Utilization of family-friendly policies in Hong Kong

Abstract

Employees in Hong Kong, like those in many other industrialized societies, face the competing demands of work and family. Long working hours and the associated problem of work–family conflict is a serious problem for the workforce. Although a number of family-friendly policies, such as the five-day working week, paternal leave and so on, have been introduced, they are not necessarily used to their fullest extent. This paper examines the utilization of family-friendly incentives using a telephone survey of 661 employees in Hong Kong with access to such measures. Its major strength is the use of a well-established model of health care utilization, the Andersen model, to conceptualize the factors associated with the uptake of family-friendly policies. The results indicate that the Andersen model works very well in this context, and further demonstrate that access to family-friendly policies in Hong Kong is not equitable. The study makes a number of significant contributions to the literature on work–life balance and the uptake of supportive measures, and shows that enabling (such as perceived effectiveness) rather than need factors explain most of the variance in such use.

Keywords:

• Family-friendly policies
• Hong Kong
• utilization
• work–life balance
• work–life conflict

Notes

1. It is likely that people have higher education level tend to take better jobs (i.e. professionals), while people have better jobs are more likely to be provided with family-friendly measures. However, education level was not included because it was closely associated with occupation leading to multicollinearity.

2. According to the census Women and Men in Hong Kong Key Statistics, the median age at first marriage for women was 28.9 in 2011, while that for men was 31.2. Median age of women at first childbirth was 30.0 in 2011. Hence, the age bracket of 31–45 is our focus groups, which are in the early years of marriage and parental care and have intensive preference of family-friendly arrangements. Census and Statistics Department of HKSAR (2012).