Archive for June, 2009

New Roles Bring New Rules

Featured Guest Blogger June 29th, 2009

In 2008, Christina Barlowe founded LifeWork Alliance. The organization was formed to address the paradigm shift that is reshaping today’s workforce. The mission is to institute and promote open dialogue between organizations and working parents. Nearly two decades of professional corporate experience, coupled with an MBA and a Masters in Social Work, form the well-rounded skill set necessary to head the innovative organization that is LifeWork Alliance. Christina has a four-year-old son and a newly adopted little boy who have reshaped her life and been her source of inspiration. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

I had this bright idea about how I would build a life with my partner and how things would become bigger and better as our careers grew and our family grew. Sure, I would work, but I would be able to scale back during those tender early years for my children, because of course my husband’s career would be blossoming. And then it happened– 2007, that is.  Most people didn’t speak the word “recession” until late 2008. For those of us in the New York area, however, the decline in stability and rise in fear happened about a year in advance. My husband lost his job, as many people did, and we saw it as the opportunity that would allow us to explore other options for him and for us. We quickly discovered a few problems with this plan: 1) We still needed to pay the mortgage as we were “exploring,” and 2) Things become increasingly harder at home because our usual roles had changed greatly. As much as we like to think that we are not gender role-specific in this day and age, it is a simple fact of conditioning that we still are bound to these roles, however loosely. We have slowly adapted to me being the primary breadwinner and he being the primary caregiver. Sure, there is jealously and resentment and even envy at times from both sides.

What has been more challenging than either one of these roles, though, have been the roles within the marriage. Who are we now? It is clearly different that what we were when we married and what we imagined we would become. Do we like these new people? Do we have a choice? I have found that communication, as clichéd as it sounds, is the key to mental and emotional survival in these circumstances. My husband is a wonderful father, and men in general are more involved with their children today than they were in the past, which is a blessing for all involved. Even if there are new rules that have been bestowed upon us in this new economy, the rules will always shift. It is an individual’s ability to adapt to those new roles; that is the necessary skill for survival.

What’s New From the Network?

Karen Corday June 26th, 2009

New from the Network:

New, free work-family content online:

Do We Really Need Public Policies To Encourage Flexible Work?

Featured Guest Blogger June 24th, 2009

Sandy Burud, Ph.D., is a researcher, consultant and author on human capital and work-life. She is the Chief Strategy Officer for FlexPaths, a flexibility-focused software platform for employers and employment portal for individuals. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

I believe that flexible work practices will naturally continue to filter into the fabric of organizations — at the rate of an iceberg melting.  So, unless we’re willing to wait another generation or so, it will take a policy “push” to move things along.

We know that:

  • Businesses thrive when they embrace flexible work practices. Employees are more focused, engaged, and productive, overhead costs are reduced, and earnings and shareholder returns grow. (Workers, families, the economy and the environment also benefit significantly.)
  • Though many employers ‘allow’ flexibility, most employees still are not using it, even though most would prefer to do so.  In most organizations there are substantial barriers to its use, even in ‘best practice’ companies — a condition that has changed little over the last decade.
  • A catalyst is required.  Businesses are not sufficiently motivated to ensure that everyone whose job is suited to flex can work flexibly, despite the fact that it’s in the organization’s best interest.
  • A significant barrier to the widespread use of flexibility is the lack of systems to ensure consistency and practical application.  Managers and employees don’t know what’s possible and flexibility is inconsistently applied in most companies. (Hewitt, 2008) Employees are afraid to request it, fearing a subtle or not-so-subtle penalty. Nine in ten low-wage workers who do not use it would, if it carried no penalty. (WFD and Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2009) When employees do request it, they often are refused because their manager is resistant to considering the idea or lacks the support to make it work.
  • A mandate?  While employers resist mandates and more regulation, a mandate that ensures a thoughtful consideration of an employee’s request for flexibility is one such motivator.  Companies say informally that without a doubt, such a mandate would cause them to be more systematic, consistent, and transparent in their decision-making about whether to grant employees’ requests.  Such a requirement would also encourage internal record keeping systems that by themselves would raise the level of knowledge.  The systems can include ‘informal’ flexibility — a change work hours or location on short notice — and ‘formal’ flexible arrangements negotiated in advance.
  • Mandates should be coupled with incentives for companies to provide pragmatic information.  Incentives are also essential (tax incentives, for example) for employers to disseminate practical information internally, e.g., how to manage teams who work flexibly.  Incentives alone are not sufficient, however.  More is required to overcome the inertia of the old way of doing business.

