Organizational interventions for balancing work and home demands: An overview

Abstract

The effective management of work and non-work demands can have a significant effect on workers’ health and performance. The last decade especially has seen an explosion of work-life balance research, resulting in substantial theoretical and practical advances. However, the published literature on organizational interventions to improve work-life balance is extremely sparse. In this paper, we provide some prominent examples of empirical research concerning work-life balance organizational interventions and note that these fall into three main groups: initiatives addressing working time and/or working hours, collaborative action research focused on improving workplace equity and performance levels, and initiatives to embed work-life balance within organizational cultures. We also comment on some common difficulties faced by researchers in evaluating interventions. The specific examples presented here illustrate challenges to research on the effectiveness of work-life balance interventions. We encourage researchers to reconsider the use of merely descriptive rather than more rigorous research designs and to investigate the long-term effectiveness of organizational strategies to enhance work-life balance.

Keywords:

• work-life balance
• interventions
• working hours
• action research
• organizational culture