Posts belonging to Category work/life balance

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was just released last week. Conversation about the book, however—in which she “cut[s] through the layers of ambiguity and bias surrounding the lives and choices of working women,” according to Amazon.com—has been heating up for a while.

Last month on The Leader Board, our own Andrew McIlvaine offered a snapshot of Lean In, in which Sandberg shares her views on what often impedes women from achieving leadership positions within their companies. For example:

We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. [The result is that] men still run the world.”

Sandberg’s perspective is certainly not shared by everyone, as McIlvaine pointed out, referencing a New York Times article in which business consultant Avivah Wittenberg-Cox opined that Sandberg “does what too many successful women before her have done: blaming other women for not trying hard enough.”

The Times also references Princeton professor, former State Department official and Sandberg’s “chief critic,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, noting her claim that Sandberg—and feminism, for that matter—has been guilty of holding women to unrealistic professional and personal standards.

So, it’s safe to say that Sandberg has her detractors. But she may also have a point, according to an online poll being conducted by The Economist.

The still-open survey (you can vote here if so inclined) asks readers if they think that women derail their own careers. The answer? Yes, at least according to 64 percent of the 9,564 voters who have participated in the poll since it opened on March 15.

Interesting. This is a thorny subject, and a complex argument, to be sure. But it seems Sandberg is far from alone in the views she puts forward in Lean In, and she has started a dialogue that may only be heating up. In fact, if you want to feel some of that heat, take a look at the six-plus pages of comments on The Economist’s poll page and watch the opinions fly.

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Amidst all the news about the budget impasse, sequesters and partisan gridlock, it’s easy to think of Congress as a bunch of do-nothings more concerned with scoring points than getting actual work done. In fact, a new survey by SHRM and the Congressional Management Foundation finds that the average member of Congress puts in 70 hours of work per week when Congress is in session, spending 35 percent of a typical week on legislative/policy work when Congress is in Washington, 32 percent on constituent services work when in their districts, and 17 to 18 percent on political/campaign work (i.e., fundraising) at all times. When Congress is on recess, members report an average 59-hour workweek.

“Members of Congress get very frustrated, really angry, when they hear reports about them going home on recess and not working,” says Bradford Fitch, president and CEO of  the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve Congressional operations through research and training. “They work long hours regardless of whether the House is in session.”

The survey was released today at SHRM’s 2013 Employment Law and Legislative Conference and was conducted jointly by SHRM and the CMF to, as Fitch says, “improve the effectiveness of Congress by shining a spotlight on Congress as a workplace.”

The report also showed that members rated “staying in touch with constituents” as the aspect of their job most critical to their effectiveness, with 95 percent rating it as very important. A majority of the members also gave their job high marks in the satisfaction it gave them and the important work they feel they are doing. For example, 89 percent listed feeling “satisfied” in response to the statement “Feeling that you are performing an important public service.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, work/life balance is not a part of their lives members are highly satisfied with: While 68 percent cited “Spending time with my family” as very important, only 16 percent were satisfied with this aspect. Nearly nine out of 10 feel they spend too little time with family and friends and too little time on other personal activities. In fact, the overwhelming majority of House members (85 percent) report that their spouses/families live in their home district, not with them in Washington, and regularly fly home to spend time with them on weekends.

“The fact that many keep their families at home has probably contributed to the lack of relationship-building among different members of Congress from different parties,” says Fitch. Interestingly, he says, some of the work/life benefits implemented in Congress in recent years (such as a daycare center operated by the Senate and a lactation center set up by Nancy Pelosi when she was House Speaker) have in some cases led to bipartisanship friendships among Congress members and their staffs, he says. “In many cases, they get a chance to interact and get to know one another outside the formal workplace,” he says.

Lisa Horn, coleader of SHRM’s Workplace Flexibility Initiative, says SHRM and the CMF plan to conduct training for members of Congress and their staffs in the next few months on best practices in work/life balance in areas such as flexible hours, telecommuting and job sharing.

The report, “Life in Congress: The Member Perspective,” is based on a survey conducted of 25 members of the House of Representatives and is augmented with focus groups, interviews and data collected by the CMF during its 35-year history of working with Congress.

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We often joke about how many companies have to actually do something before we can safely call it a trend. Three? Five? Ten?

In the realm of telework practices, we now have at least two companies that have announced a change in course in the past couple of weeks.

On the heels of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision a couple of weeks ago to nix telework, Best Buy announced earlier this week that it had cancelled its much-publicized Results Only Work Environment program. As most of you already know, the big-box retailer essentially gave birth to the approach in 2005. (HRE last revisited the ROWE concept in detail in 2010, with a story titled “Anytime, Anywhere.”)

