BALANCING WORK-LIFE TIME: A NEW MEASUREMENT OF CORPORATE WELFARE

In recent decades, corporate welfare has become a central focus in modern organizations.It refers to goods, services, and actions designed to foster individuals' well-being, work, and quality of life.Current socio-cultural shifts lead people, particularly younger individuals and parents, to prioritize work-life balance (i.e., a broad set of policies implemented to enable people to better balance personal and professional time).These policies could support women's participation in the labor market and foster gender equality.Consequently, companies must adapt to attract and retain employees also through welfare policies.It is, therefore, essential to monitor and assess the usage of welfare measures provided by the organization.In this context, the present study aims to offer an initial contribution to evaluating the factorial structure and reliability of a new measurement scale designed to capture perceptions of corporate welfare measures.This scale is agile and capable of assessing how the welfare offerings are perceived in terms of personalization, communication, effective monitoring, and sustainability.Based on a literature review and consultation with a group of experts, nine items were developed to be evaluated using a 5-point Likert scale.An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to assess the factorial structure, employing principal axis factoring as the extraction method.The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett's test of sphericity were applied to verify the suitability of the scale for EFA.Eigenvalues greater than 1 and the scree plot were examined to determine the number of factors, with factor loadings exceeding |.40| selected.The KMO and Bartlett's results indicated an adequate sample size.Only one eigenvalue was above 1 (5.69), explaining 63.13% of the total variance, and the scree plot confirmed the selection of a single factor.All factor loadings for the nine items exceeded |.40|.Additionally, the scale demonstrated excellent reliability, achieving a Cronbach's alpha of .92.This tool can be valuable for organizations by accurately measuring employees' perceptions of implemented welfare practices.The results are promising, and future research could confirm the factor structure, also considering the construct and criterion validity.Moreover, corporate welfare could be considered an important organizational resource that, according to the Job-Demands Resources theory, could prevent organizational distress and counterproductive work behaviors (e.g., burnout, exit and neglect behavior) and improve workers' well-being (e.g., work engagement) and performance.