Advantages to employers in instituting family-friendly policies - Research Paper Example

? The Advantages to Employers in Instituting Family- Friendly Policies Table of Contents 2. Introduction 3. Why Family friendly policies?? 4. Advantages 5. Costs on the Business 6. The Flipside 7. Recommendations 8. References Abstract A human’s life comes with a lot of responsibilities to fulfill. But these responsibilities sometimes prove to be difficult to manage such as the work life and the family life. But effective work life balance establishes itself to be a win-win situation for both the employer and the employee. It helps to retain the employees and also increase their performance by providing them benefits that makes the juggling between home life and work life easier and flexible. But like every human phenomena, it also has a flipside. The job sharing done to accommodate the work that could not be completed is given to the employees who don’t have children. This makes them to work out two jobs for a single wage. Hence, effective distribution of the work is the key in here. Introduction Life is not easy. There are many spheres in our lives that hold equal importance and hence we need to manage all of them. Our work, our family, our social life and our health are some of the areas that we need to juggle between. Neglecting any of them proves to be harsh on us. New age employers are now understanding this fact and taking initiatives to make work life much more flexible and hence happier, by employing family friendly policies. Today, employing family friendly policies is not just about the happiness of the employees, but it’s also about the attaining the status for an employer which increases his value in the market and gives him a gut above the rest with the help of the tag “a good employer”. When people see that their family lives are given its due importance, they feel that the company is taking care of them and hence in turn they feel much more driven to perform for the company and accomplish the organization’s goals. Why Family friendly policies?? Work-life conflict proves to be very debilitating for the employee. When they have to manage the work life as well as their homes, and either of them gets disturbed because of the cruel deadlines they are subjected to. This makes them experience stress and hence they put in less effort to accomplish the goals that they are working for. This in turn affects their performance as a whole which leads to a dip further in their job satisfaction (Halpern, 2005). If they are not satisfied, this feeling will further have a loading on their personal lives. The stress they experience will have its dire manifestation on their health. Many diseases that can result out of this are hypertension, heart disease, polycystic ovarian disease and so on. This can be seen in times of economic nose-dives such as recession. This was a time where the employees didn’t have a clear idea as to will they retain their jobs the next consequent day or will they be called- off from their jobs. The new age employers understand the importance of keeping employees happy even in the hardest of times because this will lead to greater production for the organization’s stated goals. Some of the family friendly policies can be that the organizations provides coverage for prescription drugs, hospital bills, basic clinician’s expenses and other paramedical services such as the visits to a psychologist. The juggle between work and family and the tight schedule where in to sit comfortably and contemplate for one’s life becomes a rare luxury. Taking this scenario into account, we need to understand that an employee is also a human being and may also get nasty spells of depression and frustration and hence there might be a need for him to vent out all the anger and pain that is loitering around with him in all his spheres of life, making them even more unmanageable. Here comes a need for a psychologist. A faulty thought pattern may lead to faulty behavioral tendencies. Next Level Games is a Vancouver based organization that understands this fact and gives coverage for the expenses for the visits to a psychologist. A yet another policy that has been employed is providing holiday packages to individuals working in an organization and increasing the duration of these holidays after a stipulated period of work has been completed. This makes the employees to work hard because they know that their efforts are going to be soon manifested in terms of the enjoyment they will have with their families. Some other organizations namely The Association of Management, Administrative and Professional Crown Employees of Ontario and KPMG LLP provide for maternity leaves with a handsome top up benefits for not just new moms but also new dads. The benefits are derived on the plan to satisfy the diverse workforce; the rationale behind this is that when the company is spread across the globe, there are a lot of people in it. All of them come from different cultures and have different backgrounds. Hence, the family friendly policies may be viewed differently for each of them. KPMG gives an adoption program for parents who want to adopt children and give full support to them regarding this issue. Giving flexible hours to parents is another approach which almost all companies nowadays are practicing, which also involves work from home facilities. The major viewpoints that can be working behind this mindset of employers is that if the employees are happy, then they will feel related to the organization and strive towards its betterment through their greater inputs in terms of efforts whose output will be greater performance (Davis, 2009). Advantages Flexible employee assistance programs accommodate the needs of the employees. Whether they have to suffice for the role of a parent or to perhaps take care of an ailing parent, these programs take care of it all. This reduces staff turnover, burnout and absenteeism. This