Work-Family Initiatives:
a Historical Perspective (1990-1995)
by
Susan Seitel, President, Work & Family Connection, Inc., Minneapolis,
MN
speech to clients of The Partnership Group 1996
reviewed
2001
University
of Minnesota Children Youth and Family Consortium. Permission is granted
to create and distribute copies of this document for noncommercial purposes
provided that the author and CYFC receive acknowledgment and this notice
is included.
From
the treetops, you can only see the high spots, so today, looking backward,
I'll try to hit those high spots and answer these questions:
-
What were the most important events in regard to work-family initiatives
during the years from 1990 to 1995? and
-
What did we learn that informed our actions?
How
does one judge what's important? Here are the criteria I used.
Did
this event make a statement to other companies, get their attention?
Did it set us on a new track or point us in a new direction? Or was
an initiative a win/win-good for shareholders as well as employees?
Almost
everything I'm going to say today about any history or any initiative
can be found someplace in this book (Work ~ Family, A Retrospective:
Research and Results from 1990 to 1995). So since our hosts have very
thoughtfully bought you this book as a gift, you won't have to take
such copious notes.
Let
me begin by telling you a little about how to use it. The table of contents
will guide you to the chapters; there are 28 of them and each is about
an initiative that companies have been putting in place over the past
five years. All the chapters are self-explanatory except maybe the last,
which we called "Work & Family" because that began with
a W and we wanted it to be last in the book. It's what's left over -
multiple initiatives and multiple results, general studies. Each chapter
has a little history of how the initiative has been implemented over
the past five years, some Newsbrief summaries that illustrate the history,
and in the back of most chapters is a section called "A summary
of findings." (For some initiatives there just weren't enough findings
to warrant a summary.) Some of those findings will be repeats of what
has appeared in the chapter, some will be new - findings that never
appeared in the Newsbrief but that we found through our research.
In
the back of the book are two indexes. The first is simply a straightforward
index of organizations. The second is an index of our own invention.
What we've done is make a list of the results - the drivers, the consequences,
the potential - and then we've looked up for you every page in every
chapter where those results are referred to.
When
we talk about important events, we really must back up a little and
start with 1987 and Workforce 2000, the Hudson Institute study; the
wakeup call I believe helped put work and family on the map by predicting
that companies would have to be much more productive and that workers
with the right skills would be very hard to find. Once companies found
the right workers they'd have to give them more responsibility; employees
in Europe were already doing the work that managers were doing here.
And once they upgraded their skills, they'd have to come up with a way
to hold on to them. So that set the stage for work and family in the
early 90s. Be more productive, find and train the right workers, and
hold on to them was the message we had going in and it was a big year
for work and family.
By
1990 I had already been a work and family consultant for six years,
and as we started the Newsbrief I had an eye out for creative programs.
John Hancock's Kids to Go fit the description. They rented a bus, arranged
with an agency to pick up the kids on holidays and took them someplace
wonderful. It was early in the game to be so creative. They addressed
a problem no else had done much about, demonstrated that it doesn't
have to take a lot of money to help parents resolve problems (total
expenditure was $2,000 for the year) and used what was already out there,
showing us how to partner with an already- existing community resource.
And like the best programs still do, it gave birth to all kinds of knockoff
programs around the country.
Partnerships
were important in 1990; many companies were showing they could solve
problems together that they couldn't make a dent in alone. And partnership
schools made news that year in Minnesota and Florida. Companies promised
school districts space, equipment, guaranteed class size, and schools
promised in return, teachers, books, curriculum, and voile, they had
a little private primary school for their employees' kids. It told us
to look for partners that have a need and can fill a need.
1990
was the year the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power started the
nation's first publicized corporate lactation program, and said they
would start an adoption assistance program. Think of it. This was a
company with 80% men and these were women's issues. So the statement
this company made was that families were everyone's business.
