Meeting 1 – BC12 – 27/05/2016 – 12.30 p.m

Question:

Discuss on the process of the report.
 

Date: 27/05/2016

The meeting started at 12.30 PM in the room number BC12. The chairperson of the group was Sasanka. In the meeting, the whole group was present. The meeting focused on the kind of steps that have to be taken. At the time of meeting, Sasanka suggested the way to creatively start the presentation which agreed by everyone. In the meeting, the role of every member within the team discussed so they can able to complete their task within the deadline. The meeting had 30 minutes of brainstorming session. At the latter part of the meeting, the whole group discussed about the team norms in details. The norms were noted down to the sheet by Kanishka who is in the charge of writing down the team norms discussed in the meeting. Sasanka takes charge of the research page and Nipuna was given the responsibility of taking photos and videos for developing the presentation. The entire team took the responsibility of articulating all the important information on the google docs. Then the meeting was adjourned.  

Date: 31/05/2016                  

This meeting was conducted at 4.05 PM in the room number BC15. The chairperson of this meeting was Nipuna. All members are present in this meeting as well. The primary objective of this meeting was to plan a report on WLB. As a leader of this meeting, Nipuna clarified the reason for conducting the meeting at the very beginning. In this meeting, 10 minutes session of brainstorming conducted. While Nipuna has made arrangement for videos and photos for the purpose of presentation. Each and every member of the group contributes to complete a set of task mentioned in the report. Sasanka was given the opportunity to complete the introduction part of the report. Maith and Nipuna was considered for the development of the body of the report. They also handed with the responsibility to develop presentation slides. The body of the report includes strategies of overcoming challenges of work life balances (Noon, Blyton & Morrell, 2013). Kanishka was given with the responsibility to develop the conclusion part of the report. The further details were described in the meeting before the meeting comes to end.

In present competitive situation, companies are trying to utilize all its resources to its fullest. Therefore, work life balance has become one of the major issues that the company has to develop in order to minimize the employee turnover. According to Adcroft & Taylor (2013) work life can be balanced if the organizations can able to develop trustworthy work culture, promote open-door policy, train managers to handle stress situation. As per the article by Shanafelt et al. (2012) developing flexibility in the work culture has the major positive impact on the on the work life balances of the employees. Jones, Burke & Westman (2013) mentioned a recent case where an FMCG company has able to improve the satisfaction level of the employees by allowing them to manage their work time so that they effective plan their performance of responsibility to increase the level of work life balance.

Meeting 2 – BC15 – 31/05/2016 – 4.05 p.m

Sasanka: Hello everyone, please mention the time when you all can able to meet for meeting?

Maith: I am available on next Monday, Tuesday or Friday

Nipuna: I can join the meeting on Wednesday, Friday or Saturday

Kanishka: Please conduct the meeting on Friday

Sasanka: Okay, then I am fixing Friday for the meeting at 12.30 PM on the room number BC12 and I am sure that all of you will be present on the given time and place

Kanishka: I have no issue with date and time

Nipuna: Okay then we will meet on Friday and I also have to share some important information relevant to the objective of the meeting

Maith: See you guys on Friday

Sasanka: In the meeting, we will go through a brainstorming session for the purpose of developing an effective strategy. So please prepare well before come to the meeting

About the company:

Unilever is a consumer goods manufacturer company. The company headquarter is present in the United Kingdom and Netherlands. However, Unilever has its presence all over the world, which makes it third largest consumer goods manufacturer of the world (“Unilever Sri Lanka”, 2015). Revenue wise, Unilever is only after P&G and Nestle. However, the company recently facing several issues related to work life balances in Sri Lanka. The company has lose some of its potential employees in Sri Lanka due to the over stress work atmosphere.

Raw material issue:

As a consumer goods manufacturer, availability of raw material is extremely crucial for the success of the business. However, the company has faced several challenges to get high quality raw material at reasonable price (Sirgy & Wu, 2013). It makes the operation of the Unilever much more difficult. Therefore, the company is actually facing issue with the high operational cost in Sri Lankan region.

