To What Extent Can Employers’ Need for Flexibility and Employees’ Need for Work-Life Balance Can Reconcile

This paper seeks to draw round the significance of employers’ need for flexibility and employee’s need for work-life balance and whether they can reconcile. It also looks to explicate how Work-life balance and flexibility are regularly, though not constantly contrasting within HRM. Lately, upward market demands and organizations’ need for global competitiveness have as highlighted by Edward and Wajcman (2005:46) resulted in an increased need for organizations to reorganize and draw from their employees’ an utmost efficiency and that has brought about the subject of Work-life balance and Flexibility. Work-life balance depicts the need for employees to pull off and uphold a balance between their compensated vocation and life outside the organization, from childcare, leisure, household work or whatsoever their “life” entails (theworkfoundation.com) whereas Employers’ Flexibility implies the different ways in which organizations try to develop some balanceworks to make available to employees policies and services intended to offer supplementary support in managing the employees’ rather ever more demanding lives both within and outside the organization. Atkinson in his flexibility model below has portrayed the structure which he supposes the UK organizations are moving towards; people working part-time, sub-contracting, increased outsourcing and so forth. Founded on the principle of fragmenting employees into groups, the three peripheral clusters are made up of recruits, who are numerically flexible because they either are needed only at hectic times, they can be easily substituted because their skills are in abundant supply or they are only needed part-time to complete fastidious tasks making the core group more privileged. The core group enjoys more job security because it comprises staff that is imperative to the organization, is not easy to replace, is functionally flexible and its tasks cannot be outsourced. Employers’ flexibility pledges an organization the