Work–life balance policies: Challenges and benefits associated with implementing flexitime

SA Journal of Human Resource Management

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Work–life balance policies: Challenges and benefits associated with implementing flexitime
 
Creator Downes, Caroline Koekemoer, Eileen
 
Subject human resource management; organisational behaviour financial sector; flexitime; human resource management; qualitative research; work–life balance policies
Description Orientation: Helping employees to balance their work and family lives is a business imperative. Work–life balance policies (like flexitime) aim to support employees to do so. However, implementing these policies is problematic.Research purpose: The aim of this article is to report on the challenges and benefits associated with implementing flexitime as a work–life balance policy.Motivation for the study: Organisations must develop and implement work–life balance policies. This requires human resource practitioners to investigate and understand experiences and perceptions about the challenges and benefits of flexitime.Research design, approach and method: The researcher used a qualitative research design with an exploratory approach. She drew a nonprobability purposive and voluntary sample (n = 15) from the financial sector. She used semi-structured in-depth interviews to collect the data and conducted content analyses to analyse and interpret them.Main findings: The researcher extracted four main themes (individual and general challenges, the aspects organisations need to implement flexitime effectively and the benefits that would follow its implementation) from the data. Its benefits vary from work–life balance to employee loyalty and commitment. Some challenges are maintaining productivity, a shortage of critical resources and understanding flexitime.Practical/managerial implications: The research identified requirements that human resource practitioners should attend to in order to ensure that organisations use flexitime more effectively.Contribution/value-add: The researcher obtained unique findings about the minimum requirements for implementing flexitime effectively. They could assist organisations to address the challenges that employees face.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2011-10-06
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — qualitative research approach
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajhrm.v9i1.382
 
Source SA Journal of Human Resource Management; Vol 9, No 1 (2011); 13 pages 2071-078X 1683-7584
 
Language eng
 
Relation
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https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/view/382/377 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/view/382/381 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/view/382/378 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/view/382/366 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/downloadSuppFile/382/614 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/downloadSuppFile/382/615 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/downloadSuppFile/382/616 https://sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/downloadSuppFile/382/617
 
Coverage — — employees from financial institute
Rights Copyright (c) 2011 Caroline Downes, Eileen Koekemoer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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