in turn proves to be a blessing for the organization in the longer run because the positive outlook maintained by the employees as general feeling about their work makes the efficacy tower up high. Developing work life balance is considered to be of utmost importance to all the employees who have newly entered into the world of parenthood. A child is a blank slate and hence, whatever a parent does is observed and imitated by the child. If the parent acts out in ways that are straightaway coming from his mental set which is stressed out, he/she is bound to do things that will have a negative effect on the child. Also, if the parent is not present with the child throughout the day and does not spend much time with the child, then this lack of stimulation can also have dire consequences in terms of late acquisition of language and inability to grasp parental idols (Stanley, 2004). An organization which has policies that makes room for effective communication between the employees helps the organization itself to identify the places where it needs to improve and also comes to know about the employee’s needs. This involvement in their lives makes them feel accepted by the company and hence ingests a feeling of ethic towards the employer. In such cases, the employees want to work and produce to the best capacity. Galinsky and Stein (1990) found that companies who supportive child care policies had had workers, who were more loyal, satisfied and took less sick time than companies without supportive policies. Costs on the Business Work life programs such as part time or reduced hours for a particular job, career breaks, convenient timings after the maternity leave, and home working help to a very large extent to make the job flexible. Its basic aim is to establish an open-minded culture which respects the plethora of responsibilities a person has to fulfill in his life. But, we have to take care that these programs don’t have any negative effects to the organization in question. The programmed facilities are made available only when the advantages are weighed appropriately with the costs the company has to bear to incorporate them in its culture (Moody, 1999). Another very important tool to make for family friendly policies is the usage of employee surveys and questionnaires. They act as a source of primary data collection from the employees itself that will tell the authorities that what is it that they need to help employees feel content and happy about the job culture they perform in and will also lead them to determine the actual costs they will have to undertake to make those things available to the members of the organization. Effective comparison of the needs and the costs will provide the organization an estimate as to how to retain the employees and what factors may lead to increased performance. These may include finding about the reasons for poor attendance, failure to return after maternity leaves, company’s cost to make a creche and the number of single parents in their organization (Moody, 1999). Subramanian and Selvaratnam (2010) researched a group of people in Malaysia of different age groups, race, income, and occupation level. They received questionnaires about their personal work experiences with Family Friendly policies. The study found a little over half of them have companies are working toward family friendly policies, a small section of them actually had them, and the rest of the companies needed improvement. The research concluded that the addition of more family friendly policies positively affect the work and personal life. The Flipside Everything employed in the human phenomena for its betterment have its flipside too. Neese (2000) found that childless parents have to bear the brunt of the added work they have to do in the name of job sharing. The work that is originally in the job profile of the employees who have become parents is given to the employees who don’t have children. The basic rationale behind doing this is the presumption that childless parents don’t have many duties to fulfill in their personal lives and can come up with extra time to complete the jobs of others. This actually renders them to perform two jobs for a single wage. Here, family friendly policies prove themselves to be disadvantageous and discriminating. This in turn leads to an integrated feeling of stress and its manifestation will lead to results that will deteriorate the performance and seep in mental and physical exhaustion. This will in turn to cost a dime to the organization in the end. Recommendation All in all, we come to a standpoint that employment of family friendly policies in the work sphere tries to make the lives of the members of the organization stress free and strives for their retention and greater productivity. But taking the scenario of the added burden of the work on the childless employees it seems to be discriminating towards a particular sector of the organizational workforce. References 1. Davis, A. (2009). Helping Employees Juggle Multiple Roles. Employee Benefit News Canada, 7(3), 28-30. 2. Stanley, J. (2004). Family Friendliness in the Workplace. Equal Opportunities. New Zealand, 26-27. 3. Halpern, F.D. (2005). The Business Case for Family-Friendly Policies: Health, Stress, And Productivity. Berger Institute of Work Family and Children. Claremont, USA. 4. Moody, M. (1999). The Family Way. Director (00123242), 52(10), 52. Retrieved from EBSCO host. 5. Subramanian, G. Selvaratnam, D. (2010). Family Friendly Policies in Malaysia: Where Are We? Journal of International Business Research, 9(1), 43-55. Retrieved from EBSCO host. 6. Neese, T. (2000). Childless Employees Get Cheated Benefits and Time. Long Island Business News (7/1993 to 5/2009), 47(33), 43A. Retrieved from EBSCO host. 7. Galinsky, E. Stein, P.J. (1990). The Impact of Human Resource Policies on Employees- Balancing Work/Family Life. Journal of Family Issues. vol. 11 no. 4 368-383. Read More