INTRODUCTION The research problem as investigated will have to focus on the single parents in assessing ways and assumptions on how they can achieve a balanced life and work knowing the fact that they are working in somewhat diverse workforce. The investigation will then have to deal with single parents acquiring the appropriate time management in dividing family roles and work roles respectively. The assessment of work life balance in general notion, identifying possible factors leading to such situation for those working single parents. The study will explore on possible execution process of work life balance programs in detail and knowing its advantages to the single parents being the focus of research investigation. The motivation behind for the study lies that it is crucial and of importance because for the people and the society as well to get involve as to why there is a need for balance work life engagement through human resource control and that the study can provide implications for the organization's role as well as manager's role in achieving the balance act for life and work among employees and that single parents are one in the group. The study implies process of awareness in reaching balance work life as there is a need for single parents being employees also, to achieve balance in their lives receiving attention and the employers are paying lip service to it. As of the present, companies have created such policies that recognize the balance issue but these policies are often ignored like for instance, such conference organizer had developed a conference on work and home life balance because it was an issue but have to cancel it due to lack of registrants on the matter.
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY There is a need to carefully assess and evaluate through research and empirical observation based from related studies, the balanced work life of single parents working in extraneous type of milieu for the execution and finding out valid and reliable outcomes comparing the balance work life of single parents as compared to parents having their respective partners or companions in order to realize and gain accurate application such HR programs and or activities in responding to the need of incorporating a balance work life among parents The latter point needs to be considered and be investigated if needed so that there can achieve a well-coordinated notion for having a balance work life knowing how valuable the reality of having one and have experienced it mostly, to the single parents with more than one obligation everyday – being a parent at the same time an employee. The importance of addressing work/life problem as there is development of possible schemes that will help single parents to work better in balance condition that includes flexible work hours as well as job sharing, child care assistance and worker support programs. CRITIQUING LITERATURE REVIEW Section 1: Summary Despite research on the value of diversity and cultural pluralism in organizations there remains much systematic resistance to difference within workplaces (Prasad and Mills, 1997) and particular resistance to pluralistic work and career approaches which are necessary for the integration of work and family (Raabe, 1996). Issues concerning work life are increasingly termed to take account of a range of non work demands are usually conceptualized as a key aspect of managing diversity, particularly in Section 2: Main critique Organizations which value the contributions of those with family responsibilities usually begin to manage this aspect of diversity by introducing specific policies often referred to as family friendly policies, such as parental leaves, childcare assistance and reduced hours of work (Forth et al., 1997; Hogg and Harker, 1992). However there has been a greater readiness to implement formal policies for targeted groups such as mothers of young children, than to challenge the central organisational systems and assumptions which perpetuate a model of work that assumes a segregation of work and family life (Lewis, 1997). Family friendly policies are often marginalised in the context of dominant organisational discourses and values such as the belief that only full time workers are committed to the organisation (Lewis, 1997; Raabe, 1996). A managing diversity approach to work-family issues as to other diversity issues suggests the need to work towards more fundamental organisational culture change which values, for example, those who work part time or flexible hours as much as those working full time or long non flexible hours. Despite growing recognition of eldercare issues most discussion and subsequent policy and practice on work-life has focused on the needs of parents, and especially mothers, of young and healthy children. The support needs of parents of disabled children have received little or no attention. There is much evidence that caring for children (Beresford, 1995) but the research on caring for children has neglected the issues of how parents can combine work and care, just as the work-family literature has overlooked the issues facing these particular working parents. This is largely due to a prevailing assumption that parents, especially mothers of children with special needs are not or should not be employed (Kagan et al., 1998). However, these parents do need to work for the same economic, psychological and social reasons as other parents (Kagan et al., 1998). This suggests the need to question not only assumptions about the nature of work but also dominant organisational assumptions about working parents and their needs. So, for example, it is assumed that the demands of parenthood are greatest in the pre school years; with some issues such as after school