45126-Invest. Qual-No111

Experience, Understanding and New Possibilitiesresponding effectively and efficiently with integrated solutions topeople’s changing needs requires a commitment to organisationalchange and co-operative working relationships.Achievement of these ambitious aspirations requires a recognitionthat people’s working lives are also undergoing major change, as aretheir preferences with respect to when, how and even where, theywish to seek employment and undertake work. Work-life balance asa concern has been driven by cultural change, by the rising femaleparticipation rate and its effects on gender relations in the home, bycare responsibilities, by increasing travel times to work, and bychanges in patterns of production and service delivery that involvethe dissolution of conventional boundaries between leisure andwork periods. Also, surveys have revealed a growing interestamong employees in greater participation, involvement andpartnership in the workplace.There is evidence in both the private and public sector, that, inresponse to the pressures for change in patterns of employment andwork systems driven by these trends, organisations are willing toradically re-think critical aspects of organisation, control andmanagement, with significant beneficial consequences for both theorganisations and the individuals involved.Improving the knowledge-creating capacity of the workplace, theeffective handling of problems and the achievement of continuousimprovement are now at the heart of work organisation in manyareas. To capture the benefits of co-operation, flexibility andlearning, organisations are moving away from hierarchical structuresand are focusing partnership on issues relating to higherorganisational performance, sustaining competitive advantage,modernising public services and promoting co-operative workingrelationships and arrangements that are flexible and responsive toemployees’ changing needs.The implications of these changes for the labour market,organisational adaptiveness, human resources and industrialrelations in short, for the workplace are understood to be demandingand some of these have been sketched out in very broad and general159