Importance of Work Life Balance

Outcomes of work life balance between Malaysia, Australia, and Japan.

Importance of Work-Life Balance

In the current economic environment, work-life balance is ranked as most important factor which emphasizes by every worker followed by the compensation and benefit and also some other factors, according to the research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board among the workers (The Staff of the Corporate Executive Board, 2009). Work-life balance is helps to maintain and create supportive healthy work environment. A healthy work environment refers to employee's ability to balance up between work and family responsibilities (Abercromby, 2007). Moreover, the employee gets satisfaction between their work and family role by getting balanced by time, involvement and satisfaction level.

At the same time, work-life balance affected when a worker faced inter role conflict, where the worker's role between work and family are incompatible in some respect. This situation may lead because of participation in one role is more difficult because of participation in the other role. To overcome the work-life conflict, the organization should consider on work-life balance practices. Despite some concerns about staff shortages, employers started to provide flexible working practices and leave arrangements for their employees (Woodland, Simmonds, Thornby, Fitzgerald, & McGee, 2003). These kinds of practices will be benefits the employers where there is less employees' turnover. In addition, the employees also motivated and committed to the work and organization. This will cause the productivity of the work and profit of the company increased.

Other than that, work-life balance is very important for the certain companies which highly depend on man power. For an example, bus companies, engineering, and accounting fields requires skilled labor force rather than machines. By integrating work-life balance practices, the skilled workers will retain in the company for long period.

Clearly, work-life balance is a crucial to every worker and also to the employers. This is because work-life balance ensures high return on investment, recruitment and retention of employees, legislation, costs and union regulations (Abercromby, 2007).

Impact of Work-Life Balance

There are several impacts from work-life balance to the employers and also employees. By balancing up the life between work and family, employees face mostly positive impacts. They feel very fresh and they have low level of stress. Moreover, by having flexible time to workers who have to look after their babies or aged parents, they got enough time to allocate to their family and also work. Apart from that, employees also enough time to spend with their families. This flexible time practice