After 20 years, a whole new set of work-life issues

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

This year WFC Resources – and arguably the entire work-life field – celebrates its 20th anniversary. Back in 1984, “work and family” was a brand new term, totally focused on childcare. There’ve been some dramatic changes in the past 20 years, changes in the field of work-life, and in the focus of the work-life professional.

Some things have not changed. Quality care for children of all ages is certainly no less important. In our rush to please Wall Street, it often looks as if American society has forgotten that without healthy, nurtured children there will be no future.

Eldercare and other caregiving programs are more important than ever, and will continue to grow in importance as our workforce ages.

And it is still vitally important to help employees meet their other personal and home life obligations in order that they may be fully present when they're at work.

So we're not suggesting that we work-life professionals change our focus. We are suggesting it be broadened to include the basic needs of all workers. Here are some thoughts about what some of those needs are, and where we believe we work-life professionals must put our attention.

Wages

Wages may be the most critical work-life issue. This spring, a study by Northeastern University researchers reported that while output increased 7.3% between 2002 and 2003, hourly compensation grew only 1.2%. In every other economic recovery since World War II, labor compensation increased at a greater rate than corporate returns. This time, while corporate profits have achieved healthy growth, the real hourly and weekly earnings of the average wage and salary worker increased by only 1.6% over the past two years, from $15.10 to $15.63. As the attention of financial executives focuses on human capital, more work-life professionals are being called to the table where business decisions are made. Let's not let them forget while we're there that people must earn a living wage.

Health care

Health care is a key work-life issue for several reasons. First, of course, there are the uninsured, a group that’s growing by leaps and bounds. And now the link between high health care costs and jobs is painfully clear. Economists are saying that the unaffordable cost of health insurance is one of the main reasons job growth hasn’t kept up with the rest of the recovery. It’s also one of the reasons, along with wages, that U.S. jobs are going to India and China (although that’s a more complicated issue). The latest Mercer study says providing health care benefits could cost employers as much as 13% more in 2005 on top of the huge increases over the past few years. Many firms will shift as much as 4% of that increase to employees. Work-life professionals had better join the lobby for government help on this one; employees and employers must be confident about affordable health care that includes prevention as well as catastrophe protection.

Workload, stress and the focus on productivity

Every study ever conducted on the matter has linked stress with higher health care costs! Employers are trying hard to reduce employee angst with “stress management” programs, but there is no “program” that can counterbalance 70-hour weeks and the stress of unmet expectations and obligations both at home and at work. Researchers are finding that the benefits of stress management programs are, at best, short lasting, said a recent article in the Science Times section of the New York Times (9-7-04). With the assistance of Blackberries, Palms and WiFi, work obligations have pushed “like a climbing vine” into almost every corner of private life. An article by American University professors Joan Williams and Ariane Hegewisch published last month (9/6/04) in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (and originally in the LA Times) points out that the U.S. “productivity advantage” is just another way of saying that we work more hours than workers in any other industrialized country except South Korea. Our lead in the world vanishes when productivity is measured per hour worked. One mission for work-life professionals should be to encourage their employers and clients to know what a normal day's work is and enforce it.

Demographics and the quandary of the older worker

Each month our collection of news features more and more articles about the older worker, and it's a confusing state of affairs. Some companies are still offering early retirement packages to get rid of them and others are knocking themselves out to keep them as long as possible. Here are three factors involved in the decision:

1. As workers get older, their benefit costs rise (again, health care raises its ugly head) decreasing their value.
2. It behooves companies to hold on to those expensive older workers and keep their experience. Whether or not we agree that there is a severe labor shortage ahead, there seems to be no disagreement about the approaching shortage of leadership skills and experienced workers, as the Gen Xers, fewer in number, move into leadership positions.
3. You can’t fire a worker just for being old, and fewer are going to be enticed by a retirement package unless it replaces the savings they lost in the recent recession. More will feel forced to stay in order to replenish their savings.

Put them all together and they add up to an older workforce, and once employees begin to age, they need some accommodation. While there may be some costs involved, next month’s Trend Report will show that not only are companies doing that, they're also demonstrating a firm belief that the cost is nothing compared with the payoff. Work-life professionals should be ready to offer advice and counsel on how to go about it.

