SAILING THROUGH TEACHERS' WORK-LIFE EXPERIENCES VIA ALTERNATIVE WORK ARRANGEMENT: A REALISTIC VIEW

Even prior the onset of a global pandemic, balancing work and life domains has been a central issue to most employees particularly from the educational sector and has persistently sparked debates in most research agendas regarding work arrangements. Indeed, the CoVid19 outbreak has driven government agencies, one of which, is the Department of Education to switch to an alternative work arrangement, a working condition that favors the mitigation of the virus, but puts most teachers in an abrupt and grand adjustment period. In view of the current situation, the researchers were prompted to examine the teachers’ perception and attitude toward the new normal at work in the pursuit of improving work-productivity and work-life balance in the new working arrangement. This research employed phenomenological approach under qualitative research design with limited in-person observation and in-depth interviews as the main data gathering instruments. Teachers’ describing alternative work arrangement as contributory to the development of work-life balance despite previous claims on the difficulty of establishing boundaries between work and their personal lives served as one of the major findings of this study. On the contrary, this study was only limited to the responses generated from 12 teachers of two newly-established academic institutions in the Division of Batangas City, hence, findings may not be generalized to the whole teaching population. Modification on the alternative work arrangement and teleworking policies to assist teachers in keeping a balance between work and home domain serves as one of the recommendations of this study. Providing a realistic and authentic perspective of the present working situation in an alternative work arrangement and allowing the respondents to contribute to the improvement of the new working scheme has set out the study from all the other previous researches