High import-export duties:

High import-export duties also created several challenges for the Unilever. As mentioned earlier, shortage of raw materials already created huge amount of challenges for the company, which left no other option for Unilever to utilize import-export services to have high quality raw materials (Erdogan et al., 2012). However, high level of import-export duties has minimized the positive impact of this business operation.

Competition:

Like any other company, Unilever also has to face huge amount of challenges from the competitors in the Sri Lankan market, which creates huge amount of stress for the employees to develop strategies that can actually help the company to gain competitive advantage in the market (Harvey & Allard, 2015).

Importance of WLB:

All these mentioned issues actually put huge amount of pressure in the employees, which increases the employee turnover rate of the company at extremely high position. This plays a huge role in creating a negative environment at the workplace, which affects the productivity of the company (MarafI, 2013). Hence, WLB is necessary not only to increase the satisfaction level or minimize the employee turnover rate but also improving the productivity of the company.

WLB strategies:     

Supportive management style:

Many studies have mentioned that work life balance is directly associated with the satisfaction level of employees (Bakker, Oerlemans & Ten Brummelhuis, 2013). Therefore, Unilever have to develop a management style that will induce employees to share their views and thoughts can actually help them to achieve a higher level of satisfaction (Robbins et al., 2013). This can play a crucial role in balancing work life of the employees.

This will help the employees to manage the time for performing its organizational responsibilities (Raisiene & Jonusauskas, 2013). However, to implement this strategy the company has to develop a trustworthy organizational culture in which every employee will be dedicated to perform their entire task within the given period of time.

• It help the employees to manage and minimize the present level of stress
• It induces all the employees of the organization to give their best at the workplace
• It helps to improve the satisfaction level of the employees
• It minimizes employee turnover rate for the company

• Sometime WLB strategies can actually create confusion among the employees regarding the way of performing their responsibilities at the workplace.
• It also demand employees to have skill by which they can able to perform their tasks on their own 

Conclusion:

 For successful implementation WLB strategies, the management of Unilever has to focus on the physiological needs of the employees. The implementation of the strategy will have to be conducted in such a way that it could able to fulfill the needs of both employers and employees.   

Evaluation process of the WLB strategies will have to focus on the stress level of the employees. The company will have to follow closely on the factors like employee turnover, production efficiency, health of the employees in order to evaluate the kind of impact that the WLB strategies have made on the organizational developmental process.  

References:

Adcroft, A., & Taylor, D. (2013). Support for new career academics: an integrated model for research intensive university business and management schools. Studies in Higher Education, 38(6), 827-840.

Bakker, A. B., Oerlemans, W. G., & Ten Brummelhuis, L. L. (2013). Becoming fully engaged in the workplace: What individuals and organizations can do to foster work engagement. The fulfilling workplace: The organization’s role in achieving individual and organizational health, 55-69.

Erdogan, B., Bauer, T. N., Truxillo, D. M., & Mansfield, L. R. (2012). Whistle while you work a review of the life satisfaction literature. Journal of Management, 38(4), 1038-1083.

Harvey, C. P., & Allard, M. (2015). Understanding and managing diversity. Pearson.

Jones, F., Burke, R. J., & Westman, M. (2013). Work-life balance: A psychological perspective. Psychology Press.

MarafI, H. (2013). Perception of Work Life Balance-An Investigation of Education Sector of East and West. Asian Journal of Business Management, 5(1), 174-180.

Noon, M., Blyton, P., & Morrell, K. (2013). The realities of work: Experiencing work and employment in contemporary society. Palgrave Macmillan.

Raisiene, A. G., & Jonusauskas, S. (2013). Silent issues of ICT era: impact of techno-stress to the work and life balance of employees. Entrepreneurship and sustainability issues, 1(2), 107-115.

Robbins, S., Judge, T. A., Millett, B., & Boyle, M. (2013). Organisational behaviour. Pearson Higher Education AU.

Shanafelt, T. D., Boone, S., Tan, L., Dyrbye, L. N., Sotile, W., Satele, D., … & Oreskovich, M. R. (2012). Burnout and satisfaction with work-life balance among US physicians relative to the general US population. Archives of internal medicine, 172(18), 1377-1385.