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Short-time work and work-sharing measures or other forms of job retention helped to reduce the volume of work and save jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, said a report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released on Friday. The report, titled Working Time and Work-Life Balance Around the World, said flexible working hours enabled individuals as well as companies, enterprises and industries to collectively reduce the hours of work, a trend already generated before the crisis. The crisis also created the possibility of increasing the hours of work for new economic bottleneck areas, such as in the healthcare or pharmaceutical industries.
The telework contributed to the COVID-19 crisis response by reducing the social contacts of the employees and enabling them to perform work from outside the employer’s premises, thereby both maintaining organisational operations and preserving jobs, the report added. The system of reduced working hours and flexible working time arrangements can benefit economies, enterprises and workers, and lay the ground for a better and more healthy work-life balance, the report noted.
The report looked at the working hours and working time arrangements and the effects of both on business performance and employees’ work-life balance. It found that a substantial portion of the global workforce are working either long or short hours when compared to a standard eight-hour day/40 hour working week. “More than one-third of all workers are regularly working more than 48 hours per week, while a fifth of the global workforce is working short (part-time) hours of less than 35 per week. Informal economy workers are more likely to have long or short hours,” the ILO said in a release.
`Great resignation’ phenomenon
“Inclusive short-time work schemes with the highest possible allowances not only maintain employment but also sustain purchasing power and create the possibility of cushioning the effects of economic crises. Teleworking helps maintain employment and also creates new scope for the autonomy of employees, in terms of regulating both their hours of work and their work–life balance. At the same time, however, it seems to be necessary to remedy the weaknesses of these working-time instruments that became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report suggested in its policy prescriptions to ILO member countries.
It said the large-scale implementation of telework nearly everywhere in the world that it was feasible to do so, changed… the nature of employment, most likely for the foreseeable future.” “There is a substantial amount of evidence that work–life balance policies provide significant benefits to enterprises, supporting the argument that such policies are a ‘win-win’ for both employers and employees,” the report stated.
“The so-called ‘Great Resignation’ phenomenon has placed work-life balance at the forefront of social and labour market issues in the post-pandemic world,” said Jon Messenger, the lead author of the report. “This report shows that if we apply some of the lessons of the COVID-19 crisis and look very carefully at the way working hours are structured, as well as their overall length, we can create a win-win, improving both business performance and work-life balance,” Mr. Messenger said.