care arising during the childhood years and that as children become older family demands decline. It is assumed that parenting is a time limited activity and that organisations can deal with the issues that arise by implementing specific policies to support parents during these years. The implication is that the need for flexible working arrangements is relatively short term. The work-family needs of parents of disabled children, however, are more long term and often more intense than those of other parents. Managing the diverse needs of these parents therefore challenges the notion of working and caring as a marginalised time limited activity and implies the need to achieve a culture of flexibility and valuing of those whose non work commitments are much more than transitory. Workplace cultures which assume that family should not impact on work underpin unhelpful organisational practices which perpetuate exclusion and undermine the valuing of difference. This creates a reluctance to seek creative win-win solutions. Managing diversity involves the questioning of deeply ingrained organisational assumptions. This study suggests that assumptions about the separation of work and family and the valuing of standard non flexible forms of work need to be challenged, to empower these parents and others with family commitments. The specific focus on parents of disabled children however also indicates the need to challenge the restriction of managing diversity initiatives to the workplace. Supports within the community must also be considered to ensure that the necessary services are in place to enable employees with disabled children as well as other parents to make a full contribution to their employing organisations. The employers should be aware of the dates of local school holidays and if these are diverse, to advocate for more consistency will then, certain companies operate information and retrieval service or a childcare co-ordinator to assist employees in finding suitable childcare. These could be extended to include information on resources for caring for children. Given the information vacuum experienced by most of the single parents in this study such a resource would meet a substantial need. But more proactive measures may also be necessary, such as working in partnership with local childcare providers or after school clubs to ensure that they are accessible for campaigning for health professionals to visit children in schools rather than requiring parents to miss work for health care visits. Section 3: Conclusion The journal will then address certain issues drawing on qualitative data from a study of employed parents as these parents were intense and long term needs for flexible working arrangements and the potential benefits to employers of meeting these needs. Blocks to integrating working and caring exist in the community as well as the workplace for these parents as there highlights the need for diversity initiatives to look beyond the workplace and to incorporate aspects of the wider context in which organizations can operate well within instances. Research strategy The strengths applicable for the research study is that in can empower and set forth the needed awareness for the human resource areas to give credit to single parents role in their work as well as in their respective homes acquiring the right perception of the readers as to how imperative and crucial it is to achieve a balanced work life mostly, to those single parents who are working in complex and diverse milieu. The inculcation of values that employees have the right to acquire family benefits as possible within the job they are serving, giving time to parents to spend quality time with their children and family. The study will provide first hand information regarding work and life experiences of the single parents and how they balance it in every day as compared to those parents with complete familial patterns. The weakness can be certain limitations in terms of giving interviews and answering of questionnaires as there can be some sort of research biases in the sense that maybe, there was not enough time being given to fully gather precise data from the respondents. The research actions are justified through engaging into empirical observation research in which actual assimilation of points is being considered respectively. Interviews were carried out with in which the parents were in paid work. In order to ensure a range of family situations, participants were selected according to certain criteria including employment status, ages of children with disability and family composition. Initially parents were recruited via a data base of families with disabled children applying for grants. However, this resulted in an over representation of low income families and children with learning disabilities and an under representation of ethnic minority families. The final sample included full time and part time workers in a range of occupations and a range of salary levels. Most were two parent families but there were six lone parents. Families were invited by letter to participate in the study and initial meetings were then arranged by telephone to establish rapport and discuss the purpose of the study. At the second meeting in depth semi structured interviews, which were audio taped and later transcribed verbatim, lasted between one and a half and two and a half hours. Initially it was intended that both parents would be interviewed together. However, it soon became apparent that fathers were contributing little to the interviews and hence separate interviews were conducted where ever possible, resulting in 15 sets of separate interviews. Interviews were guided by a schedule constructed from the research team's pilot work and