Impact of the digitalization of employment on the work-family balance: Russians’ subjective assessments

The research was supported by Russian Science Foundation grant 22-18-00614, project/22-18-00614/

Satisfaction concerning the time spent on parenthood is one of the determinants of parental well-being and reproductive behavior. The Concept of State Family Policy for the period up to 20251 reflects the idea that it is necessary and appropriate to create real conditions for combining family responsibilities with professional activities, including through the development of employment forms that promote a harmonious balance of parental and labor obligations.

The implementation of family policy to harmonize the family-work balance can contribute to the growth of fertility rates and positively affect the economic efficiency of labor relations. Satisfaction regarding the work-family balance increases labor satisfaction (Nilawati et al., 2019) and removes barriers to productivity growth (Belekhova, Ivanovskaya, 2022).

Digitalization has become a catalyst for spreading flexible employment formats (remote, hybrid, platform, self-employment), which, according to some estimates, makes it possible to combine employment with family responsibilities more successfully (Abramov, Bykov, 2021).

However, experts’ opinions on the digitalization impact on employment are ambiguous. On the one hand, the large-scale introduction of technologies opens up limitless opportunities for professional selfactualization, career and personal growth, improving well-being and quality of life (Ganju et al., 2016; Zelenkov, Lashkevich, 2020), job creation, etc.2. Digital technologies contribute to changing the working time structure (Pobiyanskaya et al., 2022), it becomes flexible and can be transformed depending on the desire of an employer and employee3. In the digital economy, there are opportunities to both reduce the duration of working time and extend it beyond the standard norm of working hours (Demina, Zayakina, 2020), conditions are created for poly-employment, which often allows not only obtaining additional financial income and stability, but also it helps to unlock employee’s professional potential, increases their stability and confidence in the future (Kuchenkova, 2019).

On the other hand, researchers agree that digitalization contributes to growing work intensity and working hours. According to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, about a third of the country’s population (35%) have a working day longer than 9 hours4. The increase in the working day length is due to a number of reasons, including underemployment at the main workplace, low wages, rising inflation and declining real incomes, and labor market instability, which encourages workers to seek additional employment opportunities in their free time from the main job (Demina, Zayakina, 2020; Kuchenkova, 2019). We are witnessing such a phenomenon as overemployment (working week is over the standard 40 hours), which carries negative risks and consequences for the work-family balance.

The problem of the work-life balance for working parents with preschool and school-age children is particularly relevant. There is a need for a deeper study of the benefits and risks of modern trends in employment for working parents in terms of planning the birth of children, the quantity and quality of time for their upbringing, and satisfaction with time spent on children. According to the researchers’ estimates (Kalabikhina, 2019), digitalization has a positive impact on demographic trends, at the same time, there are concerns that the reproductive attitudes of citizens may conflict with the lifestyle and consumer opportunities within the digital economy. In this regard, special attention is paid to creating the necessary conditions in society for giving birth and raising children, popularizing the values of parenthood and childhood, and harmonizing working hours to improve the workfamily balance (Shabunova, Leonidova, 2023).

At this stage, there is no deep understanding of how transformations in employment, in particular digital, flexible and hybrid forms of modern work organization, affect the work-family balance. In the Russian scientific literature, studies, aimed at examining the specifics of satisfaction with the time costs of parenthood among people of different types and modes of employment, are fragmentary. We aspire to fill the existing lacunas in this direction. Our hypothesis is based on the assumption that there is a relationship between the penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in employment and satisfaction with time spent on parenthood. The employment digitalization is reflected not only in an increase in the intensity of ICT use in work, but also in changes in work mode (flexible/hard), job format (remote/hybrid/stationary), and sectoral conditions of employment.

The object of the research is working-age women and men, with work experience, living in the Russian Federation and raising children under the age of 14.

The aim of the study is to examine the impact of employment digitalization on the work-child balance.

The key task is to assess the degree of satisfaction with time spent on parenthood depending on the following employment parameters: intensity of the ICT use in work; flexibility of work mode; workplace format (remote, hybrid, stationary); industry. In addition, we study the relationship of satisfaction concerning the time spent on parenthood with actual time spent on children and the age of children.

Subjective assessments of satisfaction regarding the time spent on parenting will reveal how successful working parents are at balancing work and time with children.