Organisational factors affecting work/life balance

Although regaled as the latest key to retaining staff, previous work by the current authors has shown that work/life balance bears little relationship to employees’ engagement and intention to stay with organisations. Moreover, these results were surprisingly consistent across individual variables such as age, gender and family structure. Instead, results indicated significant organisational influences, such as a ‘long-hours’ culture and organisational climate factors of safety, wellness and support for diversity. As an issue of corporate responsibility to employees, families and communities, the present study extends this research by investigating the impact of other organisation-level variables on employees’ satisfaction with work/life balance in a sample of over 1500 organisations. Differences in work/life balance are also reported across countries, sectors and industries. Results are consistent with the previous research showing a positive relationship between work/life balance and Occupational Health & Safety, teamwork and merit-based promotion. Performance-based pay and a unionised workforce were negatively related to work/life balance. Better work/life balance was also more likely for job positions facing a shortage of skilled labour.