Contemporary Challenges in HR: Striving for Balance 

The good news is that 60 percent of HR executives are satisfied with the work–life services that their companies offer employees. The bad news is that only 16 percent of their employees agree with them. According to a study conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a global network of business professionals, the disconnect results from the fact that HR managers tend to value different services than employees do. More than 60 percent of the 50,000 workers polled in the CEB study specified flextime schedules as the single most important work–life benefit that an employer can offer. 

One company that’s happy with its experiments in flexible-work programs is KPMG, an Atlanta-based tax and audit consultancy. KPMG is in an industry in which turnover is traditionally higher for women than for men, but the numbers in the financial industry also reflect broader trends in the U.S. workforce. Because of data like these, KPMG launched a campaign a few years ago to transform itself into an “employer of choice” by offering employees a range of options for balancing work and home life. Family-friendly policies fall into such categories as flexibility (flextime/telecommuting, job sharing) and family resources (backup child-care and elder-care, discounts at child-care centers). In one recent year, KPMG managed to improve retention of female employees by 10 percent and to increase the total number of women in its workforce by 15 percent. KPMG also says that if it hadn’t offered flexible scheduling to female employees with young children, it would have lost about two-thirds of them. 

Think It Over 

1.How much value do you put on work–life balance? Does this vary for different people? Why? 

2.What do you do (or what will you do if you haven’t yet started your career) to achieve a balance between work and life?