existing literature Interviews focused on family decision making and strategies adopted to work and care as well as the experience of formal and informal support from extended family, the workplace and the community, gaps in supports and barriers to coping and to quality of life. Groups of parents were then brought together in phase two to discuss the ways in which employers could better support them in managing their work and family needs so that they could make optimum contributions in the workplace as well as meeting their caring demands. The final stage of the research involved the development and piloting of an organisational audit on the basis of the findings of phase one and two and in consultation with a range of employers. The audit aims to assist employers in recognising and managing this source of diversity. This highlights the importance of empowering parents to feel entitled to ask for the support they need to be able to do their job. Both formal workplace policies and informal practice are important for these, and for other, parents. Formal policies such as entitlement to emergency leave for family reasons can help parents to fulfil all their obligations. However, there is often a lack of information about such entitlements, or informal barriers to their take up. Formal policies need to be well communicated throughout the organisation if they are to be effective. Their effectiveness is also dependent on the attitudes and behaviours of line managers (Lewis, 1997) who should be encouraged to implement policies in a supportive way. It may be important to provide training and support for managers or incentives for implementing flexibility. A workplace audit should firstly consider what is known about diverse workforce needs. For example, are parents able to admit that they have a disabled child and seek the support they need? There may be a fine line between intrusiveness and openness but providing it is clear that parents will be supported rather than penalised they should be empowered to make their needs known. An audit would also examine formal family friendly policies and consider what other policies may be appropriate. Questions included: are people who work reduced hours or flexibly valued by managers and colleagues as highly as other workers? What would it take to ensure that all employees are equally valued? Are there rigid beliefs about where and when work should be carried out, and what would it take to ensure that these assumptions are constantly revealed and examined (Kagan et al., 1997)? Researchers argued that the work-family pressures experienced by parents of disabled children tend to be more intense and long term than those of other parents. Nevertheless the recommendations can be extended to apply to other groups which may be the focus of diversity initiatives, particularly to other carers and to some disabled workers who may also need flexibility, information and community support. Data Collection and analytical tools/ techniques The method to undergo initial research survey by means of unstructured interviews for a possible total of fifty single parents and fifty parents with partners as sample respondents and integration of case studies if possible may be deemed important on the basis of interview survey results respectively. These all methods are to be used for the reason that they can bring out potential and needed information for the completion and realization of the research study and be a contributing factor for future research as well. The designing of model/framework to be used in having work life balance among single parents working in complex workforce are given validity and justice of factual basis and knowledge. Descriptive method is to be linked also for details and emphasis of evidence findings. The data collection techniques are in forms of interviews and survey materials. The interviews can be structured or unstructured, the interview are to be supported by certain type of survey questionnaires giving possible questions in brief for the desired number of respondents to answer accurately as possible. The interview will give researchers direct and honest answers from the respondents, they are to be in written form just like the questionnaire. The content then will provide basis and ample weight to work life balance challenges, issues and concerns among single parents and parents with partners giving the fact that they are working in complex work place. The comparative analysis will provide crucial and imperative overview of research outcomes as case studies will offer a closer look and encounter of experiences relating to work life balance of the respondents reflecting possible factors that may hinder them for achieving the balance cycle. The data will be analyzed through percentage ranking technique as well as standard ratio for variation in which there is the calculation of the average percentile rank as well as the mean outcomes that are to be based from the total number of respondents involved in interviews and survey questionnaires over the variable factors comprising of independent variables (single parents, parents with partners) and dependent variables (balance work life) reflecting the comparative analysis, the interpretation of the latter are based from the interviews and questionnaires to be completed upon duration of the study. Since, the research study focuses on single parents work life balance there included surveys from women who were 35-50 years old in the range of twenty percent is consistent with questionnaire interview concerning single parent employees and parents with partners as it comprise of comparative analysis (Chrobot-Mason, 2004; Ramus and Steger, 2000). The women had been employed by their current organisation for couple of