Flexibility and control

We all know by now, 20 years after the birth of our field, that these are two of the most important words in a work-life professional's vocabulary. We must help employers see that if they want employees to take responsibility, they must treat them like responsible adults, not school children. That means collaborating and agreeing on goals, making results measurable, and giving employees flexibility and control over how the work is done. And it means redesigning jobs so that those tasks that demand to be done in the office can be separated out wherever possible, leaving a "job" that's appropriate for flexibility. Work-life professionals can help.
Once we thought that if we did a good job, companies would catch on to the importance of hiring whole people and allowing them to have a life, and we work-life professionals would put ourselves out of business. Twenty years later it looks as though that's not going to happen any time soon. While work-life may be integrated into other areas of the company, and may even be called by names like "talent manager" or "retention strategist," the tasks of the advocate are expanding rather than contracting, and the stakes are only getting higher.

Colleges and universities meet to discuss work-life

by Leslie DiPietro

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

Reflections on Culture Change in the Academy

“We’ve come a long way, Baby!” That was the sense I got at the CUWFA (College and University Work/Family Association) conference in Santa Barbara in March. There was more talk about strategic planning and a focus on what Linda Siebert Rapoport (University of Illinois, Chicago) termed “total institutional transformation” – broad scale shifts in culture, rather than piece by piece change efforts. Work/life practitioners at universities are getting much more skilled in finding ways to integrate and “brand” what they are doing to further the overall mission of the school.

I also had the sense that the upper echelons of administration at many schools are—(finally!) beginning to “get it.” Several work/life directors came with their bosses (or their boss’ boss!) in tow, and they seemed actively engaged in the conference.

Competition for human capital is the driver here, expressed most frequently in terms of faculty recruitment. Academia is only just beginning to understand the impact of the large numbers of faculty who are fast approaching retirement. The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) calculated that in 2003, 35% of all full-time faculty were 55 and over. Work/life directors and practitioners are finding ways to calculate the percentage of potential retirees – both staff and faculty – and broadcasting ways the work/life program can help.

However, I did not hear a lot about the need to target programs or policies to staff, particularly hourly workers. (There are notable exceptions, i.e. UC Berkeley and Ohio State). Although there is general support and some movement toward flexibility policies, I didn’t hear of many institutions that were actively making progress towards adopting new policies, let alone policies that had an appeal process. Likewise, I didn’t find much movement toward management training for flexibility – something that we all agree is necessary to bring about a real culture change. This may be a function of many “old school” HR administrations, where a majority of work/life programs are housed, but work/life programs need to figure out how to make change in this arena.

Childcare services have (finally!) come into the limelight, particularly in terms of infant and toddler care. Several of the “top tier” schools, such as MIT, Harvard, Michigan and UC Berkeley, have built, or are building, new centers, and it's just a matter of time until pressure from peer institutions brings more schools into the fold. Many are choosing to outsource the management of these centers, although some have formed creative partnerships between the work-life programs within the University and outside vendors. Most of the change in this area seems to be coming from the need to recruit top-level faculty by showing the “bricks and mortar” commitment, whereas students’ childcare needs are by and large being met through additional scholarship money. In this way, more student-parent families can be served than would be the case if they were allotted a small proportion of spaces in campus childcare centers.

If you had asked me a year ago whether domestic partner benefits were prevalent at universities and colleges, I would have said a resounding “yes” (with the exception of some Bible Belt schools.) Today, however, I am less optimistic, given the voters’ repudiation of Affirmative Action policies in states like Michigan, where the courts recently overturned domestic partnership benefits in public universities and colleges.

Also, there are clear indications that students are leaving school – both graduate and undergraduate – with staggering amounts of debt. This may be an area with which work-life programs (the ones that serve students, at any rate) may be able to help by sponsoring financial planning workshops for students, for example..

I asked some attendees if they thought there were areas where business could learn from colleges and universities, and Sam Hester, CUWFA President and work-life manager at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, had this to say: One of the strengths of the academy is its emphasis in providing and nurturing an environment that promotes creativity and freedom of though and expression. Some of the “great” companies have created a corporate culture that fosters creativity and open expression of ideas. I think that our long history of academic freedom might provide a model to business in creating this type of open environment.”

Linda Rapoport believes businesses could apply the tenure clock flexibility model (the practice of pausing the “time to tenure” clock for faculty who need time off due to birth, adoption or care for a family member with a serious illness) to careers in accounting firms, for example. And Jennie McAlpine, director of the Office of Work/Life at the University of Michigan, pointed out that some colleges have had childcare programs as part of their teacher training curriculum since the 1940’s, and that currently they set a high bar for quality in the communities where they are located.

