Assessing Impact 2025

inconsistencies in defining or operationalizing work-life balance for future research and practice, in this brief, the term work- life balance refers to all relevant constructs that concern the interface between work and important life domains (e.g. family, personal life and community). Workplace work-life balance programmes Work-life balance programmes may be developed and implemented at different levels in the workplace, including the organizational level, supervisor and employee levels. At the organization-level, programmes may involve reducing employee working days or hours (e.g. switching from a five-day to a four- day workweek, or reducing weekly working hours from 40 to 30 hours), or offering flexible work arrangements, such as allowing workers to choose their work hours or location. At the team level, programmes may focus on training supervisors to support employees’ non-work/life needs, fostering more work-life balance. At the employee level, programmes often provide employees with resources – such as mindfulness or coping skills) – to help them manage work and non-work demands more effectively. Effectiveness of work-life balance programmes A recent meta-analysis by von Allmen and colleagues5 – which evaluated 26 work-life balance intervention studies comparing intervention groups and control groups with pre-post evaluations – found that work-life balance programmes have a positive overall effect. This suggests promising potential for organizations and stakeholders to consider implementing effective programmes. However, the analysis excluded some findings that may offer additional insights, such as those lacking control groups, but still comparing pre- and post-programme outcomes. Additionally, some studies included interventions that took place in the non-work domain instead of the workplace. To provide a broader perspective, this section highlights examples workplace work-life balance programmes evaluated both within von Allmen’s review and beyond it. Organization-level programmes Most studies on organization-level work-life balance programmes focus on changes to working hours, work schedule, or other flexible work arrangements. Conducted mainly in Europe and the US, these studies show promising, though mixed, results regarding effectiveness. For example, a study in Finland6 found that reducing work shifts from eight to six hours significantly lowered work-family conflict, especially for employees with children and among manual and lower-level white-collar workers. A Danish study of healthcare workers in a psychiatric hospital showed that allowing staff to set shift preferences within an open rotation system improved work-life balance after 20 months. In contrast, another Finnish study7 found no significant impact of participatory shift-scheduling software on reducing workers’ work-life conflict. While studies have generally linked the availability or usage of organizational flexible working arrangements – including flexible work time, flexible work location, or both – with better employee well-being and higher work-life balance in observational studies,8 studies evaluating the effectiveness of implementing organizational flexible working arrangement programmes have shown inconsistent findings. For example, a US study9 evaluated the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) initiative at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters, which aimed to shift organizational culture towards greater flexibility in when and where employees work. After six months, participants reported significantly reduced employee work-family conflict. Meanwhile, a Dutch financial firm10 found that a similar flexibility-focused intervention, New Ways of Working (NWW), did not reduce work-family conflict. These inconsistent findings regarding similar interventions highlight the importance of considering contextual factors that may affect the effectiveness of work-life balance programmes. Team-level programmes Team-level programmes that train supervisors to provide more emotional and instrumental support for employees’ work and non-work demands have gained attention in recent years. These interventions often yield positive outcomes such as improved employee mental health, but their effects on work-life balance are mixed. For example, in a large-scale study with 30 healthcare facilities using a group-randomized trial,11 Hammer and colleagues tested a programme called STAR (Support. Transform. Achieve. Results.), which combined supervisor training with efforts to give employees more control over their schedules. While the study’s findings showed that employees in the intervention group (in which the supervisors received the training) reported higher safety compliance at six-month follow-up than employees in the control group (in which the supervisors did not receive the training), the programme did not significantly reduce work-family conflict. In contrast, the STAR programme showed promising results in a study conducted in the corporate IT sector.12 In this study, Kelly and colleagues found that employees in the intervention group reported lower levels of both work-to-family and family-to-work conflict than those in the control group. Notably, employees with heavy family responsibilities and limited resources benefited the most. Employee-level programmes Most workplace work-life balance programmes are developed and tested at the employee level. These programmes aim to help employees better manage the competing demands of their work and non-work lives by building mindfulness, coping skills, or practical strategies for balancing work and nonwork roles. Unlike organization- or team-level programmes that focus on changing the contextual work-related experiences for employees, employee-level programmes focus on changing workers’ behaviours or perceptions directly. Mindfulness training is among the most popular employee-level work-life balance programmes, and most studies show positive