It will take a combination of ‘sticks’ and ‘carrots’ to achieve the desired results — workplaces that are more productive because they place the emphasis on achieving results rather than on where and when the work is done and citizens who can navigate their complex lives successfully.

Maybe It’s Not All Gloom and Doom for Work-Life Balance

Featured Guest Blogger June 22nd, 2009

Adria B. Martinelli has practiced employment law in Delaware since joining Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor in 2001 as a senior associate in the Employment Law Section. She is also a regular speaker on employment-related topics, and trains individual employers in various areas of employment law, including sexual harassment, performance evaluations and documentation, and exceptions to at-will employment. Adria serves as an editor of the Delaware Employment Law Letter and writes for the Delaware Employment Law Blog. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

Much has been written in the legal blogosphere lately related to the topic of work-life balance.   Law 21, which describes itself as “Dispatches from a Legal Profession on the Brink,” recently posted a well-written and thought-provoking blog on this topic that concluded that “we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.””

Most commentators in this area seem to agree that—at least in the legal profession—any discussion or concern about work-life balance is a thing of the past.  A past when the economy was good, attorneys were in great demand, and law firms competed for the best and brightest by offering whatever they could to attract them.  This included at least engaging in discussion of the now-verboten work-life balance topic.

Few would disagree that economy drives this discussion.  Law firms (or any employers, for that matter) are rarely going to promote work-life balance because of their generosity or genuine concern for the well-being of their employees.  However, they will consider it when they believe it ultimately benefits their bottom line.  In good economic times, some employers bought into the notion that promoting work-life balance (or at least uttering the words during the hiring process) would make them competitive in recruiting the top candidates, and that retaining these qualified employees would also mean saving on the bottom line by not having to retrain new employees to replace those who might decide to leave the workplace as a result of inflexible work policies.

What is overlooked in the current gloom-and-doom forecasts, however, is that “flexible” (or reduced) work-schedules can also benefit the employer’s bottom line in a very direct way.  Typically, reduced or flexible schedule means reduced compensation.  In the legal world, reduced work-schedules usually means the attorney is “off,” or at least seriously derailed from, the partnership track.  Nobody wants to share the partnership pie in these trying economic times for firms.  The old model of the most desirable associate being one who was willing to do whatever it takes in terms of billable hours, in exchange for partnership on a 7-, 8-, or 9-year track, is no longer such an appealing one.

At the same time that people are declaring the end of work-life balance, law firms are delaying start dates for new associates, paying associates a portion of their salary to take a year off to spend time with their family or pursue non-profit endeavors, and some are apparently considering reducing attorneys to four-day work weeks. While these employer-driven, sometimes mandatory reduced schedules with accompanying reduced pay is certainly not ideal for many, it beats layoffs.  In the end, it continues to redefine the model of the perfect lawyer.  When the economy heads north again, I believe this rethinking of the old standard will help, not hurt, the work-life balance cause.

What’s New From the Network?

Karen Corday June 19th, 2009

New from the Network:

New, free work and family content online:

Marrying Social Security and Paid Family Leave

Julie Schwartz Weber June 17th, 2009

While the majority of Americans agree that individuals should be able to take paid time off from work to attend to their family at critical times, including the birth or adoption of a child or the serious illness of a family member, there is substantial disagreement, especially among businesses, as to how that paid leave should be funded and administered. Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress, has newly provided a thoughtful and detailed proposal, a proposal that she herself states is a variation on some themes that fellow colleagues have been discussing for some time: funding and administering family leave insurance via the already existing social security system.

According to Boushey, this new program, which she calls Social Security Cares, is an “ideal way” to finance paid family leave.  She argues that the bureaucracy is already in place to finance the system and deliver checks, and the system, that contends with retirement and disability matters already includes a structure to “establish the criteria for eligibility that takes into account a variety of circumstances.”

She also states that Social Security Cares would benefit nearly all workers by being inclusive of low wage, young, or part-time workers in addition to full-time and middle and upper wage workers.  Furthermore, she indicates that Social Security Cares would encourage both men and women to take time off to provide care, an interesting point where today the majority of men and women are in the workforce and most families no longer have a stay-at-home caregiver.

