Work-Life Balance: Personal and Companies’ Concern

Work-Life Balance (WLB) among employees of state-owned company who live in separate regions from their family is possibly an intricate issue.  Majority of the state-owned companies in Indonesia have branches across the archipelago and require their employees to work away from their home towns and families.  Maintaining a balance between work and life for the employees is not an easy task.

A staff in an Indonesian state-owned company shares his experiences and challenges that he faces in maintaining his Work-Life Balance and how his work place supports Work-Life Balance.

Angga Puji Rachmanto is an employee from a state-own construction company based in Denpasar, Bali.  He has to leave his family in Java and stays around his work place.  Currently, he is handling two main construction projects in Bali and Lombok. This responsibility requires him to travel to both islands in weekly basis.

According to Angga, Work-Life Balance is an essential part of life as it enables people to do their work happily without forgetting about their personal life.  An employee should not feel that he/she is a burden to do the work place due to social expectations to fulfill social and family roles. Everyone should maintain stable and good relationships with family members, friends, and colleagues. He feels that Work-Life Balance is a challenging issue but it is not impossible to achieve. To maintain Work-Life Balance, employees should have the ability of good time management skill. Although he confesses that he is not yet at the best level of maintaining his Work-Life Balance, he believes that he will achieve the balance in the future by attempting to maintain his work schedule and live his private life every day.

In order to maintain Work-Life Balance in daily basis, Angga mentions that technology plays an important role for people who work away from their family as well as at the work place. For his work, communication technology is an essential tool to support teleworking between him and his team especially in emergency times when they need urgent data while he is away from the office. However, technology such as smart phones sometimes also removes the boundaries between working time and personal time because people tend to work at erratic hours. In this case, Angga prefers to separate his time for working and other personal activities to maintain the balance. Not only for work, technology also maintains communication with families especially for people who live in different regions.

Angga also believes that Work-Life Balance can be achieved by utilizing spare time between each work task to interact with other people around him.  Even though the workloads in a construction company are relatively high, he always believes in this phrase  — “Don’t forget to be happy!” By spreading happiness in the working environment, an office will reduce the amount of stress and eventually lead to the betterment of personal lives.

Angga’s office is also supporting Work-Life Balance among the employees. As most of the employees work away from their family, the company has a policy that for every seven weeks of working days, they can go on home leave for one week.  All of the transportation costs from the office to home are borne by the company. The company also organizes regular picnics for its employees. The company believes that investing in employees’ Work-Life Balance will maintain their best performance and high productivity.

Maintaining Work-Life Balance is not only an important concern for individuals, it is also important initiative in a working environment in the corporate sector.  Angga’s company and the employees are examples of mutual support to achieve Work-Life Balance for happier and productive individuals.

 

By: Yulita Muspitasari

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