Balancing Work Life and Home Life

Balancing Work Life and Home Life The purpose of the article is to discuss what organizations can do to adopt more effective management of professional and private life. Organizations need to help employees define the boundaries between home and work. These boundaries should be more flexible than they currently are, the value of transition time between home and work should be recognized, and family should be more consciously included into career and human resource management. What the two authors proposed was a new way of looking at the issue: analysis of the daily transitions both physical and psychological between work and home. They have identified different types of transition styles, as well as variations in the ways people make these transitions at the beginning and the end of each day. Significant differences also exist between the ways women and men deal with work and home boundaries and transitions. Nevertheless, both sexes tend to cope with tensions from work and home by greater integration of work and home. The authors found that what employees really needed, was to have clear boundaries and some degree of separation between their professional and home lives. They offer guidelines to individuals and organizations on effective management of these boundaries. Most of the literature to date on this topic has dealt with hypothetical issues. Very few have dealt with real-world organizational effects, of the stress created by the conflicting demands of work and home. While many of the remedies shown in the general media require greater integration of work and home, findings have indicated a greater need for separation of the two. The myth of separate worlds, describes a process whereby management acts as if the employee’s home world did not exist; that is, as if the work world were everything. Many managers maintain this myth, even though they knew home life had a