Social Security Cares would entail the following:

  • Workers will be able to access social security benefits for income when they experience birth or adoption of a child, the worker’s own serious illness, or to care for a seriously ill family member, for 12 weeks per year;
  • The program will cover every worker currently covered by Social Security, which covers almost the entire labor force;
  • Eligibility will be based on a worker’s lifetime employment history and will use reasonable terms to enable young, part-time, and low-income workers to qualify;
  • The cost of the program will be minimal, and could be financed in many ways, including adding a small increase to the payroll tax.

Boushey makes sure to provide substantial detail throughout her proposal.  She also underscores that the Social Security Cares program is not a panacea, and that additional changes need to be made to other laws, including the FMLA, to ensure that the program would be fully effective.

Kids With Disabilities Shut Out by Economy

Featured Guest Blogger June 16th, 2009

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

A caring society benefits us all. Sadly, this simple truth still surprises us. We assume that lean, mean, Darwinian forms of capitalism are best, when mounting evidence show that a caring society is more beneficial, even economically. Socially responsible and diverse companies, for instance, fare better on many measures. Companies where women make up from 14 to 38 percent of top management have an average 35 percent higher return on equity than employers with the lowest women’s executive representation, Catalyst data shows. Doing the “right thing” is good business, as many in the work-life field know.

My latest Balancing Acts column in the Boston Globe underscores this point in yet another way. I wrote about teens with disabilities who yearn to experience that classic rite of passage, the summer job. In a down economy, as you can imagine, many willing, tenacious talented teens with disabilities find it nearly impossible to find summer work. (Just 15 out of 100 youths with disabilities likely will find work this summer, estimates Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University.)

But we all lose out when teens with special needs can’t find work, because early work experience is strongly predictive of success in the labor market later in life for people with disabilities. In other words, kids who can’t get work early on tend to become a burden on society and on their families later.

The good news is, a few simple measures can help enormously. In researching my story, I stumbled upon a gem of a project, Project Summer, created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 2006 to help kids with special needs find summer work. The project involved 400 kids with special needs in more than 30 Wisconsin public high schools.

Put simply, when kids got the right supports, they were far more likely to work. These included advance help from teachers in planning their job hunt and high expectations from families and teachers that they could and should work. As well, schools benefited from having a liaison to the business community, such as a contact at a local chamber of commerce. These low-cost measures worked wonders. In one follow-up study, 65 percent of youths with severe disabilities who received such interventions found summer work, compared with a fifth of students who didn’t get such help.

Sometimes, caring isn’t about added funding and expanded bureaucracy. It’s all about a dash of imagination and a soupçon of common sense.

What’s New From the Network?

Karen Corday June 12th, 2009

New, free work-family content on the web:

shim

Who’ll Care for Aging Adults? Big Question, Few Answers

Featured Guest Blogger June 11th, 2009

Cali Williams Yost is the founder and CEO of Work+Life Fit Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in developing innovative business-based work-life flexibility strategies for organizations and individuals. She is the author of Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You (Riverhead/Penguin Group 2005). Yost writes the Work+Life Fit Blog and is an expert blogger for Fast Company magazine. She can be reached at cali@worklifefit.com. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

For the past few months, a friend cared for her mother through the final stages of ovarian cancer under a best case elder care scenario: 1) she is a stay-at-home mom who lived close by and had the flexibility to provide care, and 2) her mother had adequate financial resources to pay for the care she needed.  Yet, the reality of elder care was, according to my friend, “a nightmare.”  As I found two years earlier when I cared for my mother before she died of lung cancer, she was blindsided by the lack of support.  Or, let me restate, the lack of elder care beyond family caregivers.

This brings us back to the original questions:  who will provide the majority of care for the rapidly aging baby boom generation, and who will pay for it?  The answer for the most part is no one beyond family members,  and that already tenuous support is fraying with the recession.

I believe we have two choices: 1) either fundamentally overhaul the way the country provides and pays for the care of aging adults or 2) level with current and future caregivers, as well as the organizations that employ them, so they understand the hard facts and begin to plan accordingly.  Otherwise, they, too, will be blindsided.

The good news is that innovations related to elder care are emerging; however, they must take into account the realities that my friend, countless other caregivers, and I learned the hard way if they are going to have a meaningful impact:

“There are going to be more people to take care of than there are people” to provide care says Bob Caffrey, CEO of Seacoast Hospice in New Hampshire.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2050, there will be 88.5 million people who are 65-and-over, which is “more than doubling the current 65-and-over population.  Meanwhile, the number of working-age people between 18 and 64 is projected to decline from 63% to 57% in 2050.”  This doesn’t even include the number of adult children or other family members under 65 who need care. Simply put, the care requirements of aging adults will put greater demands on a dwindling supply of family care providers.