CUWFA members saw a potential for partnership, agreeing that universities have a lot to offer in terms of research capabilities. Businesses would do well, they said, to tap their expertise.

David Thompson, a friend and former work-life director at both Purdue and Microsoft, once told me that it takes universities about seven times as long to make meaningful cultural changes as it does for private industry. (I don’t know what his source was, but I’m confident he has one!) This fact obviously reflects huge differences in academic culture versus business culture. Although it can be maddeningly hard to wait to see these changes adopted, if I learned one thing when I was in academia, it was that change will happen, and it will be “well-tested” in the process. So hopefully, the change will stick!

The Happy Workaholic: A role model for employers

by Stewart Friedman and Sharon Lobel

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

Business books are filled with common-sense admonitions insisting that leaders be role models. We have reason to question whether this common wisdom is truly wise.

Can a workaholic executive be an advocate for something that does not mirror her own personal lifestyle choices without appearing hypocritical? The executive we call the "Happy Workaholic" values work over other activities and invests her time and energy accordingly. Contrary to popular belief, "Happy Workaholics" can advocate for employees to realize both their company’s goals and what matters to them in their personal lives. They serve as role models, not for "balance" in the usual sense but, rather, for authenticity.

Authenticity means knowing what you truly care about and devoting your attention and activities to these ends. Research indicates that people find a sense of fulfillment from being true to themselves. Happy Workaholic executives know that when employees feel fulfilled in all aspects of their lives then they are better able to add value to their companies.

We conducted about 100 interviews in 25 organizations over a period of 4 years (1999-2002) to find out how Happy Workaholics, who willingly subjugate personal priorities for the sake of their careers, create and sustain cultures in their businesses that support employees’ fulfillment of work and personal life goals. How do they do it? Here’s a summary of what we found.

In one-to-one interactions with their people, Happy Workaholics respect diverse choices about work and personal life, talk to employees about what matters most, help employees take responsibility for their choices, and foster trust. They:

• Assume responsibility for helping employees act on their values and priorities
• Make it easy for employees to discuss personal life challenges when necessary
• Get to know people on a personal level
• Stay abreast of employees’ personal priorities and ask about them

Happy Workaholic executives also engender support for their employees through system-wide actions. They broadcast their advocacy for authenticity (making work and personal life choices that are aligned with one’s values and priorities); tell their own stories publicly; question basic assumptions about how, where, and when work gets done; actively encourage innovation in the design of work; focus on results, not process; and change performance management systems to support authenticity. Happy Workaholics:

• Sponsor discussions that address the impact of the organization’s culture on the expression of diverse core values with respect to work and personal life
• Incorporate support for both work and personal life in the organization’s mission statement, vision, operating principles and management practices
• Provide resources, financial and political, needed for successful change efforts
• Make sure everyone feels free to speak up about new ways of getting things done
• Recognize and reward employees for identifying inefficient work practices
• Ensure that workloads are manageable
• Hold employees accountable for results, not face time at the office

A new generation of senior executive men and women is on the rise. They represent greater diversity in the choices executives make about how they lead their lives at work, at home, in the community, and for themselves. Our bet is that the market for talent increasingly will favor organizations with the highest proportions of authentic executives. Which type dominates yours?

Sylvia Hewlett on helping women succeed

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

As women struggle with ever-expanding roles, more than 60% are taking some time off from work, says Sylvia Hewlett, author of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps. But while they're doing so for “pull factors” like time for children (45%) or for elder care (24%), they're also motivated by “push factors” such as unsatisfying work (29%) or feeling stalled in their careers (23%). And “women are much more likely to respond to the pull of family,” Hewlett concludes, “when they feel hemmed in by a glass ceiling.”

The loss of women, often just when they're becoming most valuable, is costly for employers. Turnover is expensive, and demand for talent is ramping up. A survey of 4,000 hiring managers conducted by the Corporate Executive Board found the quality of candidates has declined 10% since 2004, and a third of respondents say new hires are less than satisfactory.

Part of the problem is the proliferation of extreme jobs – those high-stakes, high-rewards positions that never let up. Those jobs reinforce and entrench the male-tailored model of the workplace, says Hewlett, that assumes “lockstep, full-time employment,” a model that fits an ever-shrinking proportion of an increasingly diverse workforce.

