Archive for the 'Military' Category

Military Families and Workplace Flexibility: The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010

Featured Guest Blogger November 3rd, 2009

Marcy Karin is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of a new Work-Life Policy Unit of the Civil Justice Clinic at the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Her research interests include workplace law, policy, and practice, civil justice and litigation, and women’s legal history. She is also an active member of the national work-life law and policy community. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

Military families have acute needs for workplace flexibility. Dealing with multiple deployments, war-related disabilities and injuries, frequent moves, geographic isolation from services at bases, transitions back to civilian life, and other service-related needs impact servicemembers and their families in a real way. Military families also struggle with many work-life stresses that all families face. As The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation correctly notes, “policies that ease the strains on service members’ families” must be enacted.

Last week, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (NDAA 2010) into law. The NDAA 2010 includes the Supporting Military Families Act of 2009, which expands the qualifying exigency and military caregiver provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). President Bush enacted these provisions last year in the first successful attempt to amend the FMLA.

Under the 2008 FMLA expansion, eligible employees are allowed to take up to 12 weeks of job-protected time off for any qualifying exigency arising out of the fact that the spouse, son, daughter, or parent of an employee is on active duty (or has been notified of an impending call to active duty) in the National Guard or Reserves in support of a contingency operation. Department of Labor regulations define a qualifying exigency to include short-notice deployment, military events and related activities, childcare and school activities, financial and legal arrangements, counseling, rest and recuperation, post-deployment activities, and any other service-related activity that the employer and employee agree is a qualifying exigency.

The 2008 law also created military caregiver leave, which allows an eligible employee (spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin of a covered servicemember) to take up to 26 weeks of job-protected time off to care for a wounded servicemember.

The NDAA 2010 expands the scope of who may take time off under the 2008 provisions. Specifically, the new law allows:

  • family members of active duty members of the regular Armed Forces to use qualifying exigency leave when the servicemember is deployed to a foreign country. (The 2008 law only applied to family members of the National Guard and Reserves who were called to active duty in support of a contingency operation.);

  • federal employees to use qualifying exigency leave. (Only certain federal employees were allowed to use it under the 2008 law.);

  • military caregiver leave to be taken for veterans who served within 5 years of the date of medical treatment, recuperation, or therapy. (The 2008 law only applied to servicemembers who were currently in the military.); and

  • military caregiver leave for existing or preexisting injuries that are aggravated in the line of duty during active duty service. (The current regulations deny coverage for these injuries.).

The expansions took effect when the President signed the law. Proposed regulations from the Department of Labor and the Office of Personnel Management, which will be drafted in consultation with the Secretaries of Defense and Veterans Affairs, should be issued shortly.

At the bill signing ceremony, President Obama noted that this law “reaffirms our commitment to our brave men and women in uniform and our wounded warriors.” This is just the first of many laws that President Obama will likely sign that reaffirm this commitment and provide military families with access to additional time off and other types of workplace flexibility. We can also expect the President to fulfill his campaign promise to support the needs of all workers as they struggle to find a work-life balance. Stay tuned for more action from the Obama Administration in the months and years to come. In the meantime, employers should revise their FMLA policies to reflect the NDAA 2010, as well as notify employees of these changes.

For more stories about the flexibility needs of military families, listen to the remarks of Dr. Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, Kelly Hruska, Sheila Casey, and Patricia Kempthorne at this 2008 Workplace Flexibility 2010 briefing.

Top Ten Trends in Work-Life and Work-Family

Judi Casey November 5th, 2008

I was recently asked, “What are the current trends in work-life and work-family?” Reviewing the resources we’ve added, examined or blogged about on the Sloan Network, I developed the following list. In addition, I’ve provided Sloan Network resources and other sources for more information.

1.    Aging Workforce and Older Workers
We are redefining retirement as older workers continue to work into their 60’s, 70’s and 80’s for financial, personal and career reasons. Some demographics indicate that there will not be sufficient younger workers to replace exiting older workers in many industries. As average life expectancy continues to increase, many are physically able to work longer. A few resources: 1, 2, 3, 4.

2.    Family Caregiving
Family caregiving issues are paramount, including elder care, sandwich generation, child care and family responsibility discrimination.

3.    Green Practices
There is growing attention to being environmentally conscious or “green” with increased implementation of four-day work weeks and telework. Initiatives previously viewed as work-family are now being reframed as environmental. A ten-hour work day with Fridays off can be great for some employees and employers, but may be a work-family nightmare for others. Additional resources here and here.