years on average and had worked throughout their career without significant time off from the workforce. The women in our sample described themselves as being with balance work life. Work-family balance Work-family balance consisted of two items (α=0.72) created in order to measure balance directly rather than assuming the absence of conflict is the equivalent of balance. Respondents rated how difficult is it for you to balance work and non-work responsibilities, on Likert scale from agree to disagree and ratio of the work and family balance and from the affective commitment scale, which reflects the parents attachment to the organisation (α=0.91). Respondents indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with items and then assess age, whether or not respondents have balance work life, level of education, individual income and organisation. Interviews Wholly, 100 parents between the ages of 35 and 50 were interviewed. Interview participants were randomly selected from survey respondents to compose a group that was representative of the age range and the three organisations. The sample groups are managers and professionals in their work milieu. The interviews lasted between one and two hours and included questions about participants' background, work-life balance and career experiences. Questions included the following:
The focus and the importance for this survey questionnaire is to be able to find out and collate crucial and useful views and ideas that basically implies the cause and effect of divorce in lieu to such relevant analysis of the underlying situations regarding the matter as this questionnaire intends to search and find out real solutions to the problem on the prevalence of work life balance among single parents and the questionnaires serve as a tool – a factor that promotes crucial importance of family values and orientation that will lead to certain HR programs intended for achieving a balanced work life with clear emphasis of such implications of parenting issues and concerns. Thus, the survey questionnaire will not took participants to more than forty-five minutes to complete the questionnaire as their personal views matter to every question that will serve as key for honest answering to realize the whole process. Analysis, results and conclusions The issue of family responsiveness at the workplace remains largely an euphemism for the problems of women. If it is desired that more women will enter and stay in the labor force, it is imperative that changes be made in the workplace to ensure that women do not have to struggle with the burden of both work and family, and feel compelled to make the decision of quitting their jobs. Family responsiveness is an essential by-product of company policies. More importantly, responsiveness to the family needs of employees does not have to be a zero sum game. In other words, it is possible to do more for employees without necessarily spending more, relative to the benefits that can be gained as a result. Policies can be so designed and implemented that employees are convinced that their employer is doing especially well for them, yet it does not have to be very costly. Flexibility is the key to achieving this. By providing flexibility to enable working mothers to cope with demands in the family domain, work-family conflict can thus be reduced and these mothers will not have to leave the workforce. In addition, the provision of child care services can also act as an economic solution to facilitate mothers to work and leave their children under some form of good quality care. The human resource manager needs to take a hard look at the rationale for business involvement in the work-family nexus and its provision of equal opportunities for women. An obvious way to provide care for children whose parents are employed is to bring the children to the workplace or somewhere nearby. While the parents work, the children can be cared for in some child care arrangement as parents have the opportunity to see their children at certain times during the day, regularly check on their progress, and be readily available for any emergency. Another possible advantage includes the convenience of not having to commute to another farther location in order to drop off and pick up the children. Research suggests that work-family balance is composed of a lack of conflict between work and family domains, as well as the positive spillover between the two sets of responsibilities (Frone, 2003; Grzywacz and Marks, 2000; Kossek and Ozeki, 1999; Rossi, 2001). Work-family conflict is dysfunctional and occurs when demands from participation in one domain interfere or are incompatible with demands from participation in the other domain (Greenhaus and Parasuraman, 1994). Gordon et al. (2002) found that working women recalibrate their work and family priorities to ensure that they are achieving their desired balance between these domains. In this study, we test whether work-family balance is the mechanism through which both work-based and personal social support for women at midlife correlate with the work outcomes of job satisfaction, career accomplishment, and organisational commitment. Work-family balance mediates the relationship between work-based social support and the work outcomes of job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and career accomplishment for midlife working women. Work-family balance mediates the relationship between personal social support and the work outcomes of job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and career accomplishment for midlife working women. Interview analysis Each interview was transcribed in preparation for analysis through content analysis to analyze the interviews. As a qualitative method, content analysis is used for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context by systematically identifying specified characteristics. The purpose of this methodology is to look for common ideas and patterns in participants' responses (Rossman and Rallis, 1998). There was focus on manifest content of the data by examining among implications data were examined for qualities, relationships to other data and implications. (Sandelowski, 2001; Lee, 1999)
