Work-Life Balance in India: Policy, Practices and the Road Ahead

With businesses focusing on emerging economies, Indian business landscape during the last two decades has undergone swift transformations. Demographic shifts, generational and cultural differencescultural differences mark today’s workforce. Given the heterogeneity in terms of nature of work and workforce, huge variations may be observed in how work, life and work-life balance is viewed. This chapter aims to explore the work-life balance policies and practices in the changing institutionalinstitutional contexts. It also attempts to identify gaps, if any, between policies and practices, causative factors and consequencesconsequences. The chapter is based on secondary data collected on Indian work practices with an effort to understand the current status of work-life balance initiatives and the road ahead. Starting with how the traditional economy of the land is linked with the WLB initiatives, the chapter dwells into the expanding scope of the term both for the organization as well as the individual. Causes and consequences of work-life imbalancework-life imbalance along with coping strategies is also explored. The literature throws light on how gender still acts as major societal driver. The findings give an indication that the country is currently going through a transitionary phase in relation to WLB initiatives with multiple diverse policies and practices operating parallelly making it is difficult to identify a uniform standard for WLB programs. While on the one hand, there are companies that have WLB policies and practices that can be benchmarked against the world’s best, on the other hand, many organizations look at WLB as a phase in employee’s life and are best worked out at an informal level. The chapter also throws light on how the gendered norms prevailing in the national culturenational culture still interfere at the operational level often creating a gap between the stated policy and the practiced one.