Influence of Work-life Balance on Employee Performance at the Cabinet Affairs Office, Kenya

Abstract

The objective of the study was to determine influence of work life balance on the performance of employees in Cabinet Affairs Office, Kenya. The research is very useful to the policy makers as it contains very crucial findings that can help the government officials in decision making when it comes to making and implementation of policies on work life balance programs. The Cabinet Affairs Office would find the study a masterpiece and very resourceful as it contains new methodology of flexible work system which would improve the employees’ morale hence increase performance. The research piece was guided by spill over theory and compensation theory. The research study then employed descriptive research design which enabled the researcher to fully describe the characteristics of the variable under study. Simple random sampling method was used to come up with 70 respondents who took part in the research in Cabinet Affairs Office. The study covered only middle and lower-cadre level of employees. The primary data was collected by use of semi-structured questionnaire while the Inferential and descriptive statistics was applied to analyze and process the obtained data. Descriptive statistics comprised of frequencies, means, standard deviations, and percentage. The influence of WLB on EP was determined using simple linear regression analysis. The study revealed that work-family priorities affected employee performance at Cabinet Affairs Office. It also found out that the demand at the workplace interfered with employee’s family life. The research also revealed that due to high demand of the work, most of the employees had to make changes in order to accomplish their family duties. The long working hours made employees to experience too much stress, many employees experienced job-related stress due to lack of organizational support. The research also found out that supervisors’ regular commends on outstanding employees resulted in increased performance above the average hence this increased quality of work performance and most of the employees always surpassed the set work targets. In order for the organization to improve and maintain good performance, it is very prudent that work life balance should well be addressed. This particular research work recommends that Cabinet Affairs Office to give proper attention to processes and procedures in the organizaion. These types of procedures include coming up with professional programs that focus on giving employee adequate skills on how to handle job related challenges resulting to improvement in performance.The research also recommends that the organization should come up with work life balance related policies that should be implemented at departmental level. All policies should well be screened to ensure that they fill the gap existing among the employees. Good amount of resources should be invested in the program to enhance proper implementation as no program can be achieved without backup of good human and financial resources. The research only focused on employees in Cabinet Affairs Office. The future research should focus on other organizations like law courts, county governments among many other firms. The research only focused on the influence of work life balance on performance of employees in Cabinet Affairs Office, the subsequent research work should be done while considering the effect of WLB on job satisfaction of employee in Cabinet Affairs Office. The research also used simple random sampling method to sample the population. This method is costly and time consuming. The subsequent research should consider using non-probabilistic type of sampling as it is less costly and time saving.