Reducing Work-Life Conflict: What Works? What Doesn't?

3.0 Reducing Work-Life Conflict: What Can Organizations Do?

For some time, Canadian organizations have focused on "streamlining," "downsizing" and "doing more with less." Our research would suggest that the considerable restructuring that has taken place within many Canadian workplaces over the past few decades and workplace practices that are driven by concern for the "bottom line" rather than recruitment, retention and motivation of employees has taken a toll on both employers and employees alike. As noted in Chapter One of this report, employee engagement and organizational commitment have been negatively impacted, productivity has declined, workloads have increased, demands on Canada's health care system have escalated, and the incidence of stress, burnout and work-life conflict has risen dramatically (Duxbury & Higgins, 2003; Higgins & Duxbury, 2002; Higgins et al., 2004).

Future success in an increasingly competitive business environment will depend on making the most of one's employees. While Canadian organizations have long held that "people are our most important resource," the policies and practices currently in place in many organizations do not reflect this view. Canadian employers, faced with an impending labour force shortage, are searching for ways to stay "lean and mean" but effective (Johnson et al., 1999). Dealing with the issue of work-life balance offers one strategy employers can use to increase their ability to recruit and retain employees in a "sellers market" for labour.

There are two broad categories of support that organizations can provide their employees to help them obviate and cope with work-family conflict. First, organizations may provide formal supports such as family-oriented policies and benefits (e.g. parental leave, ability to take time off and make it up later, flextime, job sharing, sick child care, and flexible work arrangements), which give employees autonomy over their hours and their absence from work. Second, the organization can supply a number of informal supports such as a family-friendly organizational culture (e.g. flexibility around hours and location of work) and supportive managers (Behson, 2005; Hall, 1990; Warren & Johnson, 1995), which may help employees deal with work-life conflict.

The types of support offered, and the level of organizational commitment to work-lifestyle issues, varies widely across companies. This part of the report examines the prevalence of four organizational initiatives or practices that the research literature suggests may help employees balance work and family demands:

• alternative work arrangements
• perceived flexibility with respect to hours and location of work
• supportive management
• supportive policies

This section also empirically links each of these potential work-life moderators to the incidence of the four forms of work-life conflict: role overload, work-to-family interference, family-to-work interference and caregiver strain. Such information should prove invaluable for managers who are trying to develop the business case for change and policy makers who seek to affect change.

This chapter is divided into six sections. In section 1, we provide a number of key reasons why organizations should consider implementing policies and practices to support work-life balance. The case for change presented in this section goes beyond the typical dollars and cents approach¹² and instead links work-life conflict to the ability to recruit and retain employees. Section 2 evaluates the degree to which flexible work arrangements help employees cope with the different forms of work-life conflict. Specifically, we look at the link between work-life conflict and a number of formal alternative work arrangements, including working a "9-to-5" workday, flextime, compressed work week, part-time work, formal tele-work and shift work. In section 3, the discussion focuses on the impact of perceived work-time and work-location flexibility and other informal arrangements such as guerilla tele-work on work-life conflict. Section 4 explores how the behaviour of an employee's immediate manager may exacerbate or ameliorate work-life conflict. Section 5 investigates the relationship between the use of various family-oriented benefits and policies and role overload, role interference and caregiver strain. The chapter concludes in section 6 with an overview of how organizations can reduce the incidence of role overload, work-to-family interference, family-to-work interference and caregiver strain in their workforce.