Week 1 Assignment Balancing Family and Work

Week 1 Assignment Balancing Family and Work

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Today’s business world often requires that employees work longer hours and travel extensively. This forces many to sacrifice family time and other personal responsibilities for their careers. In a one to two page paper, answer the following: What are the ethical implications of requiring that employees dedicate long hours and extensive travel time to their careers? What obligations, if any, does a manager or employer have to enable employees to create a balanced professional and private life? Support your answers with examples.

As today’s workforce is becoming more focused on family and life outside of the working world, the conflict between work and life is one of the most common issues facing men and women alike. Women are the primary focus in this conflict, as women make up about half of the workforce, and are half of a two income household. Today’s women are expected to fulfill both traditional and contemporary expectations. Work-life balance can be a process of finding personal meaning and satisfaction across multiple roles and aspects of one’s life. The work life balance issues aren’t just for women, in fact for many men, the desire to be more engaged in their personal and family life is met with incompatible professional and career expectations. (Evans, Carney, & Wilkinson, 2012). The delicate balancing of work life with personal life appears to be an almost universal struggle. It is exemplified in varying amounts and ways amongst both men and women. One of the greatest factors that impends this balance is the need for caregiving that has not declined. In today’s society, the expectation of women to bear the primary responsibility of caregiving as well as expecting them to work for pay, as well as juggle multiple forms of childcare, work schedules, and unpaid household responsibilities (Balancing Work & Family Life, 2012). Research also indicates that job satisfaction also has a direct impact on a working mother’s sense of balance between work and home demands (Giraffe, 2011). Since the shift in the demands on working parents has changed drastically with the difficulty of balancing logistical issues working caregivers frequently must cut back their employment to part-time work, it impacts the working party by losing opportunities for promotions. Another implication of the struggle between work and life for women and men is an increased workload the individual feels when they have to take the additional time off to be the caregiver for either their elderly parent or child. Productivity at work is negatively impacted when workers take time off to provide care for sick family members

Work-Life Balance 3 by running errands or taking them to medical appointments. Caregiving demands have been estimated to cost more than $33 billion per year in lost productivity for American businesses (MetLife, 2011). Moreover, when workers are tired from these competing demands, productivity can decline, causing what is sometimes known as “brain drain” in businesses (Giraffe, 2011). The pressures and demands of work are reflected both in longer hours, more exhaustion, and in the case of the need for evening and weekend work which leaves less opportunity for “quality” family time. The consequences due to the lac

Week 1 Assignment Balancing Family and Work