The Role of Wearable Technology & Health Applications in Work Life Balance Among Malaysian Employees

Technology has been a significant contributor in achieving work life balance (WLB), such as by allowing flexible working arrangement (Glucksmann & Nolan 2007) (Azar, Khan, & Eerde, 2018). (Vanajan, Bultmann, & Henkens, 2020). Therefore, technology has been used to bring about significant positive impact to business and been adopted by millions of employees worldwide (Duxbury, Smart, & Rob, 2011). This has produced positive results for the agenda of WLB. Unfortunately, according to (Tay, 2019), most Malaysian workers are involved in long working hours culture and almost half of them were considered overweight or obese. Consequently, this also trigger stress among employees and causes employees to suffer from psychological distress that eventually impacts their organizational performance. Purpose-This study examines the role of wearable technologies such as smartwatch and health mobile applications in achieving WLB among Malaysian employees. Despite previous studies that had been done in the area of technology usage and work life balance (Adisa, Gbadamosi, & Osabutey, 2017) (Fujimoto, Ferdaos, Sekiguchi, & Sugianto, 2016) (S.Brown & Palvia, 2015), the role of wearable technologies and their health implications on achieving WLB has not received adequate attention especially in the context of monitoring employees’ mental and physical health. Negative impact to employees’ health has become an important factor since it can bring negative consequences such as reducing work engagement, increase in medical leave and can influence absenteeism and presentism at workplace (Chan, et al., 2020)