Blog, cont'd,  Susan Seitel, WFC Resources

May 29, 2008

News that will never make the Newsbrief

Because I write the Work-Life Newsbrief, I read about 1,000 news stories a week, searching for news that will make a difference for those who interact with workers in their organization. Every once in a while I come up with stories that are so weird that they beg to be shared. Yesterday brought two of those stories – both, in a way, about the relationship between employers and employees.

The first: The Associated Press reports that Nepal's lawmakers have fired their king. Yes, they have abolished the monarchy and declared the country a republic, ending 239 years of royal rule. King Gyanendra has been given 15 days to leave his palace. There was no immediate reaction from the palace.

The second, reported in Sify News, was about indignities suffered by employees in India, and the headline said Sabarimala employees would now be allowed to wear undergarments. Said the article, "The Kerala State Human Rights Commission has asked the Travancore Devaswom Board to allow male employees at Lord Ayyappa temple to wear underwear while counting currency notes and coins offered by devotees. Earlier, the staff at the hill shrine of Sabarimala had to strip themselves of all clothing except their dhotis before entering the counting chamber. The temple authorities enforced this practice after they found that money was being smuggled out, concealed in the undergarments. The employees of the temple, said the article, were silently suffering the insult because of the misdeeds of a few. Fortunately their union, the Travancore Devaswom Employees Front, came to their defense and won them a victory.

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May 27, 2008

The UK's "request flexibility law"

Coincidentally, barely 10 days after we wrote the blog below, this article from Personnel Today appeared in our mail box.

"Flexible working arrangements are proving hard to secure despite new laws - with seven in 10 employers admitting they rarely accept requests to work from home. The Labour Market Outlook survey of 735 UK employers, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) with accounting firm KPMG, found that 69% 'never or occasionally' grant homeworking wishes.

The figures will come as a blow to the government as it presses ahead with plans to extend the right to request flexible working. Currently, registered carers and parents of children up to the age of six have the legal right to ask for alternative working arrangements. From next April, this will be extended to those with children up to 16.

However, research has previously found that few people take up the existing right to request for fear it will damage their careers. Now it seems that many of those who do ask for flexible working will be turned down. Gerwyn Davies, policy adviser at the CIPD, said: "The slow increase in the take-up of homeworking defies the evidence. . . Of those employers offering homeworking, only 8% in the Labour Market Outlook survey believed homeworkers were less productive than their office-bound colleagues, with 30% saying they were more productive, and the remaining 62% saying there was no difference."

When you're right, you're right.

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May 23, 2008

Wachovia's three-year leave plan 

Several publications, including Workforce Management Online, have written about Wachovia Bank’s new three-year leave plan. The new initiative allows employees to take an unpaid leave of absence for up to three years to care for loved ones. The Workforce Management article begins with a little story about a 10-year employee whose 6-year-old was born with a congenital heart condition, and may need surgery. Says the mom, “I’m hoping I don’t need to be away for a long time," but she will take advantage of the leave plan, and says it’s "nice to know that the flexibility is there if I need it."

Once on extended leave, individuals are considered “inactive employees” and their benefits are “put on hold.”

The program provides “a formal way for employees to maintain a presence with the nation’s fourth-largest bank. They retain access to some of Wachovia’s Web-based tools, stay in contact with managers and receive employee communications materials. They are also given regular listings of job openings within the company.”

When and if an employee returns, their benefits do kick right in as though they had never been away. The program provides neither pay nor benefits, nor job protection. This employee will be able to make ends meet during her time off because she and her husband happen to have another business.

We sincerely hope this program meets the needs of both the banking corporation and several of its employees, even though it is hard to imagine many who can afford to take three years off. It does illustrate, however, how a little creativity and a cost-free initiative can go a long way in generating good PR and grateful workers.

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May 15, 2008

Much ado about nothing

Gordon Brown, the UK's Prime Minister, has added another teeny tiny baby step to the country's work-life efforts. Now mothers or fathers of children as old as 16 will have the right to request time off work to look after their children. Before, they just had the right to ask if their children were under six years old. British businesses are reflexively upset, claiming they'll have to struggle to cope with so many more workers changing their hours. They estimate the cost at £50 million.

Whatever could they be thinking? Or perhaps they just didn't read it right. The law says employees now have the right to ask (they didn't before?) No one is saying businesses have to say yes, and Prime Minister Brown has given them eight possible reasons why they can say no. For instance if they believe it would cost too much. Or if saying yes might lead to reduced performance. Or if it would perhaps lead to the worker not putting in enough hours. Or if they couldn't find someone to replace them.

What's more, parents have to tell their employer why they want to change their working hours. Someone should tell the Prime Minister that the operative question should be more in the area of how the work will get done rather than pitting one employees' sick child against another's.

And employers have 28 days to think it over. Could the child not be well by then – or – we won't even go there.

If the business says no, parents can then appeal the decision and if no agreement can be reached, it can go to an employment tribunal. But surely by that time the crisis will have passed, one way or another.

