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Improving Work-Life Fit in Hourly Jobs
The Center for WorkLife Law
cONcLuSiON
Absenteeism is the scourge of the industrial
workplace.
-- Roger Abrams, Labor Arbitrator
(Williams 2005, p. 22)
Uncontrolled turnover, combined with high rates
of absenteeism, plague employers who often
assume that these problems simply are facts of
life. They are not. Often they are symptoms of a
failure to match today's jobs to the workforce of
the 21
st
century. Gone are the stay-at-home wives
who freed workers up to work their shifts and
overtime at short notice with the confidence that
their children, parents, and ill family members
were receiving the kind of care and attention all
Americans believe they owe their families.
Schedules that worked well in a workforce of
breadwinners married to housewives do not work
well today. Informal paper-and-pencil scheduling
techniques, performed by frontline managers, today
signal a lost business opportunity.
Very recently, on-line scheduling has become so
inexpensive that it is accessible even to small
employers for a fee of only a few dollars a month
per employee. Employers that use this technology
effectively will have a powerful competitive edge in
the coming decade.
And yet, as always, technology is only part of the
picture. Businesses are organizations of people. What
really matters is whether employers understand their
employees' lives well enough to design schedules
that do not place workers in the position of having
to choose between their employers' needs and a
family member's immediate and pressing need for
care. Employers who place workers in that position
are bound to be disappointed time and again, as
employees put family first. (Williams 2010) The
logical solution is to increase schedule effectiveness
by designing today's schedules for today's workforce.
This report is designed to help.
Summary :
What really matters is whether employers understand their employees' lives well enough to design schedules that do not place workers in the position of having to choose between their employers' needs and a family member's immediate and pressing need for care. (Williams 2010) The logical solution is to increase schedule effectiveness by designing today's schedules for today's workforce.
Tags :
employers,well,workers,workforce,schedules,family,todays,absenteeism,jobs,today,members,only,place