The first generation of the women’s revolution focused, she says, on providing a level playing field of access to opportunities, assuming that women would then fill the pipeline and begin to work their way up. But waiting for the pipeline to fill hasn’t worked, says Hewlett. Men still are 98% of the CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and 92% of top earners at those companies. The problem, she argues, is not the women. It’s the lockstep linear career model. What we need, says Hewlett, is a “second generation” model of workplace success, with policies that provide alternative pathways for women with nonlinear work lives.

In her new book, she describes a core package of six options that can make a company a second-generational leader, and she offers case studies of companies that are leading the way.

1. Establish a Rich Menu of Flexible Work Arrangements

Work-life options such as reduced hours, flextime, job-sharing, and telecommuting are needed more than ever in a world where “work weeks ratchet up from fifty-five to seventy hours and spheres of responsibility become global.” In second-generation companies, Hewlett says, flexible work arrangements are seen not as an accommodation to women’s family lives, but as a key talent-retention and recruiting strategy. She gives us several examples.

Accounting firm Ernst & Young estimates 82% of its employees use some type of flexibility. Two-thirds say they view that flexibility as a reason for staying at or joining the firm. It's available to everyone, not just women or parents of young children, and the options include flextime, reduced-hour schedules, compressed workweeks, job sharing, telecommuting, and short-term seasonal arrangements. Increased retention has saved the firm at least $10 million annually.

British telecommunications provider BT Group has quantified the results of its "Freedom to Work" initiative. With 75% of all BT employees working flexibly (10% working entirely from home) turnover has dropped to 3%, the average number of sick days per year has fallen to three (compared to the U.K average of eleven), and 99% of employees who take maternity leaves return to work (compared to the U.K. average of 47%). Productivity for home-based workers has risen by as much as 30% per year since 1998. The company saves £5 million a year in turnover costs, £70 million a year in office space costs, and £10 million a year in fuel and other transportation costs. And the reduced travel lowers carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 54,000 tons per year.

Global financial services giant Citigroup set out to create a consistent program focused on retaining and fully realizing talent. It includes a multilingual Website to provide information to Citigroup’s three hundred thousand workers in 100 countries around the world. It offers sample work plans, role models, and success stories. In its first six months the site received 1.3 million hits and in the first year, more than 4,900 employees applied to work flexibly; just 9% of requests were declined. Employees don’t have to provide a reason why they want flexibility, but they do have to provide a work plan for how they will meet their current deliverables on a flexible schedule. Citigroup also provides extensive training globally to help managers become supportive of flexible work and understand its link to business objectives.

2. Create Arc-of-Career Flexibility

Far less common, but just as needed, is the recognition that talented women may need to ramp down and then ramp up again after a stint outside of the paid workforce. At second-generation companies, Hewlett says, “jobs are being unbundled and unpacked, clients are being shared, and work teams are being deployed in ways that allow responsibilities to be handed off seamlessly.”

Booz Allen Hamilton’s Adjunct program, for instance, “unbundles” consulting jobs into “bite-size” chunks that can be done by telecommuters or employees working short stints in the office. Work teams are more collaborative, and full-time and part-time employees are able to hand off assignments to one another. Adjunct workers, the company reports, are contributing equally to profit.

Lehman Brothers’ "Encore" program is designed to recruit women who have left jobs in the financial sector. It targets women who have been out of the workforce for three years or less and who had at least five years of experience before they left. Lehman invites such women (about half former employees and the other half referrals) to events featuring financial sector updates, self-assessment activities, and networking opportunities. After the first Encore event, 98% of the seventy-one attendees expressed an interest in learning more about working at Lehman; twenty eventually joined the firm.

Goldman Sachs has developed a program called "New Directions" to recruit women seeking to return to work full time. The Goldman team invites candidates to a nearly day-long event that features senior managers (both male and female), distinguished speakers, and a panel of Goldman Sachs female executives sharing their on-ramping success stories. Sixty-five women attended the first New Directions event in New York in May 2006. In the following six months, 155 additional women expressed an interest in the program, and the company plans to expand the events to other locations worldwide.

3. Re-imagine Work-Life

Traditional work-life programs have tended to focus on employees who are married with young children. That model only fits half of all women; the rest are single or childless. But even those who don’t have small children have or will have eldercare and extended family responsibilities. Second-generation policies honor and support work-life challenges that go beyond biological children and nuclear families.

