Work-Life Balance and Stress Management

Abstract:

The stress may be understood as ‘the adverse reaction of people experience due to excessive pressure or other type of workload placed upon them’. With the rise of globalised and connected economy, the competition has increased many folds on the businesses to increase the performance continually for sustaining the competition which translates to individual employee stress due to increased expectation from organizations. Further, rise of digital society and increasing reliance face to face conversations that help put life and its problems into perspectives.

As the stress is increasing in today’s business and social environment leading to change in the individual behavior, attendance or performance in the workplace, it has become prerogative for the employers to recognize the problem to facilitate employees to work efficiently and effectively by handling the individual employee stress effectively enabling improvement in employee productivity in order to sustain organizational performance.

Keywords: Work-Life Balance, Stress, Relaxation, Exercise

Introduction:

For thousands of years, Indian society was agricultural like all other societies in the world.

In India, as in many other agricultural societies, the problem of work – life balance did not arise. This is because the rhythm of work-life in agricultural is consistent with the rhythm of the family life in an agricultural setting. Thus, if there is a family crisis, agricultural work can wait in a joint family because other members can take the burden of your work in any emergency. There are no bosses in your agricultural work. In fact, you are your own boss.

However, as India enters into global competition, there is an increasing work–stress among employees.

This is because the process of globalization is competitive and makes greater demands on employees. India’s rapid economic expansion has enhanced corporate profits and employee incomes, but has also sparked a surge in workplace stress and lifestyle diseases.

With increasing competition in India, and no fixed hours of work for employees, employees feel that they are losing balance between their work and family life. In this connection “in the last few years, we have noticed a number of new career opportunities opening up for Indians especially in the service sector. However, better opportunities along with good packages and growth prospects bring in a long work schedule leaving individuals with very little time to balance their work life. Demanding careers have dominated the lives of many young Indian’s for some time and it takes a toll on their family time.

Worker’s in agriculture, forestry, fishing industry seer to have a lower prevalence of work–life imbalance compared to all employed adults including women. One of the reasons for increasing work – life imbalance in society is lack of control on the job. The organizational structures which are as yet hierarchical despite globalization play a major part in employee stress caused by lack of control on the job.

Review of literature:

Sanjay Singh (2016) Stress management and work life balance– A study on some selected banks in Nagaland, India

Stress from a layperson’s perceptive, can be described as feeling tensed, anxious or worried. Stress can be positive attribute if taken at the right proportion but if it starts to increase and a person is incapable to handle it, it will lead to the negative impact on the performance of an individual. Stress is present in every person in every situation; the only difference is the level of stress and the capability of an individual to withstand the stress. With the change in life style, increasing. The level of stress is not same for all; it varies from place to place and person to person depending upon the situation. This study has been undertaken on the bank employees of some selected banks in the city Dimapur, in the Indian state of Nagaland to understand stress management and on work life balance. Bank employees have been taken as the target respondent for the purpose of this study as they have to confront huge financial risks on daily basis along with various customer dealings which makes their job challenging and stressful.

Sindhu Sivan (2014) Management of Occupational Stress and Work-life balance Among Women Managers in Indian Industries

While change is slow for Indian women to gain executive positions, they have made progress in management in a relatively short time. The key challenge for women managers is managing both their traditional role as housewives and their career. Women managers experience great pressure to work hard to prove them in the workplace. Balancing work and family roles has become a key personal and family issue for many societies. This paper on what are the facets in women manager’s lives that subject to stress how can be managed stress and work-life. This paper highlights the copying strategies that can be accepted and viewed as a condition of success so that women are encouraged to come forward and embrace managerial positions and contribute their efforts to build a develop and a civilized nation.

Objective:

1. To know the cause of work life imbalance
2. To explore work life balance and stress
3. To identify the measures to reduce stress

Research Methodology:

The present study is mainly based on secondary data which is gathered from sources like research articles, journals, and magazine’s different websites mainly focusing on work life balance.

Causes of work-life imbalance:

Family and career is the two important domains for a woman. Due to rapid change’s in the lifestyle. Social and economic environment women take up jobs in order to support their family. When a woman employee is unable to focus on the two major domain’s, work and family. Her physical and mental health is affected and there lies an imbalance between work and family.