Current and future caregivers may not see themselves as the primary providers of care for their aging family and friends, but the system does.  We need to get on the same page.  As noted in the recent Evercare Survey of the Economic Downturn and its Impact on Family Caregiving, “Family caregivers are the backbone of our health care system by providing long-term care to those with chronic illness or disabilities.” I have to say that this was news to me and my sisters before we started to care for our mother, and I’m an “expert” who thought I understood elder care.  The Executive Director of a New Hampshire community-based nurse and hospice organization stated an important fact in a recent article when she said, “Family members and friends need to play an active role in the care of a loved one at home…No home care agency can do it all.  Families really are the primary caregivers.”  The system that provides care will support you.  It doesn’t expect to cover all of the care—family caregivers need to know that.  I would imagine most don’t.

Because of the recession, a majority of those caregivers are much less likely to take a break from the workforce to provide care.  In other words, even though they are expected to be the primary care providers, family members who might have quit in the past, won’t.  When it’s needed the most, there will be less family caregiver time available because the recession has made them feel they need to keep working:

Assuming outside support is available, no one seems to have the money to pay for it—not Medicare, not the aging adults and not the adult children providing the care.

  • Medicare:  Over the past two years as I’ve pondered the question of who will pay for elder care, I’ve asked experts in the subject what they thought and most say the same thing: Medicare. My usual response is, “Really?” One expert stated, “The public will demand it.”  Okay, we can demand all we want, but what if there’s simply no money?  A recent government report shows Medicare is projecting trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities in the not too distant future.  I’m not sure Medicare is going to be the answer.
  • Aging Parents: According to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), households headed by people between the ages of 55 and 64 reported the median value of all retirement accounts of approximately $100,000.  Assuming aging adults need to use their funds for care over a limited period, it may be adequate.  However, the problem is that many will need care for years, and then $100,000 will not be enough.  There’s long-term care insurance, but that can be very expensive.
  • Family Caregivers:  According to the Evercare study, six out of ten caregivers who reported increasing their care giving spending also reported having difficulty paying their own basic necessities.  And 63% were saving less for retirement.  Considering that the NBER research reported that 53% of households with at least one retirement account had a median balance of “a mere $45,000,” this is not good news.  Also, many of the caregivers who are spending more on care giving expenses, are using up their savings (47%) or are borrowing money and using credit cards (43%).  Double trouble.

Aging adult care is perhaps the greatest, yet the least discussed, work+life fit challenge we face governmentally, organizationally, and individually, especially when coupled with child care.  Finding solutions begins with asking the right questions.  And those questions need to be based on fact-based assumptions.

As I’ve shown above, the system seems to expect families (or friends) to function as the primary caregivers, even if they don’t realize it. Those families are not going to be able to provide 100%, full-time care, because they must continue working.  They must help pay for the care of the aging adults in their lives because the government may not be able to step in.  And do this while saving for their personal retirement and future elder care needs.  It goes without saying that these caregivers will need a great deal of flexibility in how, when, and where they work if they are to fulfill their responsibilities on the job and at home.

Who will care for the rapidly aging baby boom generation, and who will pay for it?  The answer: Employers, communities, families and individuals creatively working together on all levels.  It’s the only way.  It’s not happening right now, and it needs to start…soon.

Recent Network Polls: Work-Family and Social Media, Economic Climate

Judi Casey June 10th, 2009

Here are the results of two polls that we posted on the Network’s website. We most recently asked our users about work-family and social media (4/10-5/19/09): If you participate in social media networks (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), are you able to keep your personal/family and work lives separate?

Of the 53 respondents, 49% reported that “it’s difficult,” 25% said “it’s easy,” and 26% indicated that “it’s not easy or difficult.”

Read more about the Network’s activities with social media, and about the impact of technology on our work-family lives.

Another Network poll (3/12-4/10/09) inquired about how the current economic climate was affecting your spending habits: Due to the economic climate, have you changed your lifestyle (for example, spending less money, delaying major purchases, cutting non-critical expenses etc.)?

Forty-seven percent replied “quite a bit,” followed by “somewhat” (46%) and “not at all” (7%). We heard from a total of 57 people. Other entries on the economy may be found here and here.

Please answer our latest poll on your experiences with telework on our blog or home page.

Next »