Current Event Paper

An article in the Washington Post, Career Coach: Work Life Balance? Does your company care? It should, on August 28, 2015 by Joyce E.A. Russell, suggests that people are struggling to figure out how to balance their busy lifestyles, how to fit everything into their lives. They are being squeezed from every direction - work, families, community and leisure. They want to be successful in all these aspects of their lives. Yet, it seems today’s workplace makes it harder for people to do so, with work intruding on personal time, forcing them to miss important life events and the continuous distraction by electronic devices. A recent example of this is shown in a report on Amazon workers where they complained about a work culture where people worked nights and weekends leaving little time for families.

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) was intended to “balance the demands of the workplace with the needs of families”. But as a result of the number of eligibility requirements for leave under the FMLA, many employees, for example, find themselves not able to take job-protected leave for the birth or adoption of a child. In order to accommodate a better work-life balance for its employees, Netflix recently announced that it would offer new parents unlimited paid leave for a year. The company said it “would keep paying them normally, eliminating the need to switch to disability leave.”

A change in organizational culture of the two companies mentioned in the article would allow for better work-life balance. Netflix has started to change, but needs to offer benefits across the board and Amazon's C-Suite needs to reconnect with its frontline. A cultural change would allow both companies to provide their employees a balanced lifestyle so that they do not burn out. Companies need policies that meet their quality and production needs as well as meet their employees' need for a balanced life.

References

Russell, J. E. A. (2015, August 28). Career Coach:...