Apparently, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly wasn’t a huge fan of the policy. In February, the Star Tribune quoted him as saying that the ROWE policy was “ ‘fundamentally flawed from a leadership standpoint’ in that it effectively assumed the only acceptable way to lead is by delegating.”

Erin Kelly, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the effectiveness of ROWE, told that same paper more recently that companies are unfairly scapegoating flexible-work programs for their subpar performances. “I’m concerned that these flexibility initiatives and telework initiatives are getting blamed for what may be other problems those organizations are facing in the broader market.”

(No secret both Yahoo! and Best Buy have had their share of troubles lately.)

So should we expect another shoe to drop on telework in the coming weeks? Your guess is as good as mine. But even were that not to happen, I suspect the debate over the pros and cons of telework is going to continue to have some legs.

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It’s understandable that many employers might view the 20-year-old Family and Medical Leave Act as a serious thorn in their sides, considering the administrative challenges and costs associated with the law. But research released this week by the Integrated Benefits Institute suggests companies might want to set such criticisms aside and look at the bigger picture.

The study, titled “Early Warnings: Using FMLA to Understand and Manage Disability Absence,” found that employees who had a continuous or intermittent FMLA leave in one year were also more likely to submit a short-term-disability claim the next year. Prior use of such leave also predicted slightly longer STD durations.

The findings show that “FMLA is the first indication something could be wrong,” said IBI President Tom Parry during a Forum session detailing the results. Roughly 520,000 employees at 160 employers participated in the research, which looked at data over five years.

Some other findings from the report:

• The chance for an STD claim was greater for employees with intermittent leaves than those with continuous leaves.
• A person taking time-off for their own health condition is more predictive of a physical short-term-disability claim than someone who takes time-off for a family member’s condition.
• STD durations are six to nine days longer when preceded by continuous FMLA claims.
• FMLA requests were predictive of a future STD claim even when leave is denied. In other words, says IBI Senior Research Associate Brian Gifford (a co-author of the study and presenter at the session), “Just because an employee doesn’t qualify for FMLA when they ask for it doesn’t mean they don’t have a serious medical condition.”
• Claimants who used intermittent FMLA for their own health conditions prior to an STD claim had a 33 percent greater likelihood of LTD use than employees with no FMLA leaves.

Claimants who used intermittent FMLA for their own health conditions prior to an STD claim had a 33 percent greater likelihood of LTD use than employees with no FMLA leaves.

In light of these findings, IBI researchers suggest that employers, at the time of an FMLA request, might want to connect employees to various resources, such as EAPs and disease-management programs, and engage them in job-accommodation and stay-at-work discussion.

The IBI research also debunked the notion that high intermittent users of FMLA would take off more Mondays or Fridays than low users. (Many often joke FMLA actually stands for the Friday-Monday Leave Act.) “We found no appreciable differences in the weekdays of intermittent leave incidences …” the researchers said.

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We’ve all read statistics about the high cost of stress on employers and employees alike and stories about specific steps companies are taking to do something about it. But have you ever considered letting new parents bring their babies to work as one of those ways?

As I learned earlier today during  a panel titled “What the Best Do Best: Benefit Practices at the Best Companies to Work For” at the Benefits Forum & Expo in Phoenix, Ariz., apparently The Ken Blanchard Cos. has. (The panel was moderated by Jennifer Benz, president of Benz Communications in San Francisco.)

For many years now, The Ken Blanchard Cos. of Escondido, Calif., has permitted parents to bring their babies to work during their first five months, pointed out Shirley Y. Bullard, chief administrative officer and vice president of human resource for the firm.

Undoubtedly, it’s not a program that’s going to work for every employer.  It’s only natural to wonder how this might play out in a much larger organization? (Blanchard employs roughly 300 people.)

But that said, The Ken Blanchard Cos.—which was co-founded in 1997 by Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager and a truck load of other best-selling titles—refers to the initiative on its website as “our most rewarding program.”

For parents, it’s “a great stress reliever,” Bullard notes. Plus, as the Blanchard website points out, the babies benefit too. “Blanchard babies become socialized and at ease with people.”

To participate, parents have to come up with “care plan” and must have access to a private office (arrangements are made for those who don’t have one).  Supervisors must also give their approval.

All in all, definitely a pretty bold idea. But apparently Blanchard isn’t alone when it comes to bringing babies to work.  In a report titled Babies at Work, an association named Parenting in the Workplace notes there are at least 170 companies with babies-at-work programs.

