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The best part of the quality of work-life of employees in an organization is the best practice on work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept under human resource management that refers to perfect management between personal and professional activities of an individual’s life. Work-life balance helps in stress reduction, prevents burnout in the workplace, and creates a healthy work environment. Due to the increase in technology in the workplace the importance of work-life balance (Rashmi et al. (2021), De Clercq et al. (2021), Liu et al. (2021), Perreault et al. (2021)) is going to enhance very much day by day, though it was difficult to take work at home earlier and could not be managed time for both phases personal as well as professionals.
In modern days the challenges of work-life balance in the organization are rising to the top of the consciousness among most employers and employees. In today’s fast-paced society and the competitive structure of economy the human resource management is getting very crucial activity of the business, by satisfying them the company can earn a high level of productivity which leads to organizational development in near future. Improvement of employees’ morale, retention of employees, protection of human capital, and knowledge management are the striking parts for any company in the market. The factors like personal loves, family values, global competition in business, an aging workforce, etc. are the present challenges of work-life balance. The human resource professionals can assist their companies by taking initiatives on these factors to make the organization capitalize in the marketplace (Köse et al. (2021), Hammer et al. (2021), Le et al. (2020)).
The term work-life balance is becoming more enthusiastic when it gives a focus on the quality of life, perfect life balance, and flexible work options, and so on. It has been seen that work-family conflict is a push and pull mechanism between work and family obligations. An individual can take effective participation in both the fields of life when he or she can meet all sort of family and work demands. As mentioned earlier, stress is the cause of poor work-life balance. Mental strength has been recognized as one of the health and significant economic problem and it has arrived when people are not so much comfortable to maintain all the needs of personal and professional life. Stressed-out employees are making errors at work and less productive as well. It is the responsibility of employers to provide a stress-free work environment for these human assets for making work-life balance practice successful and helps to increase organizational effectiveness.
Over the last few months, the Covid-19 crisis (Joshi et al. (2020), Dey et al. (2020), Fong et al. (2020), Shinde et al. (2020), Bhapkar et al. (2020), Hassanien et al. (2020), Singh et al. (2021)) has revealed several unexpected positives. This situation proved that many companies have concerned about the well-being of their employees and given high priority towards the value of employees. Helping the employees to cope up with the situation, companies provided health and safety measures with so many benefits. For maintaining flexible working arrangements during the Covid-19 crisis business organizations enhanced medical insurance, additional caregiver leaves, sickness benefits, medical facilities, etc. On the other hand, it also generates less achievable work-life balance than before as work from home practice omitted the boundaries between the time that is dedicated to working and the time that is reserved for oneself.
The pandemic is also opening the conversation on the mental health of the employees so that the firms are also provided mental health, support, and stress-free work practice, they are not only providing tangible benefits like ‘mental health day off”, but also showing a clear communication on this part by an effective messaging policy that people will be supported to manage their states.
The main objective of this study is to explore the state of the literature on work-life balance pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focused on types of documents, subject areas, most productive and influential countries, and co-occurrence of keywords in titles, etc.