Question
| 3.1 | Explain the importance of work-life balance within the employment relationship and how it can be influenced by legislation. |
| 3.2 | Explain the concept of wellbeing in the workplace and why it is important. |
| 3.3 | Assess how employee engagement impacts the way people feel at work. |
| 3.4 | Summarise the main points of discrimination legislation. |
| 3.5 | Explain what diversity and inclusion mean and why they are important. |
| 3.6 | Explain the difference between fair and unfair dismissal. |
Solution
Task 4: Narrative-Legislation and Organisational Practices
AC3.1
Adopting the definition of CIPD (2018) work-life balance include a daily achievement and enjoyment in each of my four life quandrants: work, family, friends and self. This is by scheduling equal number of hours for every task and personal activities. From a general context, Forbes (2018) report evidenced that existence of work-life balance is critical for achieving a healthy working environment. This is by reducing the stress and preventing workplace burnout. Similarly, for the case of Technow organisation, establishing a business environment with a priority on work-life balance, it is possible saving financial resources and maintaining a healthy, more productive workforce. Also, through ensuring existence of worklife balance, it is possible to improve retention of the highly talented or qualified employees. A summary of the reasons is shown in figure 3;
Figure 3: Importance of Work-Life Balance
The importance of the work-life balance can be influenced by the legislation in UK. For instance, the Work Life Balance Policy Monitor (2020) is used to offer opportunities for parental leave, exceptional leave, medical, dental and related leave, flexible working and working from home. Parental leave is anchored in the UK employment law where GOV.UK (2021) note that employees can benefit from 18 weeks leave for every child and adopted child. Further, the legislations offers a provision of flexible working practices. This is identified in CIPD (2021c) as the right of requesting for flexible working for any employee which was in the past being offered to parents and certain careers. This is for 26 weeks continuous employment apart from the parental or care responsibilities. All these employees would be offered with £800 for holiday childcare when they are simply going through unpaid leave.
A summary of these legislations which influence the work-life balance is as illustrated in figure 4;
Figure 4: Work-Life Balance legislations
AC3.2
Workplace wellbeing is defined by ILO (2021) as different aspects of working life starting from quality and safety of physical environment. This is in regard to the extent in which the employees assumes a feeling of their job roles, working environment, climate at work and working organisation. The rationale of this is ensuring that the employees are achieve the required safety, healthier, satisfaction and engaged at work. The existing employees wellbeing represent a core aspect of the organisation. This is since majority of the studies have directly correlated the employee wellbeing and the workforce productivity. Hence, the wellbeing can be categorised into physical, social and mental (see figure 5);
Figure 5: Employees wellbeing classifications
According to Krekel et al. (2019), the organisations are significantly appreciating the necessity for prioritising the wellbeing of their employees. Specifically, in the current COVID-19 pandemic, CIPD (2021d) has established that increasing the employees wellbeing leads to the following implications;
- Increasing the entire resilience of the employees
- Improved employee engagement levels
- Reduced sickness absence
- Improved employees performance and also productivity
In regard to Technow organisation, for the purpose of achieving the above identified benefits of employee wellbeing, this need to be integrated in their culture, leadership and also people management strategies. Also, the organisation HR function would need to convince the senior managers in ensuring it is prioritised and ensuring line managers are accepting and upholding its relevance. The outcome of investing in employee wellbeing in Technow organisation would lead to achieving the benefits as summarised in figure 6;
Figure 6: Benefits of increasing the Employees Wellbeing
AC3.3
For the positive aspects of the employee engagement and their impact on the way people feel at work, and likely results include;
- Increased employee commitment– As evidenced in Cesário and Chambel (2017), the core reason why employees involvement has significantly developed as it has contributed in increasing the employees commitment in an entity. Through an improved engagement, the employees would feel appreciated in their work roles. In TechNow context, the likely results for this would include increased commitment towards achievement of the set organisational and departmental objectives. Also, they would provide better input in decision making impacting on success.
- Increased Creativity– A report in Gethhappy (2021) note that the employee engagement and innovation are directly correlated. The report findings note that engagement is significantly correlated with innovation behaviours of different organisation types. The outcome of this is the employees having the will and readiness of working more in their roles or performing more than the organisation expectations. In Technow employees for instance, this would involve the senior managers involving all the employees in their active practices and inclusion in the process of change.
- Increased Productivity– According to HBR (2013) employee engagement has a positive implication on improving their overall productivity. Despite of the organisations having high-level engagement reports 22% of increased productivity based on the 1.4 million employees Gallup Organisation report. This would lead to the employees having a higher feeling of happiness in their job roles with reduced employee turnover evident. In Technow operations, the outcome of this would be increasing the training outcomes and saving training times and costs from turnover levels.
For the negative aspects of the employee engagement and their impact on the way people feel at work, and likely results include;
- Managers and Employers Boundaries– A major negative issue of employee engagement is the existence of a clear difference between the management level and employees levels becoming affected. There is a significant risk of the employees being provided with responsibilities without a clear boundary would be a major challenge. The outcome of this would be for Technow to invest in strategies for accommodating appropriate decisions and organisation stability.
- Complexities in Communication– This is characterised by lines of communication and likelihood for inconsistencies in making decisions with various employees involvement systems. Lack of effective communication would make the employees to feel unappreciated or uninvolved in core organisation decision making. The likely results for this is the Technow managers facing hard time to monitor the entire decisions and practices linked with the emloyees involvement. This is intended to protect the employees and the organisation from negative consequences and restricting likely chaos.
AC3.4
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