In 2003 Citigroup added a new Eldercare Management Services program to the resource and referral services it was already. It offers the company's U.S. employees up to six hours of consultation per year with a trained eldercare specialist who can make on-site visits, assess care options, provide check-in services, assist with insurance and billing issues, and arrange respite care. Citigroup employees are using the program to assist with caring for employees’ elderly parents, parents-in-law, grandparents, and spouses or partners.

Time Warner has expanded the company’s benefits beyond direct dependents. Now the company’s Employee Assistance Program and company scholarship program are available to “reliant individuals” the employee supports, even if they aren’t directly related.

4. Help Women Claim and Sustain Ambition

Many talented women downsize their expectations for themselves, says Hewlett, and an employer can’t promote a woman “if she herself is not enormously invested in this endeavor.” She recommends that companies foster women’s networks and other leadership initiatives to boost women’s confidence and connect them to their peers. Some examples:

Johnson & Johnson’s Women’s Leadership Initiative provides management and leadership training, networking and mentoring activities, and conferences and events around the world.

Time Warner developed a program called "Breakthrough Leadership" in partnership with the Simmons School of Management in Boston. It’s a symposium that includes leadership skills development, peer mentoring, exposure to role models, and interaction with senior leaders at the company.

General Electric’s Women’s Network has 130 chapters worldwide and over forty thousand members. It hosts an annual “Leading & Learning” event for GE women to interact with customers and build business relationships. The Women’s Network is also involved with the company’s recruitment, leadership development, and succession planning initiatives.

5. Harness Altruism

Women derive a different “value proposition” from work than men do, says Hewlett. Her surveys, conducted with the help of the 34 companies on her “Hidden Brain Drain Task Force,” found that while money is important to women, it’s not nearly as important as it is to men. Women tend to rank it below such values as forming relationships with high-quality colleagues, believing in the products and services their companies provide, and giving back to their communities (both the corporate community and the wider society).

Companies are responding. Goldman Sachs offers a variety of opportunities for community service that include "Community TeamWorks," an annual volunteering day with company-provided transportation, meals, and t-shirts; a mentoring program for inner-city children; opportunities to serve on non-profit boards; and matching gifts to charities that employees support. Goldman Sachs sees community involvement as both a leadership development tool and a means to recruit and retain key talent.

Cisco Systems loans employees to nonprofits for a year at a time through its Leadership Fellows Program. Program participants remain Cisco employees and receive full salary and benefits. Their fellowship work is included in performance reviews, and each fellowship is expected to accomplish something tangible at the nonprofit, to “leave something behind.”

American Express offers a paid sabbatical program of up to six months for employees who work for a nonprofit of their choice. Returning employees are then celebrated in the company’s internal communications. Amex has loaned more than 190 employees to nonprofits through this program.

6. Reduce Stigma and Stereotypes

Hewlett’s focus groups found that women frequently quit their jobs rather than take advantage of flexible work arrangements that were on the books, but that, as one executive put it, “label you as some kind of loser.” One way to reduce stigma is to position flexibility as a means to achieve strategic objectives. For instance, Lehman Brothers’ Virtual Workplace technology for working outside of the office is a key component of its disaster preparedness strategy.

Cisco combats stereotyping with "Microinequities" workshops to help people recognize and eliminate subtle behaviors and messages that devalue other people. Respectful behaviors are reinforced with a quarterly "Courageous Observer" award for an employee who has stood up to or pointed out a microinequity. “You want to catch people doing it right,” explains senior VP George O’Meara. “That’s what the award is about.”

Ernst & Young programs include the Women’s Leadership Conference at the national level, Professional Women’s Networks at the local level, the "Career Watch" mentoring program, and "People Point," a Web-based rating tool through which employees can provide anonymous feedback to managers – ratings that become part of the performance evaluation process.

Flexible options become credible, says Hewlett, only when they are modeled from the top. Niall FitzGerald, chairman of Reuters and former chairman of Unilever, telecommutes on Fridays and bans early-morning meetings so he can have breakfast with his five-year-old daughter. He told Hewlett, “Flaunting my flexible work arrangement is one of the most important things I can do. It starts to change the culture.”

The Evolution of Work-Life

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

Over the past year our Center has been engaged in a number of interesting research studies and initiatives. We began a Global Workforce Roundtable for organizations faced with the challenge of managing a workforce spread across many countries and cultures. We have undertaken interesting studies that look at how to organizations can engage and be responsive to the needs of older and low-income workers. We have completed two books. One is a comprehensive look at the issue of aging, co-edited by our research director Dr. Jackie James. The other is a work that ties together career management and work-life integration, illustrating how critical self-assessment and a clear sense identity are to navigating contemporary careers. I was fortunate to co-author this book with Professor Douglas T. Hall of Boston University, one of the country’s preeminent scholars on career development.

