The Quality of Work Life

PRINCIPLES OF MANAGEMENT

Chapter 13 – The Quality of Work Life

Managers’ social responsibility includes the quality of work life of their employees. In enhancing the quality of work life, managers must explore two areas where they can contribute positively. These areas are the job environment and the job itself.

The Job Environment

The word environment refers to the aggregate of surrounding things and conditions that affect the quality of work life of an employee. Among these are hours of work, safety and health hazards, job security, pay, grievance procedures, right to privacy, and special services.

1. Hours of Work: With the congestion of transportation during rush hours and overcrowding of recreational spots during weekends, employees are opting for new alternatives to work schedule.

a. Flexitime

b. Flexiweek

c. Four-day work Week

2. Safety and Health Hazards: In the Philippines, DOLE sets and enforces mandatory standards to eliminate or reduce occupational and health hazards in all workplaces.

Experts now contend that problems at work – low productivity, health hazards, accidents, high turnover – the result of ignorance of ergonomics.

The essence of ergonomics is to design or redesign the work and the work environment to fit people. It aims to ensure that work procedures, tools, equipment, and environment are safe, efficient and comfortable by applying engineering, physiological, psychological, and anatomical knowledge.

3. Job Security: This refers to the stability of employment of the worker. An employee must be selected, promoted, transferred, and dismissed for just cause.

The issue of dismissal is important to older employees. If they are dismissed at a late age or years before retirement, they may find it difficult to get new jobs.

It is also important that employees be guaranteed employment and if they to be dismissed, the dismissal must be based on some objective criteria and not just on managerial caprice.  An employer may terminate an employment only for the following just causes:

a. Serious misconduct or willful disobedience of lawful orders of his employers or representatives I connection with his work.

b. Gross and habitual neglect of duties.

c. Fraud and willful breach by the employee of the trust reposed on him by his employer or representative.

d. Commission of a crime or offense by the employee against the person of his employer or immediate member of his family of his representative.

e. Other cause analogous to the foregoing.

4. Pay: Determining equitable levels of pay has many variables involved. If the worker’s pay is not equitable, a deterioration in the quality of work life is sure to follow. This is also true for non-financial rewards.

The problem in this regard is that the pay is often based on the length of service and other unrelated factors and not on output. As a result, few workers really put out their best effort.

It is imperative that the pay or non-financial rewards be just and fair for the efforts and skill that the worker brings to the job. Only then will employee satisfaction and better performance ensue.

The DOLE considers the following factors in the determination of the minimum wage: Cost of Living; Comparable wages and other incomes in the local economy; Fair return of the capital invested; the imperative of economic and social development.

5. Grievance Procedure: This refers to the systematic procedure used to resolve conflicts between managers and subordinates. Through this procedure, the facts are assessed and resolved by following certain established guidelines.

Conflict not resolved by the organization's grievance machinery may be brought to the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC) under DOLE.

6. The Right to Privacy: There is now a growing concern over the fact that organizations often probe into the personal lives of their employees. This issue becomes more sensitive because of the use of computers. Computers can place all the employee’s files together in one spot to which a number of people can have access.

To ensure the privacy of their employees, management must curtail the information that it asks of employees and restrict the access and use of the information gathered.

7. Special Services: At present, most organizations are assuming greater social responsibility for their employees. They are now offering a multitude of special services to meet employee’s needs. Most of these services evolve because of the employees’ problems in the workplace which compromise his job performance.

Included are services such as counseling programs, financial and economic planning programs, and retirement planning and investment programs.

The Job

The job is perhaps the most important consideration in the quality of work life issue. Many workers are dissatisfied with their work, feeling they “trapped” in the job.

This dissatisfaction with the job can be traced to several causes. Experts point to the two most important causes are values of the employees and the structure of their jobs.

· Values of the Employees: Experts claim that the new values are that employment are entitled to decent working conditions, a living wage, and a job that fits their expanding needs. “The job exists for the employee, not the employee for the job.”

· Job Structure: In response to employee demands, many managers have restructured or redesigned the contents of jobs. It would, however, be worth manager’s time to check if the job can be redesigned or if the workers want more enriched work.