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Quality of Work Life

Daphine Lopes Luz

Quality of Work Life (QWL) is related to organizational practices that aim at promoting employees mental and physical health, safety and satisfaction. A high QWL is essential for organizations to continue to retain high performing employees. Quality of Work Life has emerged as one of the most important aspects of Job that ensures long term association of the employees with the organization. Let's understand how quality of work life can be seen in the optics as a management tool. Since the beginning of our civilization, the human being has found a way to make work easier and simpler as we created math formulas and machines to help us out, and till today we are still trying to improve our work life. The industrialization initiated a new perspective about time witch became a product, so that as much time as possible is used to convert it into a form of income. And only in the XX century, we were able to gather some studies that contribute to the research. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that humans are motivated to accomplish work if they fulfil some needs. The most basic need is for physical survival, which are the basic needs, like water, food, warmth and rest. And once you achieve that, our second concern is with the safety and security of the employee.

After that, it leads to concerning about the psychological needs and then to the self fulfillment needs of the employees. Like Maslow's hierarchy of need, other theories have collaborated to reach our current area of knowledge on the subject. The improvement of QWL occurs from the moment one examines the company and the people as a whole and starts gathering other sciences and knowledge to contribute to the studies. Nowadays it can be said, in general, that quality of life at work encompasses the income being capable of meeting personal and social expectations, feeling pride in the work done, having a satisfying emotional life, having a good self-esteem, being able to see the company's image in the eyes of the public, having a balance between work and leisure, having sensible working hours and conditions, knowing you have an opportunity in career prospects, having a potential use of the individual abilities. It is in this context that the importance of people management in organizations arises. Implementing mechanisms that improve the quality of life of workers has become a goal of modern organizations. It was verified that when employees are valued, with better working conditions, benefits and career plan for example, his performance in the company is better and then better will be the results of the company in general.

Companies today have been concerned with providing their employees with a better quality of life in the workplace. They realized that employees are the key for the business and as the satisfaction improves, the probability of improving the company's performance as a whole will be greater. QWL is the diagnostic process made by companies to detect the problems and situations that occur inside of the operational activities in order to propose solutions and improvements and promote better conditions of human development for the realization of the work. With this objective in mind, companies normally make implementations in the process of people management, new technologies and implement the structure of the company, the structural reorganization in terms of the positions in which workers occupy and changes in the operational process itself.

There are many aspects that qualify the QWL and we need to understand each one. The workers search for a job with a fair salary and appropriate assignments, good work conditions (e.g. justice, equality, safety, reasonable hours by work journey, appropriate materials and equipments), time stability, safe and healthy physical environment, autonomy, freedom of expression, labor rights, privacy, stability, career plan and individual growth, social relationships in the organizations, leisure time. It all interferes with the individual satisfaction, higher stress resistance. But why don't we see more organizations using this resource? This is not a new issue, but there is still an inadequate application of its resources. Organizations tend to set aside and prioritize other issues. For this to change, it is necessary to address this issue in a broad sense, demonstrating its impact not only on the lives of workers but on the company as a whole.

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