4.    Military Families
Managing work and family responsibilities is particularly difficult for military families, with nearly 1.8 million children living in military families. Challenges include frequent moves, school disruptions, financial strain and family separation.

5.    Multigenerational Workforce
Emphasis has been placed on understanding the multigenerational workforce, with attention to matching employee needs with workplace benefits and work styles— some say that younger workers do not want to work like older workers and have a different vision of a satisfying work environment. A few resources: 1, 2.

6.    Overworked or Underemployed?

Although some workers can’t find enough work, many professional workers complain of overwork with long hours and little time for healthy behaviors such as exercise or family dinners. Reports indicate that workers are reluctant to take needed sick days, and may not use all their allotted vacation time or work while away. A few resources: 1, 2, 3, 4.

7.    Parents Caring for Children with Disabilities
The number of families affected, the stress on family relationships, and the impediments to workforce participation are considerable. One in seven children under age 18, or approximately 10.2 million children in the U.S., have special health care needs. Nearly 14% of parents caring for children with special health care needs spend more than 10 hours per week coordinating child care. Employers and community resources must do their part to better support these working parents and their families. Resources: 1, 2

8.    Talent Management to Keep the Keepers
Increasing employee engagement is a high priority to improve productivity and morale, as well as recruit and retain key talent. Innovative employers have introduced programs such as sabbaticals or extended leave time, mass career customization, lactation rooms for breastfeeding or even bringing your baby to work. A few Encyclopedia Entries: 1, 2

9.    Technology Affects Work Life Balance
Realizing how technology (email, Blackberry, etc.) impacts our work-family lives has led to a blending between work and home boundaries in a 24/7 global economy. What are your work hours when your team is in the U.K., the U.S., Spain and Australia? Is it OK to turn off  your Blackberry after dinner? What does the 21st century workplace look like?  A few resources: 1, 2

10.    Wellness and Health Care Costs
Rising health care costs have pushed employers to pay attention to employee wellness, since healthy employees have lower health care costs. Efforts include on-site fitness or yoga, health assessments, paid sick days and incentives to promote healthy behavior. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) continues to have a profound impact on employees.

What’s New

Karen Corday October 3rd, 2008

New from the Network:

  • Issue 15, Policy Briefing Series: Supporting Military Families with Children
  • New entry in Work and Family Encyclopedia: The Dual Labor Market and Its Work-Family Implications, by Kenneth Hudson
  • Two updated and two new Work and Family Syllabi
  • Join us for a phone conversation with Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and Jessica DeGroot, president and founder of the ThirdPath Institute. Maggie will discuss her new book and what we can do to reverse our collective and individual attention-deficits. Jessica will share her experiences working with leaders who have found ways to bring more focus and clarity into their lives. You will have plenty of time to ask questions, and learn from these thought leaders.
    Monday, October 6, 2008, 4-5 pm EST
    RSVP to: wfnet@bc.edu
    Attendance limited to 50 people. A confirmation and call in number will be provided following registration. Questions? Contact Lauren Leonard, francola@bc.edu

Work and Family News Headlines:

See our site for more!

Work and Family News From Around the Globe:

  • Brussels Calls For Longer, Better-Paid Maternity Leave
    The Earth Times reports that Vladimir Spidla, the Belgian EU Equal Opportunities Commissioner, has called for an extension of maternity leave from 14 to 18 weeks.
  • Mothers Boost the Ranks of Women at Work
    Jo Wiley of the United Kingdom’s Daily Express reports on a report from the Office for National Statistics that found two-thirds of working women with dependent children were working in the second quarter of 2008.

See our site for more!

How Workplace Characteristics Impact Employee Wellbeing

Judi Casey September 12th, 2008

In August, I was a discussant at the 2008 American Psychological Association conference for the session The Impact of Workplace Characteristics on Employee Wellbeing with Rosalind Barnett (Brandeis), Jackie James (Center for Work & Family at Boston College), Taryn Morrissey (Society for Research in Child Development, formerly Cornell), and Shu-Wen Wang (UCLA).

1) Wang and Repetti examined how job stress affects family interaction after the work day and found that more distressed dads exhibit a negative spillover effect between work and home, while less distressed dads may withdraw from family interactions. These patterns were not found for mothers.

2) Barnett and Gareis identified caregiver concerns as a more powerful predictor of job withdrawal and health-promoting behavior than objective aspects of the care burden. Usable flexibility affected both job withdrawal and health-promoting behavior.

