A Study on the Effect of the Use of Mobile Office Systems on Work-Life Balance

Human being does work to live out and they have their private life because human has sociality. Both work and life are important to live out but they are on the trade-off relationship. Because keeping the balance between work and life is too hard, it has been interested by academic and practical areas. Definition of Work-life balance here is that balance or imbalance arising between work and life has no negative impact on their daily life. Above all, Work-life balance is important because it is strongly related to identity. Recently, the introduction of the mobile office system has emerged as a way to solve the problem of work-life balance. It is based on the teleworking which was formerly generated. Teleworking is to perform the work in the employee's home or office space set aside without going into the workplace. Concept of the mobile office system here is not only using portable devices during work for convenience but also the system which is designed for the performance. Thanks to the diffusion of smart devices(smart phone, tablet pc), mobile office system has been spread. Although the importance of mobile office systems is emerging, there are few researches about it. Even they mostly focus on the standpoint of performance of mobile office system. However, Quality of life is as important as the performance. As a part of Quality of Life field, Work-life balance is the closest to employee's quality of life. So this study aims to examine the effect of the use of mobile office systems on work-life balance. To do so, we try to find factors effecting Work-life balance from existing studies and then set a research model. We set the use of mobile office systems as independent variables which are divided by use of function, use by location and use by situation. There are four dependent variables - sense of self command, sense of balance, solving work problem, solving life problem. We collected data from employees who are using mobile office systems on their job. 215 people were participated in the survey and we used multiple regression analysis to verify our research model. Results show that every independent variable has no impact on solving work problem while they have slight impact on the other dependent variables. Especially use on the business trip has significant effect on dependent variables. It means that there is a possibility use of mobile office system could control the employee's quality of life and system should be evolved until it covers even critical tasks. Also, support for mobile office system -education, encouragement-should be provided. By mobile office system is maturing, future research would be done.