Hoffman-La
Roche made a statement that year about childcare centers; they had opened
their center 13 years before, and in 1990 they announced a $1 million
expansion of that center, telling us childcare might be expensive, but
it can really work. And IBM said they would build five childcare centers
for a total of $3 million, serving 530 children of employees. Edward
Zigler, Yale child development expert, commended them but gave the country
a prophetic warning. Don't, he said, count on companies to solve the
childcare problem. When times are bad, it will be the childcare center
that will close, not an assembly plant.
It
was in '90 that StrideRite, striding way out in front of the rest of
the country, announced it would open the nation's first employer-supported
intergenerational center. CEO Arnold Hiatt said childcare had been working
for them; his two centers was saving him money by helping him hold on
to high-caliber people and avoid having to train replacements. And the
statement he made to corporations was watch out for eldercare, it's
coming. Eldercare benefits were still rare in '90. Only 5% of Fortune
500 companies were providing them, but more than half said they would
in the future. The term "Daughter Track" was coined in 1990;
a Newsweek cover story pointed out that the average woman would spend
17 years caring for children, 18 years helping aged parents. And the
strain would show up in the workplace.
A trend
started in Washington DC in 1990, when firms with long names and billable
hours discovered the joys of having employees there when you needed
them, even if their childcare failed. Akin, Gump, Straus, Hauer &
Feld joined Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in offering on-site emergency
care, and didn't just point us in a new direction, they started an epidemic
on the East Coast. It spread to Boston with Goodwin, Procter & Hoar;
by the end of the year at least seven East Coast law firms were offering
emergency childcare centers for healthy children.
EAPs
in 1990 were still pretty much doing what they'd been designed to do-address
alcohol and drug problems-and they were doing that very well indeed;
McDonnell Douglas landmark study came out that year with a statement
that everyone listened to; Their EAP, they said, saved the company nearly
$4 million in one year, about $9 for every dollar spent. And some were
starting to say there was a payoff to be found in expanding EAPs' role.
Prophetic indeed!
Flexible
benefits had already gained a foothold in 1990; more than 80% of companies
offering them reported cost savings. But PepsiCo stretched our imagination
with a cafeteria plan that went beyond what anyone had envisioned. They
started each employee out with somewhere between $1,500 and $3,500 each
year to spend, and offered them options that included everything from
discount surgery to mail-order drugs, from legal advice to pre- natal
care.
Families
and Work Institute, which was responsible for an amazing amount of enlightenment
during those five years, discovered in 1990 that turnover cost a lot
more than parental leave, and flexible work hours were one way to keep
employees from turning over. NCNB (later to become NationsBank) starting
letting new mothers phase back to work gradually, and began a program
called SelectTime; they said it helped them attract and keep women who
had family responsibilities.
In
August of 90 we reported on another Families and Work Institute study
- this one for Working Woman magazine - that found mothers who worked
for flexible bosses were seven times less likely to want to quit, and
less stressed both at home and work. And when a company had four or
more family friendly policies, no one reported wanting to quit and women
were twice as likely to make up for lost time by taking work home. Very
important to a company that was trying to build a skilled workforce.
And we were beginning to hear from employees that this was what they
wanted. Another study that year found flexible work schedules ranked
higher in their ability to satisfy workers than even on-site childcare.
Up
until 1990 wellness was pretty much a new-age fad. But it grew up that
year. With more companies self-insured than ever before it was turning
out to be a serious and conservative approach to cutting health care
costs. Prenatal health care saved Oster/Sunbeam in Milwaukee about $15,000
per pregnancy. A pretty good return on a total cost of $20,000 a year.
1990
was the year the courts ruled men deserved equal parental leave, a statement
that seemed to matter little at the time; only the most enlightened
companies were allowing it even for women. A survey that year showed
three-fourths of companies had no parental leave policy and 62% said
they wouldn't unless someone made them. Paid parental leave was so rare
it earned headlines for Sacramento County, which took a step few employers
take even today. In 1990 they began to provide four weeks of paid parental
leave to all of their eligible 9,000 employees.