3) James et al. reported that flexible work schedules might be one way to reduce health care costs as they appear to benefit both employees (and their managers) by reducing stress and improving mental health.

4) Morrissey and Warner detailed how child care vouchers resulted in a range of positive outcomes, including decreased work-family stress and greater commitment to employers.

The workplace can help today’s diverse families to better manage their work-family stress, which can lead to a triple win— better emotional wellbeing, stronger family relationships, and enhanced work commitment. Workplace programs and policies can act as a buffer to reduce stress and improve emotional health outcomes, but with three important caveats:

1) We must create a workplace culture where utilization of family supportive policies is encouraged and supported— it’s not the existence of policies and programs that is important, but rather whether employees feel like they can use them without negative ramifications.

2) No one size fits all and FIT is critical. You must match the needs of employees with the programs or policies— for example, it doesn’t make sense to build an onsite child care center if the majority of your employees are over 50 years old or if they wouldn’t bring their kids to work on the subway.

3) The role of the manager or supervisor is critical, and is often the key ingredient. They must assess and monitor with their subordinates what supports are needed to create a work environment that helps employees meet both their business and personal needs.

What do you think? How can workplace characteristics impact employee wellbeing?

For more information, visit our topic pages on Health and Workplace Flexibility and Flexible Work Schedules, or read our interview with Kay Campbell on personal and workplace resilience.

The Special Case of Military Spouses Returning to Work After a Career Break

Featured Guest Blogger August 18th, 2008

Carol Fishman Cohen is the co-author of the acclaimed career reentry book Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, and the co-founder of iRelaunch, a company providing career reentry programming, events, and information to employers, universities, organizations and to mid-career professionals in all stages of career break. Carol recently spoke at the 2008 Joint Warfighting Convention Military Spouse Symposium on the topic of returning to work after a career break. Contact Carol at ccohen@iRelaunch.com.

Military spouses face specific challenges when attempting to resume careers after a career break. Returning to work after years away is complicated enough, but the confluence of lengthy overseas postings, having to function as a single parent when a spouse is deployed, and moving every two to three years on top of the usual issues of lack of confidence, reviving old networks and creating new ones, and figuring out what you really want to do can make the process even more overwhelming. It’s no wonder that military spouses question their ability to make a successful back to work transition even more than their civilian counterparts.

Military spouses have unique qualifications to offer employers that tend to go unrecognized–by the military spouse herself and the prospective employer. These qualifications include:

  • Emotional Resilience - Military spouses are emotionally resilient because they have had to deal with a spouse being away on lengthy military deployments, often with his/her life at stake.
  • Experience in Dealing with Uncertainty - Dealing with uncertainty about a spouse’s whereabouts and safety, the timing and location of future postings, and maintaining the well being of children through these transitions is a way of life for the military spouse. Dealing with uncertainty is a qualification lacking in many job candidates at any life stage. Employers valuing this quality should seek out military spouses for recruitment.
  • Comfortable with Constant Transition - The business world is in a constant state of flux. Transition is a way of life for military spouses and military spouses themselves take for granted their own expertise in dealing with it.
  • No Benefits Required - Military spouses have insurance benefits already, so these benefits do not need to be part of their compensation package. Therefore, their overall cost as an employee is lower than that of civilian counterparts. Ideally, this gap would not be exploited by the employer, but instead used as a creative opportunity to offer other benefits as part of the employment package.

At the same time, hiring a military spouse can be problematic because of frequent moves.

  • Moving every 2 to 3 years - The biggest issue in hiring military spouses is that their posting in a single location often lasts only two to three years, and sometimes they need to move on short notice. Some employers shy away from hiring military spouses for this reason. However, with frequent job changes among non-military employees becoming the norm, the loyalty of the military spouse to stay with an employer for the entire length of the posting should be considered. Also, companies with a national presence or an option for remote work could benefit by hiring a military spouse if the person could transfer to another company office or work remotely with each new posting.

Determining readiness for career reentry may be trickier for military spouses than for their non-military counterparts. This means military spouses may need to wait longer than non-military spouses to relaunch their careers after a multi-year career break. This also means military spouses need to be extra patient with themselves as they move forward in the process. Issues delaying readiness include:

  • Lack of a Support Network - Because of frequent moves, military spouses often do not have time to develop friends and family support networks to turn to when their spouse is away and they need coverage for going to work.
  • At Home Responsibilities can be Overwhelming - Since military spouses bear the brunt of the childcare and eldercare responsibilities alone, they may feel these responsibilities too overwhelming to consider returning to work even if there is some sort of support community in place.

