Measuring the Impact of Work-life Initiatives: the Development of an Organisational Work-life Performance Scale

Work-life balance is an area of increasing importance to both employees seeking to balance work and non-work roles a nd to organisations striving to improve their organisational effectiveness or competitive advantage (Greenhaus & Powell 2006; Gregory & Milner 2009). While there is no consistent definition of work-life balance, there are consistent themes which include: employees achieving an acceptable balance between their work and personal lives, employers providing a range of targeted work-life initiatives that enhance firm performance. Work-life initiatives are policies, programs and work practices that enable employees to reach an acceptable integration of their work and personal lives. The business case for developing and implementing work-life balance programs has often been based on employee behaviour such as turnover, absenteeism and productivity, as well as employee attitudes such as organisational commitment. Contributing factors to organisational performance may be complex; therefore, direct empirical evidence of an association between work-life and bottom-line measures i s somewhat limited (Beauregard & Henry 2009). However, offering a wide range of work-family practices has been associated with high levels of firm performance (Perry-Smith & Blum 2000). Developing a reliable and valid measure for organisational work-life performance i s an important step in valuing and encouraging employers’ implementation of work-life initiatives (Arthur & Cook 2003; Bardoel, De Cieri & Mayson 2008a). The process of scale development and validation is both a critical and complex issue for management researchers. Ensuring that an instrument measures what it purports to measure has important implications for i t s future use, particularly when relying on survey outcomes for decision making purposes. While recognizing the potential value of measurement, we acknowledge the inherent pitfalls and difficulties (Pfeffer 1997). For example, there can be a gap between the presence of measurable policies and uptake by employees in organisations (Abbott & De Cieri 2008; Harrington & James 2006). Numerous scales have been developed to enable organisations to determine the effectiveness of their work-life programs (for a review see Bardoel et al. 2008a). These scales have focused on either higher-level constructs that measure organisational attitudes to work-life balance or indices of work-life practices. Few have directly utilised both approaches and none have determined whether there is an association between attitudes to work-life balance and the extent of the worklife initiatives offered by an organisation. Additionally, only one research group has published information regarding the development and psychometric properties of their instrument (Standards of Excellence Index (SEI): Harrington & James 2006). The lack of information regarding validation procedures in extant work-life scales does not mean that these instruments have not undergone a validation process, but rather that without this information, their ability to accurately measure their target constructs cannot be assessed. The purpose of the current study is to develop and validate a scale (DeVellis 2003; Hinki n 1995) to measure work-life performance in Australian organisations. Thi s study has been a multi-stage project that includes a literature review of current survey instruments used to measure work-life initiatives and focus groups with human resource professionals. From this process we developed a conceptual framework of measurement for organisational work-life performance that comprises four dimensions: planning and alignment, communication, supportive culture and leadership support and demonstrated value. The resulting survey was pilot tested using 12 subject matter experts. T he survey was subsequently refined to a 69-item scale designed to measure organisational work-life performance. In early 2009, this survey was administered to a national sample of 3073 Human Resource, WorkLife and Diversity professionals in organisations across Australia. To validate the scale, rigorous statistical assessm ent will be conducted using Classical Test Theory (exploratory factor analysis, reliability) to establish the underlying structure of the questionnaire and Item Response T heory (Rasch analysis) to refine the survey and obtain a more fine grained analysis of the survey items (Pallant & Tennant 2007). The survey will enable managers to measure company progress in establishing work-life integration and how these practices are connected to business outcomes. This information can be used to inform changes to organisational policy and practice.