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Well known in the literature as work life balance, the quality relationship between paid work and unpaid responsibilities is critical for success in today's competitive business world. The issue of work-life balance has been developed in response to demographic, economic and cultural changes. The purpose of this paper is to establish whether work-life balance initiatives and practices can be considered as strategic human resource management decisions that can translate into improved individual and organizational performance. The results of a number of studies reviewed in this paper show the outcomes and the benefits of implementing worklife balance practices not only for employees themselves, but also for their families, organizations and society. Despite the fact that work-life conflict has significant business costs associated with lack of engagement, absenteeism, turnover rates, low productivity and creativity or poor retention levels, there are some factors of organizational work-life culture that may compromise availability and use of these practices What are the challenges for research and practice in the future? In the end of the article we propose several suggestions (guidelines) in order to improve our understanding, choice, implementation and effectiveness of work-life practices.

Intensive mining and processing activities worldwide resulted in the generation of huge amounts of waste (tailings), generally characterized as toxic, radioactive, and/or hazardous. The exposure potential and, hence, the risk posed by such wastes is enhanced by a general lack of vegetation. Phytostabilization has proven to be efficient in reducing this risk. However, establishing vegetation on tailing dumps may be expensive due to the intensive use of amendments and chemical fertilizers. In this article, investigations on artificial inoculation of mine tailings with bacterial strains as a means to improve the development of vegetative covers and reduce application cost by eliminating chemical fertilization are presented and discussed. The development of plants and microbial communities from tailings, as well as the impact of inoculation on metal uptake in plants, were studied. Experiments were carried out in greenhouse using two types of mine tailings (phosphogypsum and sulphidic tailings) from the Romanian Black Sea coast. Indigenous herbaceous plants were cultivated on tailings with the addition of chemical fertilizers versus bacterial inoculation. After a 6-month experimental period, excellent plant growth, which is associated with a rich microbial community, was observed in all inoculated treatments, in contrast with poor plant growth and microbiota from the chemical fertilization treatments alone. Additionally, artificial inoculation improved plant resistance to heavy metals by reducing the uptake of some toxic metals. Once a rich microbial community is established, inoculation may be discontinued. Based on these results, efficient and cost-effective phytostabilization schemes can be proposed.

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