Research Article
a
January
2018
Computer Science and Software Engineering
ISSN: 2277-128X (Volume-8, Issue-1)
Work-Life Balance of Women Employees in Service Sector
Sonali R. KshirsagarDepartment of Management Science, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad, Maharashtra, India
Email- [email protected]
Abstract: An employed mother is carrying the pains of her child crying at home till she returns at home indicating separation anxiety; a Father is stressed on the work spot resulting of his known negligence for his family. It has a great influence on overall quality of life. Of course the art of doing lies in balancing among work, non-work and family aspects of life.Work and quality of life: QWL provides for the balanced relationship among work, non-work and family life should not be strained by working hours, including business travel, transfers, vacations etc.The research study was focused on Women Employee Work-Life Balance of service sector namely Academics, Banks and Health care sector of Aurangabad Region. An Attempt was done to study the existence of work-life balance problem among the working women in the specified area. It was tried to examine how the factors affecting work-life balance influence quality of life of married working women.
Key Words: Work Life Balance (WLB), Quality of Work Life (QWL), Productivity
I. INTRODUCTION
An employed mother is carrying the pains of her child crying at home till she returns at home indicating separation anxiety; a Father is stressed on the work spot resulting of his known negligence for his family. It has a great influence on overall quality of life. Of course the art of doing lies in balancing among work, non-work and family aspects of life. Work and quality of life: QWL provides for the balanced relationship among work, non-work and family life should not be strained by working hours, including business travel, transfers, vacations etc. The research study was focused on Women Employee Work-Life Balance of service sector namely Academics, Banks and Health care sector of Aurangabad Region. An Attempt was done to study the existence of work-life balance problem among the working women in the specified area. It was tried to examine how various factors affecting work-life balance influence quality of life of married working women.
II. OBJECTIVES
1. To study the existence of work-life balance problem among the working women in Academics, Banks and
Health care sector of Aurangabad Region.
2. To study the work-life balance factors that affects the working women from the specified area.
3. To study the impact of work-life balance on the quality of life of married working women.
III. REVIEW OF LITERATURE Work Life Balance at a glance
Work–life balance1(WLB) is a concept including the proper prioritization between work (career and ambition) and
lifestyle (health, pleasure, leisure, family). The work–leisure2dichotomy was invented in the mid-1800s. Paul Krassner3,
an American journalist, observed that anthropologists define happiness as having as little separation as possible between
your work and your play. The expression4 "work–life balance" was first used in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s to
describe the balance between an individual's work and personal life.
Work Life Programs Encompasses
Although these programmes5were originally termed "work life programs", this book used to term "work life" programs,
to reflect a broader perspectives of this issue. The term "work life" recognizes the fact that employees at every level in an organization, whether parents or non-parents, faces personal or family issues that can affect their performance on the job. A work life program includes any employer sponsored benefit or working condition that helps an employee to balanced work and non-work demands. At a general level such programs span five broader areas.
1. Child and dependent care benefits (e g., on site or near site child or elder care programs, summer and weekend
ISSN(E): 2277-128X, ISSN(P): 2277-6451, pp. 1-6
2. Flexible working conditions (e. g., flextime, job sharing, tele working, part time work, compressed work weeks).
3. Leave options (e.g., maternity, paternity, adoption leaves, sabbaticals, and phased re-entry or retirement
schemes).
4. Information services and HR policies (e.g., cafeteria benefits; life-skill educational programs such as parenting
skills, health issues, financial management and retirement; professional and personal counseling).
5. Organizational cultural issues (e.g., an organizational culture that is supportive with respect to the non-work
issues of employees, co-workers, and supervisors who are sensitive to family issues).
QWL Influence Work Life Balance leading to improved Organizational Productivity
There are two ways of looking at what quality of work life means. One way equates QWL6 with a set of conducive
organizational conditions and practices (e.g. promotion-from-within policies, democratic supervision, employee involvement, and safe working condition). The other way equates QWL with employees' perceptions that they are safe, relatively well satisfied, and able to grow and develop as human beings. This way relates QWL to the degree to which the full range of human needs is met.
J. Richard and J. Joy defined QWL as the degree to which members of a work organization are able to satisfy personnel needs through their experience in the organizations.
The term productivity7 must not be confused with production. Productivity is a ratio while production relates to
a volume. Increased production does not necessarily mean increase in productivity. Input of resources goes up in direct proportion to the increase in output; the productivity will remain the same. People are the important assets of any organization because only through people all other resources are converted into utilities. Productivity consciousness has acquired worldwide momentum. Higher productivity is very important for any firm for the survival of any nation, and its stands for proper utilization of available resources to check the best results with minimum costs .The only path to national prosperity is to improve the productivity in the industrial sphere.
Not only the firm’s survival, the productivity denotes the efficiency of the various input’s which are converted in to different goods and services. It’s a multifaceted concept it also signifies the ratio between inputs and output.
All organizations regard work life benefits as an investment designed, among other things, to attract, and retain talent. Such benefits recognize the growing demands on the lives of people.