The use of questionnaire data to allow comparative analysis and have divided the average sums for work-based and personal social support by the number of sources in index respectively. The single parents women indicated that they don't have enough balanced work life (Mean = 2.55) than work-based support (Mean = 1.41) as the means as well as standard deviations and correlations among all variables for the sample. No correlation is sufficiently high to preclude the effective use of hierarchical regression analysis for testing the hypotheses in this study. The qualitative data allow researchers to further extend the description of the sources of support that the parents reported in illustrating the relevance of an individual's complete network of work-based and family relationships (spouses or partners, family members) and suggested the sources of support are imperative and reinforcement is high to facilitate work-family balance. Future research should further explore the nature of this interaction as a way of showing organisations how to provide effective support and informing individuals how to invest their personal resources. Perhaps, single parents make the link between non-work support and the immediate, short-term requirements of the job and organisation, but not the longer-term commitments associated with their careers. Common methods variance is a limitation to the use of one survey instrument; however, the addition of qualitative data that support the link between social support and work-life balance helps to alleviate this issue. Because the relationships among variables are associations, a longitudinal design is required to more accurately determine the direction of causality. Future research should focus on assessing the relationships over time, which would also offer the opportunity for obtaining insight into the dynamics of the work-family interface as it evolves and changes. This research has taken the next step in unbundling the impact of social support on work outcomes. In particular, we have contributed to the literatures on social support, work-life issues, and careers by linking the complete network of social support, from work and home, to the work-life balance and career outcomes of single parents who are working women. APPENDIX ONE: QUESTIONNAIRE - Start of Questionnaire - RELEVANT DATA 1. Age 1.1 1.2 26 – 35 1.3 1.4 1.5 2. Gender 2.1 Male 2.2 3. On the average, how many hours would you spend together with your children and family? 3.1 1 hour below 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4. On the average, how many hours would you spend in your work? 4.1 1 hour below 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 QUESTIONS
a. ________________________________________________________ b. ________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ . A – AGREE DA – DISAGREE ________ 1. Single Parents don't have much time for their children because they are too busy working as compared to parents with partners ________ 2. Achieving balanced work life is only applicable to those parents with regular working hours ________ 3. Human Resource Team are not in full support to single parents as it may affect work performance ________ 4. Single parents and balance work life is not an issue of concern to the companies ________ 5. Balanced work life is more effective when there is support from the HR management in the sense that there are more complete family patterns as compared to single parenthood _________6. The assessment of a balanced work life is biased in nature and does not have enough weight in complex work milieu _________ 7. Complete parents achieve a more desired balance work life as their respective partners can embrace family and children responsibility for example, in a week as the other parent is busy working outside town _________ 8. Work life balance is not that important aspect when it comes to successful indication at work _________ 9. Single parents are more prone to imbalance in terms of work life as compared to parents with partners given the fact that there attention and time is being divided or shared with family plus work _________10. Work life balance implies a string sense of happy and contented life among single parents
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Introduction Today's market is characterised by highly competitive organisations which are all vying for consumer's loyalty. Firms are faced with the challenge to maintain their own competitive edge to be able to survive and be successful. Strategies are carefully planned and executed to gain the ultimate goal of all: company growth. However, external factors are not the only elements which influence growth. There are also internal factors, components working within the organisation which shape the direction of the company. Along with the changing business world, customers change as well, becoming more demanding and knowledgeable than before. In turn, company management had shifted their focus on their clients or customers so as to stay successfully in business. This transition meant that organisations have to completely reformulate their conventional business aims and purposes from being process-focused to customer-centred. Hence, in order to bring out exceptional custome
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