lexibility – allowing employees to have some capacity to adapt their workday to respond to family issues such as a child becoming ill or one who has special needs, school visits and parent-teacher interviews or special needs of elders. It typically includes family responsibility leave for employees.
Supportive supervisors/managers whose management style values staff and is characterized by a desire to help employees achieve better balance between work and the rest of their lives.
A culture that is family friendly - overall attitudes, beliefs, values and taken-for-granted ways of doing things that support work-family issues as legitimate workplace concerns, and as an opportunity to develop ‘new ways of working’. Options include maternity, paternity, family and personal leave provisions.
Alternative work arrangements – options are available to employees including daily or scheduled flex time arrangements, job-sharing, reduced hours, compressed work week, family leave options, part-time work, gradual retirement, telecommuting, other leaves and sabbatical options. Such alternative work arrangements are seen as ways of working, and employees using them are not sidelined, marginalized or belittled.
Recognition of child and elder care issues including support for child care, providing access to a service regarding child or elder care, establishing on-site child care or, developing a consortium with other employers in order to provide emergency child care. This includes accommodating the needs of employees who are breastfeeding their children.
dedingo on 13 Dec 14Salman Sakir's article is relevant to the issues raised in Friedman's book The World is Flat in which Friedman in a sense laments over the impact of globalization upon the developed countries, the USA for him, because the developing countries like Brazil and Asian countries like China and India have a massive work labour influence upon the West. Sakir focuses on both the positive and negative aspects of globalization, one of the five forces in Gratton's The Shift and a form of global economy as discussed by Stanford in his Economics for Everyone. Because of low wage and easy availability of experts/labour in the developing countries, foreign investments have been attracted by those Asian and developing countries where the jobs have been created for the locals. On the other hand, the citizens of the developed counters of the West and the North America have consumed the products from the developing countries in a reasonably lower price. Poverty ratio has been decreased in the developing countries which have also been integrated by the phenomenon of globalization. These are positive impacts. But in the developed countries, manufacturing industries have been moved out. so unemployment rate is ever increasing, Sakir highlights these aspects of globalization in this article.
