Susan's Blog  
(Occasional comments by Susan Seitel)

January 22, 2009

The guy gets it about work-life

I cannot remember ever feeling this way about a new administration. Maybe John F. Kennedy, but somehow even that was not this good, or maybe I was too young to really appreciate it. Partly it's simply that emotional reaction, swept up in the "Yes we can" drama that my friend, Margery Sher, who lives in D.C., captured so well in just a few sentences in her blog (you can read it at www.agingboomerchick.com).

But a big part of it is that the guy just gets it about work-life. His task force on working families is a first, and it sounds like Vice President Biden will be taking his job as head of that task force very seriously. As he says, "We'll look at everything from college affordability to after-school programs, the things that affect people's daily lives. I will be the guy honchoing that policy." The president has said he wants to expand education, restore labor standards, protect middle-class incomes and retirement security and improve work and family balance, and to that end they'll propose executive orders and develop new legislative and public policy initiatives.

Michelle Obama has picked Jocelyn Frye as her policy director. Frye is the general counsel at the National Partnership for Women and Families, and she heads its Workplace Fairness Program. And Obama's policy director is Karen Kornbluh, who has long been a champion of work-life balance. She made the case for flexibility in a wonderful article written for the Washington Monthly nearly four years ago called "The Joy of Flex." 

While to a certain extent, employees do have some power over whether they have a healthy work-life relationship, for the most part it must be a partnership between employers, employees and the government. The payoff for employers is – all the things we talk about all the time – engagement, commitment, productivity, loyalty, etc. etc. The result for employees is so obvious that it doesn't even have to be discussed. Stress is the new national disease, perhaps replacing obesity as the greatest health threat. And the stress that comes from having more on your plate than you can manage and still care for your family may be the worst and the most common. Shared commitment to preventing that stress is the answer and there's a dual payoff for doing so.

But the payoff we seldom discuss and seem to forget – more than any other developed country – has more to do with the future of our nation. Our children must be nurtured, disciplined and carefully cared for if they're going to be able to grow up and handle all the stuff we're leaving them with, and that takes time and commitment.

It's just so good to know there's someone in the White House who gets it.

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January 6, 2009

A good time to try an old idea

Back in 1990 – an astounding 19 years ago – a group of researchers began a project they thought might forever change the way work was done. It started in London with the work of Rhona and Robert Rapoport, consultants to the Ford Foundation worldwide.

The Rapoports, who had been studying gender equity since the ’60s, advised the Foundation that women in the workplace were still faring poorly, even in companies with the most generous programs and policies. While firms were “accommodating” home life issues, accommodation didn’t mean equity. And since women were the only workers taking advantage of the accommodation they were paying a heavy price: using leave and other programs was costing them regular promotions, a successful career, and their reputations as hard-working professionals. The cost to companies? Highly trained women, in whom they had invested time and money, were leaving. There was a growing awareness of the need for a culture change to achieve gender equity, but the question was how to move from talk to action. And employers were struggling to stay viable.

Together with researchers Deborah Kolb, Lotte Bailyn, Barbara Miller, James Levine, Ellen Galinsky and Dana Friedman, they began to study Xerox, Corning and Tandem Computers (a company that was later purchased by Compaq) challenging work teams to examine how to better meet the needs of both employers and employees in a way that balances work and family issues, and is equitable for both men and women.

One of the things they found was that even though on the surface, companies were saying the right things and offering programs that made it look like they were walking their talk, men didn't want to be seen as needing the accommodations and women feared (often with good reason) that taking advantage of them might derail their career.

The researchers worked with teams to challenge the status quo, holding roundtables, presenting findings, engaging employees and management in exchanging experiences and ideas about change. They encouraged people to share concerns they thought were theirs alone, and by doing so reframed work-family issues as relevant to all employees, and clearly connected to existing work practices. In some companies they divided the tasks in a job, making some appropriate for remote work. They looked at which tasks were duplicative, and which were essential.

They called it "work redesign," different than reengineering because it took people's home lives into consideration.

The bottom line: every group involved in an intervention experiment experienced gains in productivity, efficiency and morale.

At a time when morale may be low, teams may be overworked because of layoffs, engagement may be suffering and commitment lacking, wouldn't this be a great time to drag work redesign out of the closet?

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