Susan's Blog  
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Work-Life Champions Do Right Now?

March 9, 2010

Looking back 20 years

February was a most unusual month for me. From the traumatic – my husband had major surgery – to the tragic – we lost a beloved young daughter-in-law to cancer – to the merely irritating – both my desktop and my laptop crashed and I lost my wallet – I was beginning to feel a little Job-like.

And then as the month was winding down, I got this lovely letter from Ellen Galinsky saying I was being awarded the Conference Board Work-Life Media Award, putting me in the amazing and august company of people like Sue Shellenbarger, Judy Woodruff, Keith Hammonds, Carol Evans, etc.  

The award is for publishing the Work-Life Newsbrief, a digest of workplace news lo these many years. It will be presented at the Conference Board/Families and Work Institute conference in D.C. on March 25th.

Last January, Judi Casey of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network, interviewed me about that history. We took a look backward to get ready for that interview. This award has inspired me to take another look.

Every day of every month for the past 20 years, we gathered the day's most important news, printed it out and saved it in a box next to my desk. Then on the 9th day of every month, I would go through the articles – sometimes 200 or more – and grade them from one to five as to their importance for our readers, mostly HR or work-life or diversity people. On the 11th day of each month I would lay them out on our office floor, sorting by category – workforce, workplace, research, gender issues, etc. – and then I would choose the 25 or so most important stories. On the 12th day I would begin writing, summarizing each, and by the 20th the Newsbrief for the following month would be ready for proofing.

On one 11th day, just as I was getting ready to lay them out, my husband called to tell me to turn on the TV. A plane had crashed into a New York building. I never finished what I was doing. The October, 2001 issue never was written and everyone's subscription was extended by one month. Otherwise, we published each month until December of last year – a total of 235 issues, recording a kind of history of work-life.

Work-life really began well before the Newsbrief, in 1984, just about when our company first opened its doors. There was only one work-life (then work-family) issue then and that was childcare. The country was in shock that so many women were going to work, and people were just starting to wake up to what that meant: Mothers were working, and there was no one home to care for the kids. And if workplaces wanted mothers to focus on the work, they began to see they’d better do something about it. In those early days, about 100 companies opened day-care centers, and every time one opened, we wrote about it.

I’d say it was toward the late 1980s when companies started thinking about providing for their workers who had other family issues, but the focus was still mostly on dependent care. There was a consortium in 1989 in New York that included HBO, Colgate, Con Edison, Time, and Ernst & Young that started an emergency backup care service for employees. That year, IBM also started the Fund for Dependent Care Initiatives, which included elder care (IBM has always been a leader in this field, and still is.) Hallmark started a family resource center in 1989. They even began to talk about flexible hours that year, but that was rare.

Another issue just beginning to be important in those early days: health care. The average cost of health care in 1990 was $3,217 per employee. Companies were horrified. (Last year the average cost per employee was $9,660.00).

In 1989, we got the news that Merck was actually looking at employees’ workloads. They assigned teams of employees to analyze, dissect, and reorganize work and come up with solutions to give people a sense of control over their workloads and schedules. But the focus was still mostly on women.

It wasn’t until the mid-90s that we started writing about men and fathering. And by the late 90s, we were starting to see articles on alternative work arrangements, telecommuting – and even virtual offices – and news about expatriates and the global workplace.

So it went like this: We moved from a focus on women to include men, then to flexibility, then to new ways to work, and then to engagement. We first heard that word in 1993, but it took about ten years before we really started to see its importance.

So that was the path. Interestingly, the direction has always seemed to follow the economy. During boom times, the news is all about recruiting and retaining skilled workers. In recessions, like now, we hear about downsizing and what that does to engagement, the damage that layoffs do, how to keep survivors engaged and how to cut the costs of benefits. It’s certainly economically driven.

I'm grateful to have held on to this library of clippings, grateful to be in a position to look back at the last 20 years, and most grateful to have this acknowledgement before I'm gone.

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