Work-Family Benefits As an Incentive to Better Well-Being Conditions of Employees. Empirical Evidence from an Industrial Sector in Italy.

The topic of “Work-Family benefits” has received attention in different streams of literature such as psychological and behavioral studies, Human Resource Management studies, pension studies, social research, focused on the change in work practices and the related effect on work-life balance.

Among the different type of corporate benefits provided to employees as a form of additional welfare, the “Work-Family benefits” are those who interest most in our research, as a consequence of a primary attention given to work-family balance in an era where flexibility of work arrangements and attention to well-being is crucial.

Previous findings evidenced how the organizational provision of employees´ benefits is a sign of companies´ competitiveness, attraction and retention of employees, a means to improve organizational performance or to manage conflicts between work and family.

In this wide literature however, the investigation of the well-being construct seems to represent a frontier of research in understanding the inner relation between employee engagement, organizational performance and individual well-being. Specifically the aspect of Subjective Well Being (SWB) associated to the personal and family life of employees and organizational provision of benefits remains completely uncovered.

Our paper contributes with an empirical analysis to evidence the link between the use of employees` benefits and SWB. We based our analysis on a sample of 5074 employees of an Italian industrial sector, who answered a specific questionnaire designed to investigate three main issues: the diversity and accessibility of corporate welfare, the satisfaction of employees and the possible relations with subjective well-being. In order to answer to the questions mentioned above, we applied two statistical methods: a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and a set of logistic models. With respect to the logistic models, we estimated the impact of the effective access to the different corporate welfare benefits on the subjective well-being.