Balancing Work and Life in the Mining Industry

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Balancing Work and Life in the Mining Industry

• Dr Connie Zheng
• School of Management
• Faculty of Business and Informatics
• CENTRAL QUEENSLAND UNIVERISTY

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Contents of presentation

• Importance of balancing work and life
• Changing work practices in mines
• Impact of changes on work-life balance
• Suggestions for managing imbalance

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Importance of balancing work and life

• What is work-life balance?
• Why is important?
• How applicable to the mining industry?

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What is work-life balance / conflict?

• ......when the cumulative demands of work and
  non-work life roles are incompatible in some
  respect so that participation in one role is made
  more difficult by participation in other
  role.....
• (Todd 2004, p. 9)

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What is work-life balance / conflict?

• A particular element of work-life conflict is
  work-related stress, which can be caused by
• heavy workload
• lack of participation in decision-making
• health and safety hazards
• job insecurity and
• tight deadline

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Why is work-life balance an important issue?

• mental and physical well-being of employees
• quality of personal relationships outside of work
• effects on organisations bottom line

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Work-life balance - applicable to the mining
industry?

• Labour shortage
• Issue of recruitment and retention
• Sustainable growth
• Competitive/comparative advantage

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Changing work practices in the mining industry

• Numerical flexibility
• Functional flexibility
• Temporal flexibility
• Flexible wage determination

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Numerical flexibility

• core and peripheral workers
• part-time, casual employees and contractors
• just-in-time labour

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Functional Flexibility

• flexible skills
• multi-skilling
• broader tasks
• broader classification of jobs

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Temporal flexibility

• non-standard working time
• shiftwork shifthours
• shorter v. longer working hours

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Flexible compensation

• new wages system
• linking skills and training to compensation
• market rate instead of award rate
• substantial increase in disposable income

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Impact of changes on work-life balance
Source HRSDC 2006
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Impacts of changes on work-life balance

• lifestyle choices
• health and safety
• employee commitment

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Life style choices

• working longer shift blocks
• having more time with family
• DIDO or FIFO work-life style

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Health and safety

• work-related stress
• Health and safety hazards

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Employee commitment

• satisfaction with work and life
• low employee turnover
• high employee commitment
• high firm performance

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Suggestions for managing work-life balance

• above legislative requirement
• regular employee survey
• reviewing work design
• building a strong culture