As
for using paid leave to care for sick children, forget about it. People
all across the country were just lying and saying they were sick. Except
in Minnesota where they passed a law that said if you had 21 employees
you had to let people use their sick leave to care for sick kids. Pretty
good for 1990.
That
was the year resource and referral services became big news - in fact
I would go out on a limb and say they were, for most companies, the
only work-family news. Big vendors like TPG and some others I won't
name were teaching companies that like teaching someone to fish, providing
information was more far reaching and less costly than providing care.
It was also a perk unions could agree on, and we were beginning to see
some payoff from the first companies to provide the service; Deloitte
& Touche, for instance, said their R&R was responsible for reducing
turnover.
Telecommuting
was a new baby that year, and it was interesting to go back and see
what people said about it. The government's General Services Administration
was heard to announce that it was only for "self starters"
who were handicapped, had children, or couldn't easily leave home.
And
finally, believe it or not it was in 1990 that we first heard futurists
make the prediction that the employment contract as we had known it
was on its way out.
In
1991 Edward Zigler's prediction about childcare centers came true; Nyloncraft,
which had been sponsoring one of the nation's oldest and most successful
childcare centers closed the center's doors, sending a statement to
the nation about costs and about change; they said too few of their
own employees were now using it to make the cost worthwhile. But if
companies wanted a center they were going to do it anyway, and '91 was
the year of showplace centers; articles about them poured into the Newsbrief
office, sometimes as many as 20 in a month - so many that we stopped
including them in the Newsbrief and started a special publication called
Childcare Centers Open or announced this month. State-of-the-art centers,
vying with each other to find the best PR hook, be the most innovative
and highest quality. BE&K, a mostly-male construction company, found
the hook when they brought childcare to construction sites in mobile
units; they made two statements; one was that men have childcare problems
too, and the other was that it was very important to them, and very
difficult in this business, to recruit women.
Eldercare
really began to come in to its own in '91 - not as an answer to the
equity issue (like "we know you don't have children, but you do
have parents don't you,") but rather because in 1991 the impact
was really beginning to be felt. Again the Families and Work Institute,
this time with the Older Women's League, studied women who cared for
older adults and discovered it caused drastic changes at work. While
most companies offered the usual eldercare R&R, spending accounts,
seminars and peer support groups, Northern States Power, a big public
utility - also with 80% men - hooked up with a geriatric care management
company and actually provided and paid for individual case management.
EAPs
got another push in 1991. Coors announced that by expanding their EAP's
power they had cut their mental health care costs in half, saving millions.
And the handwriting was on the wall; companies began to speak about
EAPs in earnest, connecting them with marital problems, family violence.
It was just the beginning of a long list to come.
Total
Quality really had a foothold by 1991. It was a gift to work and family,
emphasizing empowerment, responsibility, freedom, trust, all very compatible
with a family-supportive, employee supportive workplace.
The
new kid on the block in 1991 was Diversity, and for one brief moment
we didn't know what would turn out to be the tail and what would be
the dog. But in many Fortune 500 companies it took over; where companies
had Work-Family Managers, they had Vice Presidents of Diversity; the
Diversity department became the umbrella. But like TQM it fit perfectly
with work-family. Diversity was committed to helping each employee reach
his or her full potential no matter what their ethnic or cultural background;
work family - ditto, no matter what their personal circumstances. And
diversity very much wanted gender equity and to move women up through
the ranks; in 1991, another reason why they were so good together; work-family
looked like the way up. But women were hitting their heads on an invisible
ceiling, said the Bush administration in 1991. And although they weren't
willing to do much about it, at least they coined the term Glass Ceiling.
In
1991 observers began to notice "serious gaps" in the workforce.
The predictions made by Workforce 2000 were showing up particularly
in small towns; good workers were extremely hard to find even for companies
that were beginning to lay off those they didn't want, and many companies
started to see that investing dollars in skillbuilding was critical.
This was the year we began to see partnerships between companies and
colleges - some of those colleges, near death, found new life because
of those partnerships. But it wasn't easy. In order to squeeze in education
while continuing to do the job, innovative efforts were called for and
that was the first year we saw a lot of them; on-site classes, classes
by TV. And as education dollars were being poured into each worker,
turnover was suddenly more expensive than ever. Another boost for work-family
efforts.
The
new employee contract began to take shape. Companies started to give
workers more choices and more power. Flexible benefits mushroomed and
flexible scheduling began to get a foothold. The question, "How
will I know she's working?" echoed across the land, as managers
had visions of empty offices with people doing heaven knows what from
heaven knows where, calling in occasionally. The practice of counting
heads for budgetary purposes was found to be the enemy of alternative
scheduling options; if managers had to count every head, they could
- and did - just say no to job sharing or part-time work.
Enter
the communications companies, with high-tech equipment sales at stake
and a strong commitment from the top to prove their worth, and the value
of working from anywhere but the office. Their experiments in telecommuting
began in '91 to demonstrate almost unbelievable productivity gains;
we used to wonder what the heck these telecommuters had been doing in
the office. There was surprisingly little negative impact and a surprising
number of different kinds of jobs that could be done from home or wherever.
It
was in 1991, with the help of a landmark Northwestern National Life
study, we saw the relationship between stress and illness, and the impact
on work. Seven of every 10 workers suffered stress-related illness,
said that study, and for a self-insured company that was bad news indeed,
news that sent many companies down the wellness path.
In
1991 we began to hear about a new practice that allowed employees the
right to take all their paid leave days for whatever purpose they wanted,
without having to present their need, make the case and secure permission.
Beth Israel Hospital was one of the first to experiment; they called
it a Paid Leave Bank. They'd been trying it for a while and said it
saved money, cut absenteeism, raised morale, and it fit with a concept
that was beginning to creep into the workplace, the idea that if we
quit treating workers like children who need to keep asking permission,
and start treating them like responsible adults, they'll act like responsible
adults.
Freestanding
sick child care centers were having a tough time of it in 91, and it
seemed like every other week we'd hear about a Sniffles and Sneezes
going belly up somewhere in the country. Sick children were a terrible
problem, and a tough one to solve. Honeywell, First Bank Systems and
several others reported that year that subsidizing sick care was a good
investment; they saved $3 for every $1 they spent.
And
finally, it was in 1991 that we first heard the term, "work-life,"
as companies tried hard to let employees know that it wasn't just people
with children they were concerned about, but wanted to support all employees
in having a life.
In
1992 we began to see more creativity in helping working parents handle
things that were taking their mind off the job - like "Latchmatch"
for instance, a program that matched homebound seniors with latchkey
children.
We
saw how complicated childcare centers could be in 1992 through the eyes
of Schering Plough. When the center isn't full you can open it up to
the community, but then what do you do when your employees get pregnant,
kick out the neighborhood kids? That's what Schering Plough tried to
do - literally asked all non-employees' kids to leave, and ended up
in a very unpleasant 5-month battle which they lost visibly, teaching
us all a good lesson. And we lost another old time center that year;
Little Mavericks, American Savings Bank's pride and joy since 1983.
Downsizing and restructuring, they said, had taken a lot of users away.
A new
definition of diversity was born this year; it was about managing people
"who weren't like you, and didn't necessarily aspire to be like
you," said Roosevelt Thomas, an oft quoted diversity consultant;
and the definition now included white males, a view that one professor
called a "George Bush plot" to do away with progress by women
and minorities.
Telecommuting
got a couple of big boosts in 92; a pilot telecommuting project of 44
Sacramento County employees was studied for six months by the University
of San Francisco and the results were extremely positive. Supervisors
reported "significant increases" in commitment to job and
customers, productivity improved, retention was up. Employees seemed
healthier. The major barriers, they found, were not related to cost
or technology, but were managerial.
GMAC
Mortgage announced in '92 that their work-family programs had improved
profitability and saved nearly $300,000. Recruiting was more successful,
morale improved, they avoided litigation and let customers know they
were responsive to employees. And of course they did what we all knew
they could do, reduced tardiness, absenteeism and turnover.
And
it was in 92 that Doug Phillips at Merck told us he'd figured the cost
of turnover adding everything in, and found for an exempt employee it
was 150% of a year's salary; 75% for a non-exempt worker.
In
'92 flexibility was just beginning to look like a strategy rather than
an act of kindness - reduced workweeks, job shares, unpaid leaves were
helping many companies avert layoffs and recruit, promote and hold on
to women. Automatic Data Processing was the first to report its studies
showed a strong link between retaining employees and retaining clients.
And Fed Ex made news in 92 for two important reasons: first by saying
only vice presidents and above could deny employees permission to take
up to 90 days unpaid leave; this is before the FMLA remember, and again
by defining "family members" for purposes of bereavement as
whoever the employee said they were. It made national news.
And
finally in 92 telecommuting got still another boost. Bell Atlantic,
having successfully completed two pilot telecommuting programs, said
they would allow 16,000 managers the option of working from home. Clients,
they found, didn't know and couldn't tell if the telecommuter was in
the office or at home. Morale, job satisfaction and quality of personal
and family life improved for participants, and productivity was up dramatically.
Telecommuters said they started to work earlier in the day, of course
spent less time tied up in traffic and were more available to give undivided
attention to customers. In one case, a medical leave of absence was
reduced from five weeks to four days because the employee could work
from home.
In
1993 on-site childcare centers were found by the University of Michigan
to improve employee performance. And it was in '93 that the Johnson
& Johnson study put us all a step forward in making the business
case for work and family. They reported 71% of those who used their
family-supportive policies and programs were actually absent less than
nonusers, and said they were "very important" in their decision
to stay with the company. And workers who used the company's childcare
centers worried less and stayed more focused on work.
NationsBank
took a look at their childcare subsidy program in 1993; it had been
in place since 1990, and turnover among participants was more than a
third lower than among non-participants in similar jobs, and nearly
90% of program users said they were more productive because they worried
less about their childcare.
Every
article about EAPs that crossed our desk that year suggested they were
perfectly positioned to take on a new responsibility; workplace and
domestic violence, gambling and other addictions, clinical depression,
even managing work and family, until finally EAP expert Bradley Googins
sounded an alarm. Employee assistance companies, he said, trying to
be relevant, may find themselves with no core technology and suffering
from sheer overload. The better the EAP is, the heavier the load will
be, until they wind up overextended, exhausted and burned out, trying
to juggle too many roles with too few resources.
In
1993 a new study called, "Adult Literacy in America" put the
fear of God into the entire country. Education Secretary Riley called
for companies to partner with schools, saying people didn't even know
what they didn't know.
Also
in '93 the National Council of Jewish Women interviewed, face-to-face,
nearly 2,000 women soon after childbirth for the Women's Bureau at the
Department of Labor. They, found those who were allowed more flexible
work hours worked longer into their pregnancies, returned to work earlier,
were more satisfied with their jobs and more likely to stay with them.
And
we got a new study about flexibility in 1993. Helene Curtis announced
their flex-time program had increased the number of new mothers returning
to work from 69% in 1990 to 93%. Savings in reduced turnover in one
year: $360,000. Xerox made a strong statement with a very unusual step
in 1993; they said that during an employee's Xerox career, they could
request up to $10,000 in extra, taxable income to help pay for family
and personal expenses. Employees, regardless of income, would be allowed
to draw the additional money to help with a family member's college
tuition, buy a home or pay for eldercare costs. The cost if all the
company's 55,000 U.S. employees took advantage of it? $550 million.
Other companies weren't exactly tripping over each other to follow suit.
And
finally, after countless votes and vetoes, the Family and Medical Leave
Act arrived in 1993, guaranteeing job security for those few who could
afford to take the 12 weeks it allowed, or who had no choice in the
matter. Most companies found so few employees took advantage of it that
the major expense was the fees charged by lawyers to interpret the law,
and figure out how to integrate it with company policies. And a Cornell
study suggested that as employees took leave instead of leaving, the
law would save companies $244 million rather than cost them money.
In
1994 a new and very frightening Families and Work Institute study found
only 9% out of 226 family daycare homes provided quality daycare. A
high number of non-regulated homes were in violation of the law, and
more than a third of homes were of such poor quality that they were
harmful to a child's healthy growth; more than half were rated as only
adequate or custodial, meaning they might not harm, but neither would
they enhance, a child's development.
We
got more bottom line evidence for childcare centers that year. Sandra
Burud helped Union Bank, Monterey, CA, add up it's costs and benefits
in their center's first year; Savings: as much as $232,000 in reduced
turnover, shorter maternity leaves and ease of recruiting.
And
flexibility was getting rave reviews. The Royal Bank of Canada announced
it had been a resounding success for all stakeholders; an American Management
Association survey reported it improved work quality and morale and
cut absenteeism by as much as 50%. StrideRite added 30 hours to their
workweek and only 3% to their costs when they put a customer service
unit on flexible schedules. Clerical workers said they could to do their
tasks faster in evening hours due to fewer interruptions and greater
access to office machinery.
And
workers wanted it desperately, said The National Study of the Changing
Workforce, another Families and Work Institute effort. Employees were
fighting burn-out, felt used up, had no time for family and desperately
needed more control over their lives. Those that had flexibility, said
the study, were more satisfied, less burned out, took more initiative
at work, felt greater loyalty to employers and planned to remain with
them longer than other workers.
Flex
was starting to look like a strategy for some employers. In Union County,
NJ the compressed workweek not only made employees happy but allowed
them to offer more hours of customer service, and - they had their union's
support. The Bechtel Corporation found compressing their week reduced
absenteeism and cut down on commute time by 10%; complying with the
clean air act was beginning to be important to states around the country
by then. Both Bechtel and Dow Chemical were very creative and started
their workweek at noon on Fridays to comply with the Fair Labor Standards
Act overtime provision.
Job
sharing was tried on the production line by the Pella Corporation. It
reduced absenteeism in the job share test group by 81%. Overtime was
reduced, and they didn't need to overstaff to compensate for absent
production workers, who found their own replacements.
Telecommuting
took an unexpected, strategic turn in 94 when IBM built a building and
had it be open 24 hours with people coming and going at all times, "renting"
desks-"hoteling," it was called, and the concept: The Virtual
Office. Very much a strategy for improving customer service and cutting
real estate costs, even though most companies still thought of telecommuting
as a family friendly benefit, an act of kindness rather than a strategy.
And it brought up some dilemmas. Should we have to buy all of the equipment?
companies asked. Some of the equipment? Should only computer owners
be permitted to apply? People who did it loved it, for the most part,
and it was a win/win, said article after article; "You are the
work," said one serene telecommuter from her desk in front of the
fire; "you re focused on results, not what you wear or who you
go to lunch with."
EAPs
now had another assignment. They were dealing with "survivor syndrome"
and Tipper Gore was telling us depression cost employers $24 billion
a year, a depressing $180 per worker whether the worker was depressed
or not, and more than $3,000 for every depressed worker. "If you
think putting in mental health coverage will reduce all that dollar
for dollar, you re dead wrong," argued the president of the National
Association of Manufacturers; "We support mental health coverage
but somebody's got to pay for it."
Diversity
and gender equity were, if not married, certainly going steady that
year. Yet another FWI study, conducted for the Glass Ceiling Commission,
found women feared using their company's flexible arrangements, and
with good reason. Users were looked down on and thought of as less serious
about their jobs, fell behind in raises, were penalized in bonuses,
and in many cases never caught up. And the job of many a diversity department
was to figure out how to alter the company culture so as to make it
okay for women to use the arrangements that had been put in to keep
them.
And
diversity programs were being stretched in a couple of different directions.
White men were beginning to be more vocal about their complaints. If
you don't have the right pigment or the right plumbing, said one guy
in a Business Week article, you're out of luck. In '94 there were now
150 employers, both private and public, recognizing the rights of unmarried
couples.
Cost
cutting was still the way to get the nation's attention. Arnold &
Porter reported their back up care center had saved them $800,000 in
billable hours the year before, and a 10-year study found Steelcase's
wellness program cut the company's medical costs in half.
And
it was in 1994 that we started noticing companies looking for ways not
just to retain valued workers but wanting to win their hearts and souls.
The question people were asking: If we can't promise you a job for life,
and that had certainly gone the way of the typewriter, "how can
we get your commitment - that discretionary effort" In May that
year we wrote a Trend Report about a study that Stephen Zimney did with
the Cambridge. They found the way to get it was to align with employees
on what they felt was important and there was no doubt that families
were high on that list.
And
finally that year a very frightening study by the Carnegie Institute
got, as usual, headlines, but no action. It reported the nation s youngest
children were being jeopardized by our lack of commitment, and called
for, among other things, parental leaves of four to six months. But
that was a joke. Even the 12 weeks mandated by the FMLA was very tough
to get. The Act was being successfully ignored by thousands of employers
nationwide.
In
1995 gay and lesbian groups were feeling stronger. Domestic partners
was a volatile issue with strong feelings on both sides, but no one
had a harder time with it than Coors, which accomplished the near impossible
by earning the violent anger of both the Christian right, and gay and
lesbian groups at the same time. And this was the year the battle about
affirmative action began to really heat up with blacks and whites on
both sides of the issue.
The
amount of work kept growing as the number of workers declined. So few
people had time to be sick that any debate about sick leave was like
rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And unwritten rules kept
men from taking parental or family leave. One article called parental
leave a "cruel joke" on men. And more companies were adopting
unallocated paid leave banks; CoreStates Financial said it right out
loud; their employees wanted control of their own days off, and the
company wanted them to quit lying about being sick.
This
was the year that even skeptics became believers about telecommuting.
Unions cautiously put a foot on the bandwagon and began to create conditions
under which they would accept it; But if one of their concerns was about
home workers turning night into day and working around the clock, it
was with good reason. It became clear this year that if we were going
to quit work when the work was done, the work day would never end. The
8 to 5 office hours, along with the other boundary lines between work
and home life, were fast disappearing. New boundaries would have to
be created, and the American worker would have to create them.
And
companies were solving the "who pays for what" dilemma about
telecommuting in a variety of ways. Lexis-Nexis gave everyone a furnishing
allowance of $500, a telephone, laptop, combination printer/copier/fax
machine, two phone lines and the option of buying a Herman Miller fully
adjustable office chair for $50. They estimated the initial investment
to set people up was about $10,000 per employee.
In
1995 we began to see more and more examples of employees being treated
like adults, and allowed to work when and how they worked best. For
some, that time was very early in the morning. The dawn patrol was the
name the media gave to those people who chose to come in at dawn and
be home to meet the school bus. Studies showed they were actually more
productive than those who came at the normal time.
And
'95 was the year resource and referral services changed from giving
out phone numbers and information to providing a much more comprehensive
service, a service that brushed up against EAPs, with some calling it
consulting, some calling it counseling people with "normal"
problems. The Partnership Group and the Marriott Corporation did something
very important; they put together a creative initiative especially designed
for low income workers, giving them extra help. The Marriott figured
it gave them a 400% return on investment in this normally high turnover
field.