One of the most interesting initiatives at the Center over the past year was a project we termed the Work-Life Evolution Study, which was funded through the generosity of our Center’s members. We are all aware that the work/life field has evolved in many new directions over the past 15 years. These new directions encompass virtually every aspect of an employee’s working life – recruitment, retention, development, rewards, and evolving corporate cultures. The comprehensive nature of the field is illustrated by the fact that work-life initiatives can be housed and led from virtually any HR function whether talent management, total rewards, diversity, organization development, or employee health and wellness. The fact that work-life has so many different homes speaks to the tremendous breadth of the field.

What we were attempting to do with the Evolution Study was to review how the field had grown and changed in recent years with an eye toward making some predictions about the future (never an easy undertaking.) We used a variety of approaches to gather our data and develop our findings including reviewing literature, interviewing experts, and reviewing transcripts of interviews with leaders in the field who in recent years had received the Conference Board’s Work-Life Legacy Award. Perhaps the most innovative approach was to gather 25 thought leaders at Boston College last summer for a future search conference, exploring through conversation where they thought the field was heading in the future.

The study is not yet complete but let me share with you two sets of tentative findings that you might find interesting. First, what are the trends that leaders in the field (mainly from the world of practice but also researchers) feel will have the greatest impact on corporate work-life efforts? The experts felt they were:

The increasing importance of diversity that has driven the need for creating more inclusive workplaces.

Changing workforce demographics, most notably the aging of the workforce. This has raised important challenges for older workers, but perhaps more importantly for workers from different generations in terms of how they interact and work with one another.

Increased workload and stress levels among employees that may well be contributing to rapidly increasing healthcare costs (another important trend.) This workload issue seems in many ways to be aggravated by technological tools that are supposed to be helping us be more productive, yet seem to be having a deleterious effect.

The impact of globalization which creates enormous challenges for working across cultures, countries in a virtual fashion
None of these trends is probably too surprising. We have certainly discussed these issues many times at our Center’s Work & Family Roundtable. More surprising however is the call to action. What do our experts feel we need to do about this?

The focus of the work-life professional has mainly been on HR policies and programs. But when given a list of potential ways that we could have a positive impact on the challenges we face as employers, developing and implementing HR policies scored a distant 3rd in terms of what we should be doing. What were the top vote getters?

By far the highest priority was influencing organizational leaders. This means working in a consultative manner with leaders at al levels of the organization to ensure effective work-life practices are ingrained in the fabric of the organization.

The second most important priority is helping individuals make and negotiate good career choices. This means providing individual employees with the education, consulting, and support to make good choices (for them and their employer) and proactively manage their own career and work-life options.

Addressing these challenges will require new skills for tomorrow’s work-life practitioner. It will involve us more directly in employee development, leadership development, and cultural change initiatives as well as with the work of the organization. I will be presenting further on the results of this study at the AWLP conference next month and our Center will publish a report on the Work-Life Evolution Study in the spring of 2007.

I wish you all a happy New Year! It looks like an exciting year ahead for all of us.

Suggestions for Work/life Professionals

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

This tip comes to us from Arlene Johnson, vice president of WFD Consulting. It caught our eye when it was first published in the January issue of Work/Life Today, and Arlene and Sharon O'Malley have given us permission to republish it.

Work/life professionals might consider making four New Year’s resolutions for 2006:

1. Spend less energy on making the “business case” for your efforts and more on clarifying how work/life meets the needs of the people in your organization. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you shouldn’t make it clear how work/life connects with organizational priorities and goals. We certainly need to let everyone know about the value that work/life efforts bring to the business. But the “business case” has morphed into both a defense of work/life programs and a way to talk people into adopting them. Neither is the most effective way to make work/life a part of an organization’s culture.

Take a step back. Instead of pushing programs on your organization because you can produce numbers that prove they would enhance productivity or cut turnover, listen to employees and managers to learn what kind of work/life help they need. The real business value of a work/life perspective is its ability to address people issues that matter to the business. Spend 2006 starting conversations with the question: “What is important to you?”

