Family-friendly Arrangements Research Articles

Alternative Work Arrangements

Alternative work arrangements, defined both by working conditions and by workers’ relationship to their employers, are heterogeneous and common in the United States. This article reviews the literature on workers’ preferences over these arrangements, inputs to firms’ decisions to offer them, and the impact of regulation. It also highlights several descriptive facts: The typical worker is in a job where almost none of the tasks can be performed from home, work arrangements have been relatively stable over the past 20 years, work conditions vary substantially with education, and jobs with schedule or location flexibility are less family friendly on average. This last fact explains why women are not more likely to have schedule or location flexibility and seem to largely reduce their working hours to get more family-friendly arrangements.

Does the Firm Make the Difference? The Influence of Organizational Family-Friendly Arrangements on the Duration of Employment Interruptions after Childbirth

AbstractDespite the increase in dual-earner couples in Germany over recent decades, starting a family still often leads to a (re-)traditionalization of the division of labour in partnerships, with considerable gender differences in working hours and family obligations remaining. Consequently, after a child is born especially women face the challenge of reconciling career and family. Against this backdrop, a growing proportion of firms has started to create family-friendly working conditions to relieve the burden on their (female) employees. In the course of doing so, firms have also increasingly invested in organizational family-friendly arrangements in recent years. In this article, we analyse the effects of these arrangements on employees’ behaviour by using German-linked employer–employee data. We ask how specific organizational family-friendly measures affect a crucial point in women’s careers: the employment interruption after childbirth. Based on time-specific piecewise constant models, our results reveal that organizational family-friendly measures positively influence women’s return to the labour market after childbirth and thus result in benefits for both firms and employees. Furthermore, we find that the effects of the measures are determined by the structural context and are not time constant but vary according to the age of the child.

Urban space in the everyday lives of mothers and fathers on family leave in Helsinki

This paper focuses on the meaning of the urban environment for parents on family leave in Helsinki, Finland. Finland is a part of the Nordic model that emphasises ‘family-friendly arrangements’, such as family leave for mothers and fathers. To date, there is little research on how parents use urban space on family leave, although it is known that fathers stay on family leave more often in urban areas. Based on a triangulation of qualitative data on the day-to-day life of mothers and fathers on family leave, the paper argues that particular place-dependent ways of being on family leave take place in the inner city. Mixed-use pavements in many ways help mothers and fathers to cope in their new life situation and break the isolation often associated with family leave. The data also shows the importance of family-friendly public and commercial places in the city, such as playgrounds and accessible grocery shops, cafeterias and restaurants. The paper concludes that there is a need to further explore the production side of the everyday practices of parents, and how they add to city life and participate in changing cityscapes.

Work-life balance and the legal right to request flexible working arrangements

In 2003, eligible employees in the United Kingdom acquired the legal right to request flexible working arrangements. The government believes that this new right will provide parents with greater choice and support in balancing work and childcare, whilst being compatible with business efficiency. This article critically appraises this new right and examines how it is applied in relation to other UK legislation on discrimination and unfair dismissal. An overview of international studies on corporate efforts to introduce family-friendly arrangements, and an overview of governmental efforts to address the reconciliation of work and family-life is provided in this article, with a view to arguing that there is a need, in South Africa, for state policy regarding work-life balance and for further research into corporate efforts to introduce family-friendly work arrangements.

Work and Sept Stability through Equal Occupation Opportunity Platforms and Accord Making in India

The purpose of this article is to assess the ability of formal Equal Wmployment Opportunity (EEO) programmes and workplace agreement making to facilitate work and family balance for women workers in India. This article uses documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews in six Indian organisations that are required to develop formal EEO programmes. Formal EEO programmes and agreement making are limited in their ability to promote work and family-friendly arrangements at the workplace. Informal arrangements and managerial discretion are important in realising work and care balance. The paper is Indian based, and the case studies were confined to six organisations, which restrict the findings. Leave and work arrangements need to be required within agreements and EEO programmes. Most programmes gravitate towards minimum requirements, hence, it is important to ensure that these minimum requirements provide for work and care reconciliation. Programmes beyond the workplace, such as funded childcare, are important in this context. The article highlights that formal mechanisms cannot achieve work and care reconciliation for women workers if they are built upon very limited minimum requirements, are voluntary and are dependent upon a bargaining process at the workplace.

Women’s Work and Family Balance: The Scope for Equal Opportunity Programmes in India

This article aims to assess the ability of formal equal employment opportunity (EEO) programmes and workplace agreement making in India to facilitate work and family balance for women workers. Using documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews in six Indian organisations that are required to develop formal EEO programmes, it is found that formal EEO programmes and agreement making are limited in their ability to promote work and family-friendly arrangements at the workplace. Informal arrangements and managerial discretion remain important in realising work and care balance. The article highlights thus that formal mechanisms alone cannot achieve effective work and care reconciliation for women workers, mainly because they are built upon limited minimum requirements, are voluntary and are dependent upon bargaining processes at the workplace.

Feminisation of the medical profession: a strategic HRM dilemma? The effects of family-friendly HR practices on female doctors' contracted working hours

Health-care institutions face a strategic HR dilemma. They need to attract female doctors from a tight, feminised labour market by offering family-friendly HR practices (e.g. part-time employment), often based on collective labour agreements, while trying to contain their labour costs by employing as many full-timers as possible. In this study, we investigate which family-friendly arrangements serve health-care institutions' HR strategies best in terms of retaining female doctors' working hours. Data collected in 2008 from 1,070 Dutch female doctors indicate that offering family-friendly HR practices such as flexible working hours (in contrast to part-time working) minimise the strategic HR dilemma, since it offers scope for improving the work–life balance without encouraging female doctors to work less hours. However, the effect of family-friendly arrangements on working hours is dependent on the family-friendly workforce philosophy: only with proper support for career goals do women using family-friendly arrangements work more hours.

Family-Friendly Workplace Reform: Prospects for Change

The recent surge of women and mothers into the workforce has generated a call for changes that make it easier to combine employment with family life. Because neoclassical economic theory assumes that existing workplace structures are efficient, suggestions for reform have encountered resistance on the grounds that familyfriendly reforms will prove costly for firms and society as a whole. In particular, so-called “accommodation mandates,” which require employers to extend benefits like paid leave and job protection to parents, have been attacked as potentially inefficient and as harmful to those they are designed to help. This article challenges the suggestion that existing arrangements maximize social welfare and that family-friendly reforms will undermine efficiency. Using dynamic game-theoretic models, it explains how management-worker interactions can get stuck in equilibria that generate less wellbeing overall than more family-friendly alternatives, and it shows how family-friendly arrangements may be difficult to maintain despite their potential for making everyone better off. The article speculates on measures that might foster the adoption and stability of family-friendly workplace forms.

Should we have more family-friendly policies?

This paper considers the extent of flexible working practices often called family-friendly working practices and evidence from published literature to address the question of whether we need more of these arrangements. A review is carried out to see whether problems exist for the workforce which such policies could help to resolve, whether employers perceive problems in offering such arrangements and whether such problems could be overcome. The conclusions are that more family-friendly arrangements would be welcomed by employees, that employers do perceive problems in designing flexible working arrangements but that there are also ways of overcoming many of these problems to work towards new relationships of trust and commitment between workers and employers.