Abstract:
The covid-19 pandemic has caused to decline of tourism industry. Therefore, most of
the tourism sector adapts to the work from home (WFH) concept. Under WFH female
workers face many more struggles than male workers in the tourism industry when
balancing their work and family life. The work-family balance (WFB) is the term
used to describe practices in achieving a balance between professional work and
family work lives. The demands and pressures of work make it difficult to stretch
time for balancing work-life activities. In this background, the present study was
undertaken to determine the WFB of working women in the travel agencies in the new
normal work from the home condition. The main objective of the research was to
identify the factors that contribute to the WFB and understand the challenges that
female travel agency workers face in balancing work-family in the new normal WFH
condition. To investigate that, the qualitative research approach was used and a
phenomenological research design was chosen as research design. The sample
consists of female managers in the top 10 travel agencies in the Colombo district.
Data was collected from eleventh female managers in the top 10 travel agencies in the
Colombo district using semi-structured interviews. After analyzing, results show that
there were family-related supportive factors, organizational-related supportive factors,
and self-related supportive factors that affect travel agency workers and there were
some challenges like personal challenges and external challenges that affect them
when balancing work and family life in new normal WFH condition. As personal
challenges, researcher identified children’s distractions, challenge of dependents,
household responsibilities and travel distance. Nature of the job, neighborhood
challenges, employment cut down and more work load were the external challenges.
When giving the recommendations of the study, the researcher found through this
research, most of the females were not practicing self-care. Therefore, it is better to
care about themselves and their health; it will help them to maintain a good WFB.
Future research may consider investigating the WFB experiences of married and
single-parent women to examine whether there are any significant differences.