So what is the best strategy for military spouses wanting to relaunch a career?

  • Take a Series of Baby Steps - Find career-relevant volunteer work (we call this “strategic volunteering”) that can be done when one’s schedule permits, Take one class at a time instead of enrolling in a more demanding program. Seek occasional consulting work from time to time. The objective is to maximize current and relevant experiences, so reference to these experiences can be made during informal networking, formal interviewing and on resumes.
  • Consider Employment with Global Employers - Global employers have offices in many locations to which military spouses could transfer or from which they could possibly work remotely. Some of the big accounting firms actually require their CPA’s to switch offices every few years in order to get broad client exposure.
  • Seek Employment with a Staffing Firm such as Aquent or MomCorps. These companies place employees in interim or part time positions that often convert to full time positions. These firms have offices and opportunities across the U.S. In Aquent’s case, their reach is international as well. Aquent focuses on marketing and creative fields and MomCorps focuses on a range of fields including accounting.
  • Target “Military Friendly” Companies - Military Spouse magazine released a list of the Top 10 Military Friendly Companies in their June 2008 issue. They include Health Net, USAA, Sunbelt Rentals, and West Corporation.
  • Target Small to Mid-Sized Companies - Small to mid-sized companies are often thrilled to hire high caliber employees who are returning from a career break, even for a two to three year period.
  • Develop Transferable Skills - Military spouses in the fields of human resources, IT, nursing, sales, and teaching report an easier time finding employment after a transfer.

Resources:

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.

What’s New

Karen Corday June 20th, 2008

New from the Network:

New in Work and Family:

  • HellerEhrman Completes Opt-In Project: HellerEhrman has completed the Opt-In Project. Started in 2006, the project is “committed to identifying and raising awareness of the obstacles that still exist for women in the workforce, both the obvious and the subtle. The mission is to address and highlight viable solutions that can help overcome these impediments.” Listen to the final podcast and read the project report.

    •  

  • Paid Parental Leave Act Passes House, But Faces Veto Threat: Simone Baribeau of the Washington Post reports that the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act has passed the House by a large margin, despite a threat of veto from President George W. Bush. Under the Act, federal and congressional employees would receive four weeks of paid parental leave after birth, adoption, or taking in a foster child.

For more popular press articles on work and family, please see What’s New in Work and Family.

What’s New

Karen Corday May 16th, 2008

New from the Network:

New in Work and Family:

  • A Better Balance: The Work & Family Legal Center is collecting stories from people who are working, or have worked, a reduced hours schedule, including those who have experienced penalties at work because of their reduced hours. Please register for and complete the questionnaire at ABetterBalance.org.
  • This week, I came across popular press articles from the United Kingdom, Australia, Dubai, and Canada as well as the United States. Please visit our What’s New in Work and Family page to check them out, and always feel free to share any interesting articles with us here!

Changing FMLA

Featured Guest Blogger April 29th, 2008

We have all heard of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993. It was President Clinton’s first signed law, and it has had a huge impact on businesses since. During one 18-month period, nearly 24 million workers took a leave for an FMLA-covered reason, or about 1 of every 7 employees.

The FMLA has recently undergone a variety of changes. The new legislation attempts to clarify definitions of terms in the past version of the Act, as well as allows for provisions for military families. The changes were noted in the Federal Register on February 11th.

Some of the more noteworthy changes (in my humble opinion) include:

1. Employees who have a spouse, parent, or child who is on or has been called to active duty in the Armed Forces may take up to 12 weeks of FMLA leave yearly when they experience a “qualifying exigency.”

2. Employees who are the spouse, parent, child, or next of kin of a service member who incurred a serious injury or illness on active duty in the Armed Forces may take up to 26 weeks of leave to care for the injured service member in a 12-month period.

3. Employers may communicate directly with health care providers to authenticate medical certifications.

4. Common ailments may be “serious health conditions.”

5. Male employees may be protected when attending prenatal appointments with spouses.

The much anticipated Final Rules are said to be announced as soon as Summer, 2008. In the meantime, employers and employees alike should keep themselves “in the know” for compliance purposes. Additionally, covered businesses should ensure that their posters are up to date.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the changes…are there any employers or employees who love FMLA? Any who find it cumbersome?