chapter 6 - Malaysia Productivity Corporation ( MPC)

Box 9.1: Best Practices in Work Life Balance
The success of work-life balance depends upon one’s ability to make decisions about what to do at any
given moment. Basically, it means dividing your time between leisure and work. This involves prioritising
between ‘work’ (career and ambition) and on the other hand, ‘life’ (health, pleasure, leisure, family and
spiritual development). For example, a career woman could maintain a work life balance while preparing
dinner before going to work and warm-up the food upon returning from work so that she can spend
more quality time with family and children. Some of the attributes of work-life balance include:
Flexible Working
Offers a range of flexible working and part-time working arrangements such as extended lunch break to
enable care of elderly relatives, variable hours to enable staff to complete school pick-up and a gradual
change in hours to facilitate the return to full-time working for parents of young children.
Maternity and Childcare
• Recruit a dedicated childcare and work life balance adviser to provide specialist guidance to staff
and students to help them find appropriate childcare solutions or working practices to suit their
individual family circumstances.
• Create a support group to link women planning maternity leave with those who had recently returned
from maternity.
• Allow maternity leavers with research grants to go on sabbatical while the faculty employs research
assistant from the grant as temporary teaching staffs.
• Ensure lighter teaching and administrative loads for women returning from maternity leave to enable
them to achieve a work life balance and re-establish their research base.
• Provide one term of sabbatical leave without teaching commitments for research-active academicians
returning from maternity, extended career or long-term sickness leave. This leave will accomodate
staff to re-establish their research activity.
• Develop a childcare package that includes after-school and long holiday provision.
• Give all staff with caring responsibilities, the opportunity to apply for unpaid leave under a career
break policy in addition to maternity and paternity leave entitlements.
Homeworking / Teleworking
The main advantages to employers of having employees who work from home are potential savings in
accommodation plus the possibility of recruiting and retaining experienced staff. Working from home
offers employees greater flexibility in the organisation and control of their work, make it easier to combine
work and domestic responsibilities and provide savings in time and cost of travelling.
Issues that should be considered by the management are:
• Whether staff is able to apply to work from home all the time or some of the time;
• The provision of office equipment;
• Any payment for other costs of working from home;
218 Productivity Report 2011/2012