A methodology to evaluate employee work-life balance through focus groups and surveys

Surveys and focus groups are two tools that can be used in a complementary mode to understand employee satisfaction. This paper presents the details from a research effort that intends to use both these tools to systematically investigate issues pertaining to the work-life balance of employees. The first approach requires the team to conduct a focus group prior to the design and implementation of a survey, while the second approach employs a contrary approach (survey prior to the focus group). The first approach allows the team to analyze the qualitative opinions of employees prior to subsequently customizing the survey based on those opinions. The second method allows the team to better understand the correlations obtained from the survey. Understanding the trade-off between the two strategies vis-à-vis obtaining and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data will eventually help design better work-life benefits for specific job categories.