Case study: Family-Friendly, Equal-Opportunity, and High-Involvement Management in Britain

This post is based on the key question: Is there a business case for work-life balance?

 According to a study conducted in 2008 by Wood and De Menzes, results have shown that there is a weak link between economic workplace performance and implementation of WLB policies in the workplace, however it does lead to lower levels of absenteeism. Read on for the key takeaways and results extracted from the study:

Family-friendly, equal-opportunity, and high-involvement initiatives have increasingly been at the forefront of discussions of human resource management since the 1990s. They are widely viewed by academics and policy makers as critical ways of simultaneously improving the well-being of workers and the efficiency of organizations. Moreover, they are often presented as related practices.

   How are they related?

 On the one hand, the work enrichment that is central to Lawler's (1986, 1991) and Walton's (1985) high-involvement management is expected to enhance workers' satisfaction and well-being at work and reduce the spillover of negative emotions from work to family life.

 On the basis that ‘personal time is a legitimate employee need,’ that the equality and diversity agendas imply that any effective high-involvement management must be extended from employee involvement to embrace issues of working time (Bailyn 1993)

Why do employers care?

It is important to restore work enrichment to a central place in human resource management if we are to capture the core of the high-involvement concept and also to pursue family friendly management and equal opportunities. The pursuit of family-friendly management and the achievement of equal opportunities can in turn help to create the conditions in which people can work in a more highly involved way. Crucially, this may signify to employees that management views the workforce as a major asset and is concerned about its well being, as well as allow them to work unimpeded by family pressures.

Family-friendly management involves employers having an underlying commitment to help employees obtain a balance between work and family obligations. Two types of family-friendly practices may be identified: (1) those that create flexibility in the timing and location of work so the employee can more readily accommodate family demands, and (2) those that provide a substitute carer for the employee (Bailyn 1993: 67; Bond et al. 1998). 

     Equal-opportunity management is oriented towards eliminating any differentiation of opportunities, resources, and rewards based on the membership of a sociological group, for example based on gender, ethnicity, or age. It is thus concerned to ensure that jobs, wages, promotions, and employment benefits in the organization are fairly distributed.

     High involvement management is oriented towards work enrichment and flexible working methods and ensuring that employees have the skills and motivation to use their discretion and decision-making powers for the benefit of the organization.

These three approaches to aspects of management are expressed in management practices, and if they exist we ought to see a pattern in the use of a range of practices associated with them. For example, if family-friendly management is an identifiable managerial approach in the UK, we would expect practices concerned with childbirth to coexist with those related to child rearing. If this is more than simply a parentoriented family-friendly policy, these in turn will be accompanied by practices associated with eldercare and other such problems. Similarly, if an integrated orientation towards family-friendly, equal-opportunity, and high-involvement management exists, we would expect that practices, for example related to childbirth, will coexist with work enrichment or equal-opportunity practices.

ü  Both family-oriented flexible management and equal-opportunity management are significantly more

likely to be found in the public sector. In contrast, high-involvement management is less likely in the public sector.

ü  Within the private sector itself, high-involvement management is significantly more prevalent in financial services and significantly less likely to be used extensively in manufacturing, construction, hotels and restaurants, transport and communication, other business services, and other community services.

ü  In addition, organizations with human resource departments are more likely to have family-oriented flexible management and equal-opportunity management, but are less likely to have high-involvement management.

ü  The size of the workplace, as measured by the number of employees, is positively related only to equal-opportunity management. But the size of the larger organization, of which the workplace is a part, is related to both family-oriented flexible management and high-involvement management.

 

ü  In the case of family-oriented flexible management, organizations with over 5,000 employees are significantly more likely to adopt it, while in the case of high-involvement management, organizations with 100 or more employees are more likely to practice it than organizations with less than 100 employees.

ü  The proportion of the workforce that consists of managers is positively associated with both equal-opportunity and high-involvement management, while the proportion of the workforce that consists of women is positively linked to family-friendly management, and weakly related to high involvement management.

In Britain there is no evidence yet of an integrated high-commitment management. Nonetheless, there appear to be discrete orientations underlying the use of family-oriented flexible, equal opportunity, and core (work and skill acquisition) high-involvement practices.

Results provide little support for the ‘business case’ in favour of family-friendly and equal-opportunity initiatives, which is the argument for employee-centred methods on the grounds that they are supportive of key organizational objectives. But, equally, neither set of practices has a negative effect on performance. It has nonetheless been found that high-involvement management is positively associated with financial performance, labour productivity, and labour retention. In addition, where high-involvement management is adopted, equal-opportunity management will have a positive effect on financial performance. Equal-opportunity management is associated with lower absence levels, and again this is strengthened when high-involvement management is adopted. When family oriented flexible management is underpinned by top management valuing employees having a balance between work and family responsibilities, it is also associated with lower absenteeism. The limited number of associations between organizational performance and family-friendly and equal-opportunity managements may be used to reinforce the arguments for a holistic approach. It could be precisely because the employee involvement, equality, and diversity issues are not integrated that the current approaches are not as successful. Moreover, the lack of recognition that the potential benefits of such an integrated approach may be high may very well explain the relatively low take up of such practices.

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