Hi Michelle,
I strongly believe work/life balance centres on flexibility and this means giving staff the ability to work on some sort of flexitime arrangement or on a part time basis. We effectively do both. We also give quite a few of our staff the ability to work from home occasionally, which means we give them a notebook computer instead of a desktop computer and they have remote access to email and the server in our office.
Providing staff with greater flexibility is obviously much easier in some organisations than others and it is unlikely to be achieved without any changes to the organisation, so it needs commitment all the way through the management chain. Introducing flexitime or part time working arrangements takes some effort. It's not likely to be the most efficient way of working and can cause some logistical challenges but it can work. It has allowed us to hire some great staff whom we simply couldn't have attracted to a normal full time position. The reward for us as an employer is an extremely dedicated, contented workforce - which means they're also a very productive workforce.
Something we have seen when hiring people from other employers who allow staff to work part time, is that the individual's work-load doesn't change when they have gone from say a five day week to a four day week. So they are simply expected to do five days work in four! Clearly these organisations are not really committed to providing work/life balance and are just paying lip service to it. As you can imagine, it doesn't take the staff long to work this out! Therefore setting correct expectations as to what work will be done by a part time employee is a critical factor for success.
Hope this helps,
Scott
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