Does Business Strategy Have an Impact on Work-Life Balance?

Work-life balance is a common HR program that attempts to balance the needs between work and home life. That balance can be difficult to find if one is working in the service industry, consistent overtime, or in a high pressure salaried positions. Taking time to find that balance will help ensure that employees maintain a well-rounded and productive life that takes into account the whole person. The strategy a company uses to manage their business may have an impact on their desire to implement their own work-life balance programs.

A regular schedule can help people find a level of consistency that doesn’t occur if schedules are randomly changed every week. The unpredictability of work situations impacts work-life conflict, time-based conflict and strain-based conflict as measured through employee stress (Henly & Lambert, 2014). As schedules move around employees have difficulties planning activities from week to week. 

Certain sectors of the labor market have more difficulty in finding work-life balance. This is often a direct result of either too much overtime, as seen in hourly jobs in construction, or inflexible work hours in low wage occupations prevalent in the service industry. At this level, employees don’t have much control over their schedules that can cause stress when problems arise.

Executives can also have difficulty managing the demands between work and home life. When a person is responsible for a team of employees, a substantial amount of assets, and the success of a department it can be difficult to simply ignore problems to spend time with family. When an important phone call comes in it is expected that they drop what they are doing and handle the problem straight away.

The type of business strategy a company uses to guide its decisions will have an impact on their work-life balance. Those companies that follow a product leadership business strategy are more likely to adopt work-life programs when compared to those that are focused on cost leadership business strategies (Wang & Verma, 2009). 

Product leadership strategies focus more on the holistic approach to creating and selling products. Culture is one of those important components to overall success and therefore decisions to encourage work-life balance can help in encouraging higher output on an organizational level. When cost strategies take precedence it doesn’t take long to find such programs on the back burner of corporate emphasis. Decision-makers should consider the long term needs of employees in addition to the short-term financial success of the business to ensure talent is retained and fully engaged.

Henly, J. & Lambert, S. (2014). Unpredictable work timing in retail jobs: implications for employee work-life conflict. Industrial & labor Relations Review, 67 (3). 

Wang, J. & Verma, A. (2014). Explaining organizational responsiveness to work-life balance issues: the role of business strategy and high performance work systems. Academy of Management annual Meeting Proceedings. DOI: 10.5465/AMBPP.2009.44257659

Improving Service Delivery to Raise Customer Satisfaction

Developing strong service management within organizations is not easy. Some customers may like a particular approach while others will leave to other opportunities. The researchers Sivakumar, et. al. (2014) studied service failures and surprises to develop a model incorporating prospect theory to encourage positive service impressions.  Their work will delve in to frequency of service failures/delights, timing of these failures/delights, proximity of failures/delights, and the sequence of failures/delights. 

It is difficult to understand the totality of service if one is only focused on failures. To get a better picture of the patterns of service perceptions among customers it is beneficial to look at failures, success, and why these things are occurring. To know what the company is doing well and what it is failing at will provide better opportunities to enhance what works and minimize what doesn’t. 

Their model is based off of prospect theory. Prospect theory explains a mental accounting system based upon heuristics that consumers use to judge winnings, losses, and mixtures of both (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979).  Customers have a value proposition in mind when engaging in a particular service and if what is offered is less than that proposition they will be disappointed and possibly move onto another company. If the perceived value is higher than the customer will be satisfied and may stay. 

It is important to remember that service loss or gain from the perspective of the customer is not equal. Research by Mittal, et. al. Baldasare (1998) found that when customers lose it has a greater impact on their psyche than when they win. This means that organizations should ensure that positive impressions are more forthcoming in their service delivery chains than the negative impressions.

They found that by suitably deploying resources and the amount of service personnel firms can gain direct and indirect control over the distribution of service failure occurrences and delights. Even with lay-offs and cuts to budgets it is possible to analyze where these occur and adjust the service process to ensure there are significantly more service positives that raise customer satisfaction.  It requires an analysis of where service success and failure are being delivered and reconstructing to service process to improve upon the chances of positive outcomes. This leads to customer satisfaction, greater purchase amounts, and customer retention.

Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: an analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica, 47 (2).

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Mittal, V. et. al. (1998). The asymmetrie impact of negative and positive attribute-level performance on overall satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Journal of Marketing, 63 (33).

Sivakumar, K. et. al. (2014). Service quality: the impact of frequency, timing, proximity and sequence of failures and delights. Journal of Marketing, 78 (1).