Poor work life balance is due to family interference in work that may be due to family related factors, namely lack of support from the spouse and family members, child care problems, elder dependency and other domestic responsibilities that create imbalance. It is also due to work interference in family like work pressure, job commitments, doing office work at home, working during holidays and weekends are the various work related factors that cause work life imbalance. It is also due to time based conflict i.e. the inability to fulfill the tasks in a given role within the due date to the needs of another role. Basically when a woman fail’s to devote time for the family. It disturbs her marital and family life.

Work life balance and stress:

One of the essential factors in successfully managing work life balance is the ability to reduce and control stress. Stress is undoubtedly one of the biggest problems faced by the modern workforce. It is also becoming an increasingly worrying problem for employers.

Stress management

Stress management is the ability to recognize the sources of stress and restructure the employee work and life in order to cope with them. This is different from stress reduction which involves eliminating the sources of stress.

Stressful situations can be categorized as

1. Significant life adjustments: This covers any serious change in the employee’s life, which can be both pleasant and unpleasant.
2. Daily routine: Daily routine such as fighting the rush hour traffic or meeting the deadline on an important project sap the person’s energy. A Person become accustomed to the daily activities and easily overlooks their cumulative effect.
3. Unrealistic self expectations: While positive self-expectations motivate a person to realize their goals, unrealistic expectations motivate a person to realize their goals, unrealistic expectations can lead to setting themselves for failure and a lowering of self-esteem.
4. Interpersonal relationships: Both personal and professional relationships require a significant amount of effort to maintain, poor communication leads to conflict that can escalate into increased frustration and open hostility as well as causing stress, poor interpersonal relationships can also be caused by stress.

General stress factors are:

1. Family problems
2. Mental illness
3. Elderly care issues
4. Childcare issues
5. Financial issues
6. Legal issues
7. Grief and loss
8. Communication difficulties
9. Work
10. Health concerns
11. Balancing work and family
12. Time management problems
13. Change management issue

Coping with stress:

There are different ways of coping with stress such as: confronting (facing), distancing (remoteness), self-control, seeking social support, accepting responsibility, escape or avoid (from the stressor), plan a problem solving strategy and positive reappraisal.

Usually two broad type of coping types are seen- instrumental coping and emotional coping.

In instrumental coping, a person focuses on the problem and tries to solve it. In emotional coping, the focus is more on the feelings generated by the problem.

Self-help remedies weight loss, clinics and diets, healthy foods and physical exercise are being given much attention in mass media. People are actually taking more responsibility to maintain good health.

However, some specific techniques to eliminate or to manage more effectively the inevitable, prolonged stress are as follows:

Exercise:

Good physical exercise like walking, jogging, swimming, riding bicycle, playing soft ball, tennis are necessary to cope with stress.

Relaxation:

Whether a person simply takes it easy once in a while or uses specific relaxation techniques such as bio feedback, or meditation, the intent is to eliminate the immediately stressful situation or manage a prolonged stressful situation more effectively.

Taking it easy may mean curling up with a good book on an easy chair or watching some light program on television or listening to a light music. Meditation is scientifically proved to be very useful, both physically and mentally to cope with stress.

Behavioral self-control:

By deliberately managing the antecedents and the consequence of their own behavior, people can achieve self-control. Besides managing their own behavior to reduce stress people can also become more aware of their limits and of ‘red flags’ that signal trouble ahead. They can avoid people or situations that they know will put them under stress.

Maladaptive strategies, rigid strategies or relying on one type of coping method lead to increase in stress. Social support helps reduce the effect of stress. People may provide help, advice, material support or moral support that helps to reduce stress.

In addition to the above, skill training, environmental changes, Bio-feedback (control of physical signs such as blood pressure, headache, etc), family therapy, group therapy, hypnosis, yoga, are found to be very useful. Finally, uses of drugs are some of the other strategies adopted in coping with stress.

Conclusion:

Work life balance responsibility lies for ensuring employees have a good work life balance the general feeling is that employers have a responsibility to the health of their employees; apart from the moral responsibility stressed out employees are less productive and more likely to make errors.

Reference:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/work-life-balance.
• Sanjay Singh (2016), “stress management & work life balance-a study on some selected banks in Nagaland, India”, Indian journal of commerce & management studies, vol.08 & issue 2 may 2016
•  Sindhu Sivan (2014), “mgt of occupational stress& work-life balance among women, managers in Indian industries”, Indian journal of applied research, vol.04, Issue 12, 2014.
• http://www.hrzone.com/hr.glossary/what-is-work-life-balance.
• http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards.
• www.scholarshub.net/ijcms/vol7/issue2/paper_05.pdf.