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I didn’t realize the United States was among the world’s standard-bearers when it comes to vacation ogres until I read this story in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Seems an attempt by the Spanish government to save tons of money lost in worker productivity by moving holidays to the beginnings and ends of weeks is something we did here long ago.

I did not know that.

I guess there must have been a time when U.S. workers were doing (a whole lot more than they do now) what Spaniards have been doing for years — “deploying paid vacation days as ‘puentes’ — literally bridges — to skip town for an extra-long weekend whenever public holidays fall in the middle three days of a week,” according to the story.

For one Spanish worker, Tatiana Restrepo, that meant 36 legally mandated days off (OK, that does it, we must really be ogres) turned into more than 50 days of rest and relaxation, weekends included. But now, trying to boost productivity in a sagging economy and join with other countries trying to contain Europe’s debt crisis, Spain’s unions and business associations have agreed to suppress three bridges by moving those holidays to Mondays.

“The two sides, which rarely agree on anything, say the bridges cost the Spanish economy hundreds of millions of euros in lost production, as they result in idle plants and half-empty offices,” the story says.

Needless to say, the plan is not going over well among workers. Restrepo, a hotel marketer, calls her bridges an “escape valve” between the long breaks in August to the winter holidays. She refers to the idea as “just horrible.”

Seems the whole country is caught up in a debate now over what an appropriate balance between work and play should be in a country that relies heavily on tourism and where one government agency even “subsidizes vacations for hundreds of thousands of elderly people during the winter low season to help keep tourism workers employed,” according to the story.

But wait. Broken down, we’re talking about moving three of Spain’s 14 public holidays to Mondays. And no one’s planning to touch Spain’s guaranteed minimum of 22 additional vacation days. Is this really so “horrible”? Or is it, as one Alberto Nadal, who works on labor issues for a big business association in Spain, tells the WSJ, ”a symbol of a change in mentality, the idea that we have to change the way we do things to belong to the euro zone”? Hmmm.

And are we really just talking about the euro zone or are we talking about an entire, stingy global economy?

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If you think you have it tough balancing the demands of child care, housekeeping and–maybe–night classes with a 9-to-5 office job, then try working in retail. A recently published study based on interviews with 463 employees at retail stores throughout New York City found that more than half learned their work schedules a week or less prior to the actual work week. Two in five said the number of hours they worked each week always or often varied, while one in five said they always or often had to be available for call-in shifts. The report, entitled “Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short,” notes that “guaranteed work hours are no longer the normal and just ‘getting on the schedule’ has become the reward for job performance.”

So just imagine dealing with such unpredictability while trying to attend classes and/or raise a family. It should be noted that this study was financed by the Retail Action Project, a pro-union organization, and conducted by the City University of New York’s Murphy Institute, which also appears to have a union affiliation. Yet the rise of “just-in-time” scheduling at many stores, further enabled by technology, has been noted elsewhere for the negative effect it can have on workers’ lives.  A team of researchers from the University of Chicago examined workforce data and surveyed workers and managers at a nationwide women’s apparel chain (with the company’s full cooperation).  The report, published in fall 2010, noted that just-in-time scheduling makes it difficult for workers to count on reliable earnings or plan for family responsibilities.

By comparison, the researchers discovered that the more hours employees at the apparel chain worked and the less their hours fluctuated, the longer they remained employed at the firm, regardless of age and job status. Stores with smaller staff size and more hours per employee have lower turnover and higher retention, the report found, while employee survey findings indicate that more-predictable work schedules led to less work/family conflict and lower stress levels for the workers. Sounds like a recipe for improved workforce health and greater productivity, no?

Of course, retail by its very nature is less predictable than other industries. Yet the researchers found that “overall store hours fluctuate much less than is commonly believed.” They suggest that managers can add some stability to employees’ work hours by using “predictable unpredictability”–keeping employees’ work hours the same for 80 percent of the week while telling them to expect that 20 percent of their hours may vary week to week.” Not a perfect solution, but one that may enable stores to remain profitable while giving employees a chance for some balance.

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I look on this as a sign of the changing times. Starting in January 2012, the Center for Work-Life Policy will be going by a new name: the Center for Talent Innovation. Its flagship project, the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, will also now be known as the Task Force for Talent Innovation. (Here’s the full name-change announcement.)

You might not think this is significant, but I do.

When I came on board as Human Resource Executive^®’s managing editor in 2000, work/life balance probably topped the buzzword list. Employers, it seemed, were just starting to take this conundrum seriously — parents, namely moms, whose full potential as productive and often top-talented employees was being compromised by the more uncompromising 40-plus-hour, office-bound workweeks.

