Present Status of Organizational Work–Life Balance Practices in Bangladesh: Employees Expectation and Organizational Arrangements

Abstract

Work-Life Balance (WLB) or Work-Family Conflict (WFC) is one of the much talked issues in the modern business arena and all the stakeholder of business world such as-employers, employees, policy makers, academicians, consumers, and the common people are concerned about it. By considering the significances of the topic the researchers have taken an initiative to examine the present status of the WLB programs/ Employee friendly policies practices in the different organizations in Bangladesh through a designed questionnaire and interviewing the supervisors and employees of some selected organizations in multiple industries. Beside this the researchers also tries to explore what are the most wanted request comes from the employees, how the organizations respond against their requests, what perceptions bear the supervisor's and the employee's regarding WLB and what are the barriers may organization face to implement the WLB programs. The key findings of the research point out that most of the organizations in Bangladesh don't have any formal policy to make work-life balance but they follow some informal approaches (flexibility in time, location, & schedule, leave provisions) to facilitates the employees WLB and make them relax, confident, committed and motivated towards their works to get satisfied employees and optimum HR productivity. The study concludes with mentioning some prospective outcomes of WLB which the organization may achieve by ensuring various WLB initiatives.

Development of Remote Jobs as a Factor to Increase Labor Efficiency

“…Nowadays, organizations are becoming more and more interested and involved in this issue. They realize the great importance of work-life balance and bring some strategic initiatives to improve it, either formally or informally (Hossen, Begum, & Zhixia, 2018). As a result of our research, it was found out that most part-time remote workers are better able to maintain a balance between work and personal life while working remotely (70.8%), and fulltime remote workers mostly reject this statement (64.1%).…”

Work-life Balance and Organizational Commitment: a Study of Field Level Administration in Bangladesh

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Work-life balance and organizational commitment: a study of field level administration in Bangladeshwomen increasingly joining the workforce, many organizations realized the urgency of providing, formally and informally, support to employees to managing work and life to improve organizational productivity (Hossen, Begum and Zhixia, 2018). This study proposes job stress and workplace support as antecedents of WLB like many other existing studies (Mauno and Kinnunen, 1999;Roberts, 2007;Bell, Rajendran and Theiler, 2012).

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“…Up to now only four research about WLB has been carried out in Bangladesh (e.g. Hossen, Begum, & Zhixia, 2018;Hussain & Endut, 2018;Tasnim, Hossain, & Enam, 2017) and these studies are based in the private sector. Research in the field of public administration has long pointed out that some HRM practices (e.g.…”

Transport preferences and dilemmas in the post-lockdown (COVID-19) period: Findings from a qualitative study of young commuters in Dhaka, Bangladesh

“…Although teleworking has become popular and recognized as keeping individuals safe from virus transmission during COVID-19 in many developed countries ( Beck et al, 2020 , Kunzmann, 2020 ), it is not popular in a developing country like Bangladesh. The reason behind this is that only a few categories of jobs can adopt teleworking considering the available technologies and both employers' and employees’ attitudes towards telework ( Hossen et al, 2018 ). Thus, depending on their job nature, many people had to return to their regular commute after the resumption of economic activities from June 2020.…”