With the global labor market becoming highly competitive and companies outsourcing to reduce labor costs, employees feel compelled to put in longer hours to achieve, and preferably exceed, expectations to protect their jobs. As a result of this, the boundaries between work and home tend to get blurred. It is easy for work to invade the personal life making both work-life and personal life go out of balance. Thus, finding Work-Life Balance (WLB) in today's fast-paced world presents a major challenge to both employers and employees. This article tries to look at various aspects of achieving the WLB from the employee's point of view and the practices that an employer can adopt to promote WLB in an organization.

Over the past 25 years, there have been considerable changes in the conventional patterns of paid work. The sense of corporate community and long-term loyalty, that was prevalent earlier, have been taken over by a performance culture, which expects more from employees but offers little security in return. The job-related chores have been increased in both scope and magnitude while goals have been elevated to unprecedented heights, as a result of which the average hours of an employee working full-time have increased drastically. An employee working on a regular eight-to-five routine seems like a distant past, as the boundaries between work and home have become blurred. The reasons cited for this change are many.

With the global labor market becoming highly competitive and companies outsourcing to reduce labor costs, employees feel compelled to put in longer hours to achieve, and preferably exceed, expectations to protect their jobs. The significant increase in number of transactional corporations,¹ wherein work is ongoing in one or more office locations of the enterprise around the world for all of 24 hours, has also been responsible for the changing work culture. Due to the advances in communication technology, people are able to carry on work from any location to support both colleagues and clients in distant locations.

HRM Review Magazine, Work-Life Balance, Global Labor Market, Transactional Corporations, Communication Technology, Human Resource Departments, Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, Employment Policies, Family-Friendly Policies, Work and Families Act, Work Place Relations Act, Minimum Conditions of Employment Act.