2.View managers as a primary customer of work/life services, not as a barrier to their adoption. We all know that if managers don’t support flexibility, there will be no flexibility. What we overlook is a primary reason why they often don’t support it: They don’t feel supported themselves. Managers need flexibility, too. They need support in managing the personal demands on their time with the incredible pressure of supervising people of all skill levels, meeting quotas and keeping production steady.

You know the best source of referrals for your company’s products and services is a happy customer. Likewise, managers who experience support for their own work/life effectiveness are more likely to see its value and to be champions of your cause.

3. Make work load your organization’s No. 1 work/life issue. Let managers know that one-third of all employees feel overworked, and that overwork causes stress, burnout and turnover. Then do something about it. Help managers identify and rid their staffs of low-value work so employees can spend less time on unimportant tasks.

Give managers tools for building team resilience or bring in trainers who can help teams and individuals cope with heavy work loads and burn out. Elevate work load issues to the top of your work/life agenda for 2006 so senior leaders in your organization will address them and find ways to solve them.

4. Develop one unlikely partnership. It has become common for work/life advocates to work with human resource and diversity experts toward shared goals. In 2006, make a point of teaming up with people elsewhere in your organization: line management, compensation, training or marketing, for example. The more you expose others to the problem-solving power of work/life benefits, the broader your organization’s understanding and acceptance of those benefits will become.

In return, you might learn something about how to market your programs internally or how to engage business managers in employing flex-time or telework. Partnerships increase the impact of work/life advocates. Any time you can integrate work/life concepts into the work of your organization, you advance your goal of making employees and the business more effective.

Reflections on Work/Life

by New York management consultant Barbara Adolf

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

I was fortunate this summer to spend some time reviewing old business (and personal) files from the past 20 years. What a trip down memory lane and what an opportunity to reflect on the path work/life has taken and where it is today!

It was fascinating to see how far the field of work/life (formerly employer supported child care, then work and family, then variations on work/life) has come. Twenty, even 10 years ago if you said you were in work and family, people would look at you quizzically or even suspiciously. Today everyone seems to know what we do. We have been more than legitimized – we are mainstream! I remember when we didn’t know where we "fit" in the organizational structure. We now have a domain, and like the other branches of human resources, e.g., compensation, benefits, learning and development, work/life directly affects and is affected by every other.

It occurred to me that what work/life has brought to corporate America is a new awareness, a unique orientation, even a new morality about the workplace. It is built on a belief that while work is important to each individual and to the society as a whole, family is the bedrock of our lives and should come first – not just in words but in the actions of organizations. As work/life professionals, we made these concepts real – actually bringing child care programs and elder care services to the workplace and developing unique work processes that take into account employees’ personal responsibilities. The movement of organizations toward "valuing people" may have originated with our efforts; at the very least our work has bolstered this principle.

We have come a long way. When I worked at large consulting firms – (I established the first work and family consulting practice at such a firm in 1986) – I was considered an "advocate" – something I tried desperately to hide. In truth, work and family professionals were out to change the world. We brought personal and family needs out of the closet. Ultimately we turned things around, making corporations vie for public visibility as organizations that "care" about employees as individuals. (Witness Working Mother’s Top 100 List). We have been major change agents, pushing organizations to examine and dramatically change the dominant "corporate culture" of the last 20 years.

My own career has been an interesting journey. I discovered I have a deep interest in helping women and minorities gain their fair share of society’s rewards, perhaps not a great departure from my work/life roots. In my practice today, the work/life "agenda" colors everything I do. For the last seven years a major thrust of mine has been developing and implementing strategies to advance women and minorities in the workplace, not the least of which is the design and management of group mentoring programs. The beauty of these programs is that they help those who might otherwise be marginalized overcome the challenges of isolation in the corporate world by helping one another. I attribute my persistence in this work largely to my work/life background. The constant pressure from organizations to justify work/life’s value taught me the importance of demonstrating success scientifically. I have been fortunate to have much of my work scrutinized in this way, providing strong evidence of its value to organizations as well as to individuals.

At this point in my career, my focus is on professional development of employees in the service of corporate goals, for example, retention of high potential employees. An important element in all my projects is work/life – its principles and issues. In short, I am convinced that no program, structure or process within an organization can succeed without integration of employees’ work/life needs. My journey has taken me to management consulting and organizational development. I gained the SPHR (Senior Professional in Human Resources) credential this year – another step that enabled me to see how essential work/life is to all aspects of HR.