The impact of HRM practices and policies on firm performance is an important aspect in the fields of HRM, industrial and organizational psychology. All the organizations do expect higher productivity with less resources and investment. The survey made by the Association of executive search consultant (AESC) have revealed a sea change in the attitude of corporate high flyers, with a growing number rejecting organization hours and scramble the corporate leader in favor of better QWL. Mostly in such (AESC) survey it is found that they have not achieved a satisfactory work-life balance and a similar proportion felt that their work work-life balance had changed for the worse over the past five years. It should be recognized that the long term productivity improvement can be achieved by the human factor through positive and innovative attitudes.
There’s an argument that high performance work practice, including comprehensive employee recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation and performance management systems and extensive employee involvement and training, firms current potential employees, increase their motivation, and enhance retention of quality employees while encouraging non-performance to leave the firm. Among human resource professionals there is a growing consensus that organizational human resource policies can, if properly configured provide a direct and economically significant contribution to firms’ performance. Both intermediate employment out comes and firm-level measures of finance performance are dependent variables.
Quality of working life among young workers in Air India with special reference to life and job satisfaction
issues premeditated by Ganguly and Joseph (1976)8 specifies that, of the various physical and psychological working
conditions, pride in organization, job earned community respect, reasonable working hours, etc. are more positively correlated with job satisfaction than friendship with colleagues, good work location, physical strain, variety of skills and risks of injury. Findings also indicate that strong family tie and rural background are more positively correlated with life and job satisfaction. They also stated that Expectation and aspiration of young workers affect the quality of working life.
Relationship between Quality of Work and Quality of Life If a person has high-quality, challenging and interesting job-that job will also have other good work factors and altogether lead to high job satisfaction. This leads to happiness and sense of hope about the future.
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Figure 1. Relationship between Quality of Work and Quality of Work Life
Source: Adapted from: Stella Mary; The quality of work life in textile industry: a case study in the house of pearl global ltd industry, south India, Chennai; IJPSS volume 2, issue 7 ISSN: 2249-5894; July 2012
Elton Mayo and his Harvard associates (1953)9 performed the Hawthorne experiments which exposed the inter-relatedness of various component at work and verified that changes in physical conditions of work such as working hours, rest pauses, monotony, fatigue, incentives, employee attitude, the formal and informal organization result in high morale, productivity and job satisfaction.
IV. BALANCING WORK WITH LIFE
Organizations should undertake work life balance programs10, as in their absence both men and women will be exposed
to stress, depression and anxiety. Programs aiming at work life balance include:
Child care at or near the workplace
Job sharing
Care for sick children and employees
On-site summer camp
Training supervisors to respond to work and family needs of employees
Flexible work scheduling
Sick leave policies
Dropping children at school and making dinner reservations.
The organization that have developed work life balance programs have found happier and more productive employees. There are also many companies that still have not investigated, implemented or experimented with work life balance programs. These firms believe that the work life balance is a personal problem and not with an organizational issue. Often the individual herself or himself balances her or his life at home and at work with her or his attitude.
There are some interesting revelations about the status of Work life balancing. Two separate global surveys conducted among senior executives by AESC, as association of executive search firms, reveal that 53 percent of the executives agree that work life balance has worsened in the last five years. Asia Pacific executives are said to be worse off than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
Allenspach’s (1975)11
reported on flexible working hours based on experiments in Switzerland discussed its advantages and disadvantages, including its effects on job satisfaction and employee and management attitude.
Women in Every Walk Of Life
It is a delightful sight12 to see hundreds of women, in their early 20’s, walking on the roads of an industrial estate early in
the mornings to reach places of their work. They are cleanly dressed, with flowers tucked to their pigtails and vanity bags dangling to their shoulders. They are confident, smiling and healthy too. These women may be poorly paid and hopelessly exploited but are employed and earning. The number is likely to increase as more number of girls is coming out of colleges and universities with degrees in their hands.
It is not that women are found working in business establishments only. They are visible in politics also. For the first time, 59 women have entered Lok sabha as elected representatives of people. This works out to be around 12 percent of a total strength of the lower house of the parliament. When compared to UK 19 percent and Sweden 47 %,
representation of women in politics is low but certainly is on the rise. In the 14th Lok Sabha, the number of women MPs
was only 45. The figure has shot up by 14 in the 15th Lok Sabha.
Quality of Work
Other Work Factors
Job Satisfaction Happiness and hope in
Life
Self Actualization
Good Health
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Table No.1 Women Employees in IT Firms
Sr. No Company Employees Proportion of Women (%)
1. Wipro 43,880 24
2. TCS 43,681 21
3. Infosys 31,000 22
4. HCL Technologies 20,249 22
5. Satyam 20,000 20
6. Cognizant 13,000 28
7. Accenture 11,000 25
8. Patni 10,299 21
9. Polaris 5,980 19
10. I-flex 4,688 20
Source: Business Today, April 10, 2005, p.36.
The Table represents the proportion of Women employees in IT firms. Balancing work and life assumes relevance when both husband and wife are employed travails of a working housewife is more than a working husband. Work life balance is becoming a major challenge to HR manager as more women are taking up jobs to add finances of their families or to become careerists shown in table NO. 1. In India working women now account for 15 percent of the total urban female population of 150 millions.
