Work- life Balance across the Lifecourse: Proofing Policies and Practices - Organisations, Work & Care

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Work-life Balance across the Life Stages:
Proofing Policies and Practices

The aim of this project was to develop a practical toolkit to help small to medium sized, (SME) businesses effectively manage their work-life balance policies, practices and procedures in accordance to their business requirements.

Driven by EU and UK legislation, work-life balance (WLB) has become a key issue for policy agendas. Businesses need to ensure that their employment practices comply with UK and EU legislative developments. We propose that effective WLB elicits that businesses comply with statutory WLB policies and flexible working arrangement practice guidelines. Employees are experiencing diverse work-life balance challenges more than ever before. The pressures to reconcile their work aspirations and expectations with personal life obligations such as care responsibilities and leisure time preferences are becoming all the more prevalent at different stages of their lives.

Employers are therefore grappling with balancing workforce management issues such as recruitment and retention, sickness and absence and workforce planning with maintaining business performance. Also SMEs are often faced with limited resources and human resource management capabilities whilst operating within the competitive and innovation driven UK knowledge economy. We propose that businesses can adopt 'good practice' WLB for their workforce and unique to their business environments by balancing the WLB needs of their employees with their operational and customer requirements. Encouraging businesses to proactively monitor and evaluate their WLB policies, practices and procedures can have a positive impact on employee motivation, satisfaction, commitment and productivity and business performance.

The 'Work-Life Balance across the Life Stages' practical guide toolkit helps employers address these issues. It also provides guidance in managing WLB orientation by outlining statutory WLB policies and practice guidelines and encouraging businesses to monitor and evaluate their WLB policies, procedures and practices to improve their business case.

The toolkit was developed as part of research exploring WLB within UK SME businesses and with the involvement of key stakeholders. The project comprised of three stages:

Stage one

Gathering evidence from work-life balance literature

Stage two

Interviews with employers and managers of SMEs

Stage three

Developing, piloting and disseminating the toolkit

For further information, please download the information sheet (PDF).

Upon completion, the toolkit was disseminated to ~350 business, academic and employment relations organizations. It will help:

• to raise awareness of the importance of work-life balance across the life stages and corresponding policies, practices and procedures
• with the day to day management, monitoring and evaluation of work-life balance policies, practices and procedures thus improving the business case
• to improve recruitment and retention and sickness and absence levels through more informed planning and better management of employee working arrangements

The toolkit is also available in CD and on-line formats. You can download the toolkit 'Work-Life Balance: a practical guide to policies and practices' (PDF) and use it to update and monitor changes in WLB legislation or to monitor your flexible working arrangement guidelines. The news page has additional information on the project.

For further information on this project please contact: