Archive for July, 2008

National Conference of State Legislatures

Julie Schwartz Weber July 30th, 2008

Greetings! It has been a while since I have last blogged, having focused much of the summer months on conferences. Most recently, last Friday, I returned from New Orleans, LA, where I attended the National Conference of State Legislatures Annual Summit, the official annual meeting for America’s state legislators and legislative staff. More than 6000 people participated — including legislators, business representatives, government officials, union members, foundation representatives and others interested in public policy — partaking in over 150 sessions on various topics ranging from the mortgage crisis, climate change, college costs, immigrants and healthcare.

This year, however, the Sloan Network did not sit on a panel or attend any of the diverse, targeted individual sessions. Instead, with a primary focus on outreach, the Sloan Network rented space in an Exhibitor Hall, hoping to meet and talk with state legislators and their staff about our high quality, evidence based, nonpartisan and free policy (and other) resources on work-family issues. Thus, like my fellow exhibitor counterparts, I arrived toting many organizational goodies – including numerous Sloan Network brochures, our most recent Policy Brief Series and Effective Workplace Series, pens and even umbrellas (upon which our web address was imprinted), ready to engage and inform at least some of the nation’s state legislators about our content rich resources.

I learned a lot from this experience on many levels – but most of all, I learned that while policy about “working families” is a critical, important and central issue for government officials (after all, aren’t most constituents part of a working family in some way or other?), there are many other organizations that passionately believe the same thing about their cause or mission. While logically I knew this to be true prior to attending the NCSL conference, it was hard not to be struck by the sheer number of competing interests legislators and their constituents contend with, when you stand just about anywhere in the Exhibit Hall. In my immediate exhibiting neighborhood, alone, you could get a feel for the range of interest groups, where I was positioned near the National Popular Vote, PETA/Animal Legislation, the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, Spot Runner, the National Education Association, the Toy Industry Association and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

Having had a chance to see the policy forest from the Sloan Network tree was invaluable. Not only do I return home with a new appreciation for matters outside my work area (e.g., the safety concerns concerning the truck transporting radioactive material on the highway, and the many ways in which animals are treated unethically, including the chaining of dogs), but also I recognize that we must be selective in how we channel resources to obtain maximum return on investment, targeting outreach in fora that will permit our message and resources to stand out within the vast and heavily populated state policy landscape.

What’s New

Karen Corday July 28th, 2008

Work and Family News Headlines:

  • Federal Minimum Wage Increases to $6.55
    On July 24th, the federal minimum hourly wage rose from $5.85 to $6.55, the second of three annual increases required by a 2007 law. Next year’s increase will raise the minimum to $7.25 an hour.
  • Federal Government Trails 23 States on Minimum Wage
    The Economic Policy Institute released a map that shows the states that mandate more than the federal minimum.

See our site for more!

Work and Family News from Around the Globe:

  • Workers Willing to Trade Pay for Time
    Adele Horin of Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reports on a recent survey funded by the Australian Research Council and several Australian governments in which three-quarters of the men surveyed expressed a willingness to take a pay cut in order to work shorter hours.
  • Bank Discriminated on Grounds of Gender
    Tim O’Brien of the Irish Times reports that the Bank of Ireland has been ordered to pay a former employee 30,000 pounds after she was not offered a part-time work or job-share option after going on adoptive leave.

See our site for more!

Sex Discrimination and Fathers

Featured Guest Blogger July 25th, 2008

I almost didn’t want to write this post because the last post that I wrote dealt with Australian work-family policy…and I like to keep a nice variety. But, I can’t help it; I just thought this was too neat to pass up…

Australia’s federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, has just announced her position on several work-family policies (paid maternity leave, women in leadership positions, and sexual harassment, to name a few) as a result of her “Listening Tour,” a 6-month venture across Australia speaking with over 1,000 people about their journey for gender equality. I found one of her post-tour agenda items particularly interesting. As it turns out, she finds herself in a great corner to advocate for gender equality in the workforce, specifically mentioning sex discrimination against working fathers.

While Broderick was once hired to promote women’s equality in the workforce, she recently stated that she wanted to strengthen the Sex Discrimination Act to penalize employers who stick family-friendly fathers on the “daddy track” by refusing to promote them. Fathers have reported that they are not seen as serious players when they “raise their hand” for flexible work schedules, as they are still seen as the breadwinners and as individuals who need to be more committed to their careers. They find that women are more easily granted leave for family time.

Currently, the law only protects fathers who have been fired , not those who have been put on the daddy track without the possibility of promotion. Broderick stated, “If there is one thing I could do to promote gender equality in this country it would be to better share paid and unpaid work between men and women…If we strengthen the family provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act, that will allow men to be more involved in their family and women to be more involved in paid work.”

The opposition states that workers who put more into their careers should rightfully get more out of them. Those employees who take more time off should consider career advancement more of a luxury than a right.

We say, keep the discussion going!

For more information from the Sloan Network on this topic, please see our:
• Class Activity featuring information on the Daddy Track
• Statistics about fathers and family leave
• Suggested Readings about fathers and work

Team Work Can Impact Overwork

Judi Casey July 23rd, 2008

A new report from WFD Consulting found that workers in their study spent an average of 52 hours per week at work, with more than 10 hours focused on low-value work. What is low value work? It is work that does not accomplish business goals and may include inefficient, repetitive processes. Study participants indicated several causes of overwork including insufficient staff, too much information, unexpected customer demands, unclear priorities and poor communication. Overwork results in negative outcomes for both employers (reduced productivity, lower work quality) and employees (stress and burnout).

However, the report goes on to say that a team based approach has been effective in reducing overwork and low value work. For example those who have utilized a team based approach report “65% improvement in team morale and 61% improvement in work process efficiency.” Do you think that your team could work together to reduce overwork and low-value work? How would you get started?

The Sloan Network has numerous resources on overwork including a Topic Page, Fact Sheet, Effective Workplace Series, a Network News interview on Team Resilience with Kay Campbell at GSK and others.

What’s New

Karen Corday July 21st, 2008

New from the Network:

New in Work and Family:

Please let us know what you think about any or all of our new features!

Parental Incentive Program

Featured Guest Blogger July 18th, 2008

Thank you to Tiffany Gabrielson, Boston College Law Student and Sloan Network Research Assistant, for today’s guest blog entry.

Over a year after it was established, the eyes of the world are still on a privately funded New York program that offers financial incentives to impoverished parents. The controversial program is aimed at families in the poorest New York neighborhoods and can only be used by families whose income falls well below the poverty line. Through privately collected funds, parents are offered yearly payments of up to $5,000 for assisting their children in receiving the educational and medical assistance that all children need. The money is earned in increments, depending upon what task is performed. Rewards are given for school performance, such as children who receive high scores on standardized tests or have exemplary school attendance records and for proper medical and dental attention.

The program is inevitably praised by some and condemned by others. Opponents argue that such incentives serve to reward parents for performing tasks that they are already morally obligated to do, tasks which many of the parents were doing anyway. However, these programs are not merely meant to spur parents into action. They are also designed to increase children’s access to the educational and medical help that they so desperately need. To even qualify for this program, a family must have a financial situation that falls so far below the poverty line that the cost of transportation alone to a school, dentist’s office, or hospital can sometimes be unmanageable. A parent should not have to choose between spending his last few dollars of the month on bus fare to attend a student-teacher conference and spending it on bread to feed his family. By providing this incentive program, perhaps New York has found a way to make both choices feasible.

Because this program is still in its infancy, it might be difficult to see just how effective it truly is, especially before the trial ends in September of 2009. While many already argue that the cost of the program will be more then recouped in the amount the government will save in costs associated with high poverty rates, it is not clear whether the program will have anything other then short term success on the participating children. Only time will tell if these programs will be successful in the long run. Cash incentive programs have been tried globally in places such as Mexico and Bangladesh, and have had varying success. If this program prospers, then it is certain that other states are not far behind in adopting their own versions. I would like to see if variations arise that extend to additional families who make a living wage but still do not have the financial freedom to miss work in order to attend a conference or to take care of an ailing child.

I truly hope that through this program New York has found a way to break the cycle of poverty that plagues so many families. By providing these incentives, children may very well become better educated and healthier in all stages of their lives. If so, then New York is undeniably giving these children the possibility of a much brighter future.

Thoughts?

Creating work-life culture change

Judi Casey July 16th, 2008

We hear about it all the time in the work-life arena.  How can we achieve the oh-so desired engagement, retention and nail talent management?  Everyone says it’s not just about policies and programs.  In order to create workplaces that meet business needs and are more responsive to employees, we need to change culture.  But how to you do that?  It sounds so daunting!

 

Well, I found out about one success at a presentation that I attended at the 2008 WorldatWork conference called Making Flexibility a Strategic Lever for Corporate Growth.  Presented by Barbara Taylor of BDO Seidman and Cali Williams Yost, Joanne Spigner, and Donna Miller of Work+Life Fit, the presentation focused on how to move an organization – employees, leaders, managers – from a vision to culture change.  Using a strategically picked task force from all levels and business lines, they described their process of “building a shared vision,” and how to avoid “vision blockers.”   Their five “strategy innovation lessons” include:

  1. compelling business case
  2. early ownership up and across
  3. patient (sometimes messy) process
  4. key messages replayed relentlessly
  5. non-traditional teaming

Great stuff!  Has your organization worked to achieve cultural change?  If so, how have you done it?  Are you stuck?  What are the challenges?

Grandparental Leave

Featured Guest Blogger July 14th, 2008

Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Chief Minister has announced that grandmothers and grandfathers who work for public services in Australia will be able to take 52 weeks of unpaid grandparental leave over the course of three years.  The purpose of this legislation is twofold:

  1. The workforce will able to retain its older workers who might have otherwise retired
  2. Grandparents will be able to maintain a better balance between work and family, and will be able to play an important role in their grandchildren’s lives. 

There is no age requirement or cut-off for the grandparents, but the grandchild must be less than three years old. 

 

I see an additional, and unmentioned, benefit to this legislation.  Having grandparent care available will also enable working parents to better manage their work situation, as grandparent care can save parents gobs of money and energy in alternative child care arrangements.  In 2005, the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that grandparents were providing child care services to more than 660,000 Australian children.  Grandparents cared for more than half of the one-year-olds who depended on child care and almost 40% of five-year-olds.  In almost every case, this care was cost-free for the parents. 

 

One troubling facet of this legislation that I can imagine is the class divide that may occur in who can use the new policy.  Who can afford to take a year of unpaid leave?  What good is job security if one cannot afford to go unpaid?  Might it be better for these workers to collect their post-retirement benefits than to have an unpaid year with job security at the end? 

 

We’re not sure.  Either way, it’s a well-researched piece of legislation with the well-intentioned goal of benefiting both the workforce and families of Australia.    

What’s New

Karen Corday July 11th, 2008

New from the Network:

New in Work and Family:

  • Six Months of Job Loss Push Economy Toward Recession
    ABC News reports that the number of jobs created in the United Stateshas dropped for the sixth consecutive month, a marker many economists use to declare a recession on the way. The hardest hit industries include construction, finance, and manufacturing, and unemployment levels are at 5.5 percent.

    •  

  • Survey Suggests Incentives That Might Persuade Older Workers to Delay Their Decision to Retire
    The Wall Street Journal Market Watch reports on research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute that tested nineteen possible incentives for encouraging employees to postpone retirement. Popular incentives include feeling truly needed, receiving a pension while working, and contract work.

These as well as other popular press articles from around the world may be found in What’s New in Work and Family on our main site.

Technology: Beneficial or Detrimental to Working Fathers?

Chelsea Lettieri July 9th, 2008

Achieving a work-family balance doesn’t seem as foreign to fathers these days as it once did. Technology advances are giving fathers the freedom to focus on their family life while maintaining their workplace responsibilities…or so it seems.

A recent survey by human resources consulting firm Adecco USA found that 81% of fathers were somewhat likely to send work-related emails late at night. The evolution of technology has allowed fathers to take a more prominent role in the family. Email and devices like blackberries have made it easier for fathers to get their work done at home after the kids have gone to bed.

However, some might argue that all of these technological advancements have caused work to overflow into family life. Countless phone calls, emails, and text messages on blackberries and I-phones can cause unwanted disruptions during family time. In a recent Monster survey, 75% of dads said they believed bringing work home interferes with a parent’s relationship with their children. However, that may be the price some working fathers are willing to pay in order to have the flexibility to cater to family demands.

While some fathers continue to think technology has blessed them with the opportunity to achieve work-family balance, others fear it is doing more harm then good. Do you think the evolution of technology has helped working fathers and their families?

*It is important to note that technology would be more of a solution for middle- and upper-class working fathers, as not everyone has access to advanced technology.

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