The Federation of Small Businesses says the sheer number of requests will create a headache for employers if the right is extended to parents of children up to 16. Right. Hundreds of employees will immediately create sick children to care for. 

Oh well. The change won't take effect until next April. That gives them a year to get over it.

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May 10, 2008

Some facts about the American family

The Council on Contemporary Families has prepared this list of interesting facts to show what's happening to the American family. We have, they observe, taken a "long leap" into an unanticipated world.

• In 1963, 14% of working women who bore a child returned to work by the baby's first birthday. Today, 83% of working moms return to work by baby's first birthday, and 55% of first-time moms return to work by the time their child is 6 months old.
• 70% of working mothers with new babies are working the same hours they worked before the child's birth.
• Ten million families of children under 14 pay for childcare.
• Fewer than 10% of daycare centers are accredited.
• Fewer than 1% of in-home day cares in the private sector are accredited.  
• In 2005, average childcare costs ranged from a low of $58 per child per week for a pre-school aged child in Alabama to $259 per week for infant care in Massachusetts.
• Parents in Massachusetts with an infant and a four-year-old will spend an average of $1,926 per month on childcare – more than their average monthly mortgage bill of $1,645.
• In 2004, approximately 2.5 million daycare workers in this nation made an average of just $8.65 an hour, or $346 a week.
• Three-fourths of all childcare workers work in a home care setting and make even less.

It is what it is. Most of it we're not going to change, nor would we want to. Research seems to indicate that our kids aren't any worse off than they were in my day, when we stayed home with them pretty much full time. But what is incredible, and what we can do something about, is that we are paying those to whom we trust our society's future less than $18,000 a year. In 2006, the median income per household member (including all working and non-working members above the age of 14) was $26,036.

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May 6, 2008

Working with far-flung employees

An article this morning in the Wall Street Journal is about the joys and frustrations of remote management, an experience more of us are having as our employees become more mobile. Not many managers come prepared to manage a virtual team, and they may have to get up to speed on their own, finding tips where they can. This article offers a few. Pack a bag and meet your team members on their own turf, says Chicago consultant John Challenger. That will help you establish the relationship and build trust. Communicate each person's role and objectives regularly, and establish agreed-upon ways to resolve conflicts and solve problems, says author and senior manager James Eicher. And as much as possible, use plain clear language.

Our newly revised e-course for managers, The Flexible Workplace: A Guide for Managers,  has one module devoted to building a virtual team. Here are a few of the suggestions you'll find there: Make sure the whole team is aware of each other’s contact details and has general information about everyone's work schedule. Be sure everyone has the technology and software they'll need to communicate schedules and share documents on a common platform, no matter where they are. Equip them with devices that allow them to reach others or be reached as easily as possible.

Hold regular meetings no less than twice each month, and include everyone – even remote and part-time workers – on a regular, programmed day and time. Assign an office “buddy” to each remote worker to be their point of contact, keep them informed about what’s going on at headquarters, and help them solve problems on the ground when they can’t get to the office. 

Make sure you keep everyone informed about birthdays or other important events and invent some way of celebrating. (The WSJ article suggests a personal visit if there's really something to celebrate). If your entire team is virtual, invite them to post a short biography with photographs and a little personal information on a special page on your company website.

And one final tip from the Journal: Be prepared for the difficulties that may arise. Just because you're sitting at your desk after a good night's sleep doesn't mean everyone is having the same experience, especially when a call crosses multiple time zones.

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May 2, 2008

A little enlightenment about the health care debate

I'm sure you too have been watching closely as the three candidates exchange views on how health care should be handled in the coming years. A Wall Street Journal article last week by David Wessel shed some welcome light on the differences, the similarities, and what has a chance of working. Read the article if you have a minute -- if not, here's a little of what it said.

Wessel covered a recent Washington forum where all three plans were analyzed, and one thing those experts pointed out was that Democrats have finally acknowledged that their plans will cost a lot. And as one of the speakers – and several analysts – have observed, the candidates "are going to get rid of the Bush tax cuts and do that as many times as necessary to pay for all this stuff."

If McCain has his way, the insurance market will essentially be deregulated, with people in one state being allowed to buy insurance in another. Low premiums will attract the healthy, and those with pre-existing conditions will pay sharply higher fees. The result, says one analyst, will be a rush to Medicare that Republicans will hate.

The Clinton-Obama proposals, he says, will force private insurers to compete against expanded government health insurance plans. The government having the most muscle, it will end up dictating prices to hospitals and doctors below those offered to private insurers. The rush to government-run health-care plans will be on.

All three acknowledge that cutting costs is imperative. But no one really has come up with a way to do that. (If you don't hear providers yelping about the plans, says one health consultant, it's not going to save money.)  But the news isn't all bad. The differences are sharp, but in some areas all three candidates are edging toward the middle. Maybe it's a first step toward really getting something done.

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