WORK-FAMILY BALANCE OF FEMALE TRAVEL AGENCY WORKERS IN SRI LANKA: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WORK FROM HOME CONDITION IN THE NEW NORMAL

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.