Now, I take this switch to suggest we’ve graduated to a more inclusive concern about the talents of both genders. Working dads are just as compromised as working moms, I’m thinking the thinking goes.

The Center describes its reason for the name change as twofold: “to drive groundbreaking research that leverages talent across the divides of gender, generation, geography and culture; and to create a community of senior executives united by an understanding that full utilization of the global talent pool is at the heart of competitive success.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center, says her organization ”is deepening its scope and reach; these last two years, we have ‘gone global.’ ”

She also says the name changes “are driven by enormous growth in the span, scope and stature of the organization. Eight years ago,” she says, “the CWLP was a small, U.S.-based nonprofit centered on women’s retention and acceleration issues.

“Today, it’s a global think tank with representatives in San Francisco, London and Mumbai, and projects in Brazil, China, India and Japan. … Men are newly center-stage in our work. When we look at ‘the X Factor’ — 33-to-46-year-olds — or ‘Asians in America,’ we focus as much on men as women.”

I’m fine with heading in new directions. I’m fine with the notion that concern for women has graduated into a much larger concern for the full realization and utilization of talent overall. I get it that we’re all on a global stage now.

I just hope no one is lured into thinking that that old “conundrum” of the late 1900s and early 2000s — that women leave careers more than men out of concern for their children and that workplace fexibility still isn’t flexible enough for them to reach their full potential and still give their children the lives they deserve – has really been solved.

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Not the greatest news for women leadership in business, if you go by recent reports from Catalyst, the New York-based organization dedicated to expanding women’s opportunities in the global marketplace.

According to the 2011 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors, Executive Officers and Top Earners and prior Catalyst censuses, women in corporate America have made no significant gains in the last year and are not further along the corporate ladder than they were six years ago. Youch.

Here are some of the more discouraging statistics, based on responses from 497 U.S.-based companies: Women held 16.1 percent of board seats in 2011, compared to 15.7 percent in 2010. (If we were rounding these, which we usually do, they’d be the same.) In both 2010 and 2011, less than one-fifth of companies had 25 percent or more women directors, while about one-tenth had no women serving on their boards.

There’s more. In both years, women of color still held only 3 percent of corporate board seats. And the number of women holding executive-officer positions actually went down, from 14.4 percent in 2010 to 14.1 percent in 2011.

The salary picture is no brighter for these women executive officers, either: In 2010, women held only 7.6 percent of executive-officer top-earner positions, a percentage that actually went down a tenth of a point in 2011, to 7.5 percent. That leaves men accounting for 92.5 percent of top earners in the year we’re about to usher out the door. Lastly, in both years, nearly one-fifth had 25 percent or more women executive officers, yet more than one-fourth had no women executive officers at all.

How can this be? Hard to say. Ilene H. Lang, president and CEO of Catalyst, says that — considering another Catalyst study demonstrates sustained gender diversity in the boardroom correlates with better corporate performance — “continued obstacles to progress make no sense.”

I know in my 11 years here, we’ve written many stories suggesting top-talent, high-performing women are rethinking the corporate-ladder top-leadership track because of its detriment to their very delicate work/life balance. But I would have thought corporate America would be further along than this by now in helping women solve those challenges — through greater flexibility, leadership development, telecommuting and teleworking options, coaching and mentoring, you name it … just sayin.

At least, on a positive note, a more expanded look by OnlineSchools.com shows more advancement. According to this recently launched “Women at Work” infographic by the Foster City, Calif.-based digital resource for online education, some 78 million women are projected to enter the workforce by 2018, with 10 percent of women over 25 holding an education beyond a bachelor’s degree in 2009, compared to only 1.7 percent in 1960.

OK, well, there’s that. I just hope those 78 million are being supported better by then.

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Mercer’s just come out with a study showing that (no surprise) workers in the U.S. have the fewest statutory holiday entitlements (zero, in fact) while our Western European brethren have access to the most. (Statutory holiday is the amount of paid time off from work that an employer must provide to its employees by law.)

Although workers in the U.K. appear to have the most statutory holiday entitlements (28 days), in actuality they have among the lowest in Western Europe because employers are allowed to include the country’s 8 public holidays into that total, while workers in the rest of Europe are generally allowed to take those days off in addition to their statutory time off.

Austrian workers (those lucky ducks) have the potential for the most holiday time, with 25 days statutory entitlement plus 13 public holidays. With all that time off, no wonder they produce so many championship skiers. Workers in Malta are also well-compensated, from a time-off perspective: 24 statutory days and 14 public holidays.

Employees in the U.S., Canada, Philippines, China and Thailand generally have access to the fewest holiday entitlements. In Latin America, Colombia has the greatest number of public holidays; Mexico the least.

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