"A
labor shortage is brewing," predicted one futurist late in the
year, "and an angry workforce will take advantage of it."
Workers were leaving a little company in Arlington, MN to go to the
Twin Cities, and the company, called Technical Services for Electronics
couldn't afford to pay any more. So they began to recruit people by
offering flexibility; it became a company-wide strategy, and it worked.
Not only did they hang on to good people, they improved customer service
and raised productivity.
In
1995 the Trend Report announced preliminary results of work that said
a lot about flexibility, and I believe altered the field. For three
years, consultants, funded by the Ford Foundation, had been helping
three companies, Xerox, Corning, Inc. and Tandem Computers, ask this
question: "What if we could address business needs, gender equity
issues and work-family conflicts all at the same time by working in
a different way, a way that included the human factor?" For most
of the nation's companies, even the more enlightened, flexibility was
offered just to the needy among their workers to accommodate them. What
they found was that to do so created an underclass of needy workers.
Not only was it not necessarily effective, it was maybe even counterproductive.
The results of this work would give new energy to the effort to include
all workers as whole people with full lives, and it meant reexamining
the way the work was done, a step many had omitted in their efforts
to trim the workforce.
1995
was a good year for studies. One by Professors Steven Grover and Karen
Crooker, said employers who offer family-supportive programs get more
commitment from their workers. If workers felt their employer cared
about them, they would be more willing to stay late if needed, work
an extra day or be more flexible. But they also concluded "Even
the most family-friendly workplace policies are at best useless, or
worse, counter-productive, if the work climate does not support them."
And
late in the year we got a study that was very much worth waiting for.
DuPont announced survey data so compelling that one executive said it
moved him from "nominal support" of work-life programs to
"strongly believing they're a business imperative." A study
of 18,000 workers found those who used the company's work-life programs
were the most committed, 45% more likely than non-users to strongly
agree they would "go the extra mile" to assure DuPont's success.
Before
I quit this history lesson, let me just say that during these five years,
labor organizations weren't just sitting around cooling their heels.
The Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers, the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
Union, Food and Commercial Workers union, the International Association
of Machinists, etc. etc., were all working hard to bring to the table
programs and services to help them handle home life issues, secure reasonable
maternity and family leave, retirement benefits, etc. It was a collective
bargaining agreement between the CWA, the IBEW and U.S. West that had
them establish their resource and referral program. But most labor groups
were deeply concerned about telecommuting and other flexible scheduling
options, afraid they would mean a return to working around the clock,
less overtime pay, abuse of the worker. Despite those concerns, many
labor groups listened to members who said such initiatives would help
them balance work and family, and cooperated in the push for more flexibility.
Some even did some prodding, bringing flex options to the bargaining
table and agreeing to measurable pilot projects.
So
that's it, five years in a nutshell. I've tried to pick out what felt
like important events to me; I know I've probably left out events you
would have included, and probably included things you don't think are
important. But it is, I think, an exercise worth doing. We have come
a long way in just five years, and learned a lot. And by indexing the
book the way we did we saw something else we think is important. We
were able to get a sense of which initiatives seemed to be doing the
best job in which area, or at least which were being used the most for
that purpose. Companies found they could reduce absenteeism with paid
time off banks, lactation programs, flexible scheduling, EAPs, eldercare
assistance. They improved customer satisfaction with flexible scheduling.
They cut costs with EAPs, sick child care, telecommuting. They improved
employee attitude and morale with flexible scheduling and telecommuting.
The enhanced recruiting efforts with childcare centers and family daycare,
flexible scheduling, housing assistance, subsidies. They increased productivity
with childcare centers and family daycare, caps, flexible scheduling,
health and wellness, sick childcare, subsidies, telecommuting. And finally,
the attribute we all thought was dead and gone, loyalty. It is, it turns
out, something companies want, and the strategy that brings it back?
No surprise-- it's flexible scheduling.