Impact of Work Life Balance on Working Women
Aryee, S. (1992)13 In his study examined the impact of five antecedent sets of work and family domain variables on three types of work-Family conflict (job-spouse, job-parent, and job-homemaker) and the impact of these types of work-family conflict on well-being and work outcome measures. Data were obtained from 354 married professional women from dual-career families in Singapore. Results indicate that married professional women in this study experienced moderate amounts of each type of work-family conflict. Role stressors explained the most variance in spouse and job-homemaker conflicts while task characteristics explained the most variance in job-parent conflict. The three types of work-family conflict explained only modest amounts of the variance in the well-being and work outcome measures.
Higgins (1994)14 examined the impact of gender and life cycle stage on three components ofwork family conflict (i.e. role overload, interference from work to family and interference from family to work). The results indicated significant differences for gender and life cycle. Women reported experiencing significantly greater role overload than men. Again women were found to experience greater work to family interference than men. Interference was highest when the children were young, and lowest in families with older children. Further, women reported significantly higher levels of family interference with work than men in early years, but interferences levels were comparable to men’s in the third life cycle stage (i.e. children 10 to 18 years). This finding is supported by the findings of studies by Loscocoo (1997) and Aryee et al. (1999b). Loscocoo (1997) found that there was gender asymmetry in the permeability of the boundaries between work and family lives. Family intruded more on work among women and work intruded more on family among men.
Aryee et al. (1999b) 15 examined the relationship between role stressors, interrole conflict, and well-being and
the moderating influences of spousal support and coping behaviors among a sample of Hong Kong Chinese employed parents in dual-earner and found that gender was negatively related to family work conflict, suggesting that men did not experience as muchfamily work conflict as women.
Rajadhyaksha and Velgach (2009)16 also found that women experienced significantly higher family interference with work as compared to men. However there were no significant differences between men and women in the experience of work interference with family.
Wesley and Muthuswamy (2005)17 in astudy of 230 teachers in an engineering college in Coimbatore, India, found that work to family conflict was more prevalent than family to work conflict, thus indicating that permeability of work into family was more than permeability of family into work.
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However, Baral (2010)19 in a study of 485 employees working in varied organizations in India found that
working men and women in India experience more work family enrichment than the work family conflict. It was also found that there were no gender differences in the employee perception of work family enrichment.
V. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The study was conducted among the married working women of Aurangabad region. At an initial stage Unstructured interviews of the Women Employees in banks were conducted for the purpose of designing the questionnaire. Then based on their issues discussed & open feedback, Questionnaire containing 10 questions was prepared. The questions were focused on benefits of work-life balance, their your typical work day, their goals, timelines, and measures of success, likes on work culture, interests outside of the office, pass much time with family members, whether job makes them feel tired to do things that need their attention at home, whether their family is often distressed with them about how much time she devote working.
Survey was planned for measuring the appropriateness of the questionnaire designed and accordingly to test the reliability of data collected.
A. Description of Sample
A sample of 120 married working women was selected using Convenient Random Sampling. They were from Private
Banks, Academics and Healthcare sectors. 40 women from each sector were chosen for the study.
B. Description of Used Tool
Then based on their issues discussed & open feedback, Questionnaire containing 10 questions was prepared. The
questionnaire20 consists of question which has options for answers as either ‘Agree’, ‘sometimes’ or ‘disagree’.
1. As the job demands it, I usually work long hours
2. There isn’t much time to relax with my family in the week
3. I have to take work home frequent evenings
4. I often work late or at weekends
5. Relaxing and forgetting about work issues is tough for me
6. I worry about the effect of work stress on my wellbeing
7. My relationship with my partner is suffering because of the pressured stretched work hours
8. My family is missing out on my input.
9. Finding time for hobbies and extended family relationships is difficult
10. I would like to reduce my working hours and stress levels, but have no control.
VI. ANALYSIS
Above was the questionnaire forwarded to the Employees and below is the analysis of it in table no.2. In table ‘A’ Stands
for Agree, ‘S’ stands for Sometimes and ‘DA’ stands for disagree.
Table NO. 2 Percentage Analysis
Sr. No. Work Life Balance Number of Women Employee Percentage
Private Banks Academics Health care
1 Worst (% DA ≥70%) 34 30 36 83.33%
2 Moderate (% A+S 50-70%) 4 6 2 10%
3 Best (% A<50%) 2 4 2 6.66%
Source: Field Survey (2016-17)
VII. INTERPRETATION
83.33% of the Women employees were found very saying that the Work Life provided to them was worst. It is revealed that they may be under substantial stress due to lack of work–life balance. Due to longer stretched working hours their productivity could suffer along with their relationships, health and long-term employability.
10% of the employees were moderatewhich depicts that they are not entirely happy work–life balance, but in a good position not to let the situation get out of control. Byencouraging the organization to adopt a work–life strategy, create an enhanced working environment that will benefit everybody.
ISSN(E): 2277-128X, ISSN(P): 2277-6451, pp. 1-6
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