Part One: Challenges Faced by Employees with Respect to Balance

Work-life balance is not something that just happens. It involves the efforts of a number of partners: the employee, the organization for which the employee works, the family with whom the employee lives, and the society in which all are embedded. It involves mutual understanding and respect between all of these players. This section illustrates what happens when this delicate balance between work and life is disturbed.

The comments presented in this section indicate that balance can be thought of as a set of reciprocal relationships with a set of highly interdependent partners. Taken together, the comments offer compelling proof that decisions, actions or circumstances in any one of the work and life domains will have impact on the others. In other words, they debunk the "separate worlds" model that is still subscribed to in many Canadian businesses and in many parts of Canadian society.

Comments relating to three sets of challenges (representing the various work-life partners) are presented in this part of the report:

• those that arise at the level of the organization;
• those that flow from the interface between work and family; and
• those that come from the individuals themselves and/or have their origin in the family domain .