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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.

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Policy , Research , Workplace
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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.

• Organizations , Scheduling , Workplace
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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.

• Organizations , Research , Workplace
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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:

• 2009 Work+Life Fit Reality Check, a nationally-representative survey of full-time employees reported that 47% of respondents were less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce for periods of time or take a career break, for example to raise children or care for an aging parent.
• The Evercare Survey of the Economic Downturn and its Impact on Family Caregiving found that 50% of working caregivers said they were less comfortable taking time off from work to provide care.

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.

• Elder Care , Organizations , Scheduling , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger June 8th, 2009

John Wilcox is the Vice President of Operations at Corporate Voices for Working Families.  He manages Corporate Voices’ family economic security work, focusing on lower-wage working families. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

When Michelle Obama attended the Corporate Voices for Working Families Annual Meeting in early May, she talked about the importance of work-life programs to working families and to the competitiveness of American business.
In conjunction with Mrs. Obama’s talk, Corporate Voices released a comprehensive study that looks at workplace flexibility options and programs involving hourly employees, Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers.

Recent research about the value of workplace flexibility has focused primarily on management and professional workers. This study finds that workplace flexibility initiatives, when available for hourly employees, are as successful as those designed for professional staff. It also demonstrates that businesses offering hourly employees flexible work options benefit through enhanced recruitment, retention, engagement, cost control, productivity and financial performance.

Equally important, we find that it is not only formal flexible arrangements that produce these impressive results, but progressive personnel policies and a work culture supportive of occasional flexibility that give workers access to a variety of time-off options and control over their work schedules. When companies provide employees with an array of flexibility and time-off options and an environment in which it is possible to access flexibility opportunities without barriers, employees develop their own strategies to use the options that best meet their individual needs and satisfy business requirements.

Highlights of the key findings of the report include:

• Managers and employees agree that flexibility has positive benefits and adds value for the business and for the individual employee in key areas involving productivity, customer service, employee work-life effectiveness, stress and well-being.
• For businesses, flexible schedules are an effective means of managing personnel costs, in particular overtime costs, which is a win-win for employees and employers.
• More than 80 percent of employers and employees surveyed say flexibility is important to recruitment and retention.
• In childcare, where there is a shortage of qualified early childhood teachers, flexible work options represents a key management strategy to recruit and retain individuals who are committed to their profession and to tap a wider labor pool than might be possible if the business offered a more limited work schedule.
• Companies have found that offering flexible schedules and innovative time-off policies contribute to being an “employer of choice” for younger workers in their competitive labor market.
• For positions in customer service and sales with typically high turnover, companies find that flexibility is a way to keep high-performing employees both in the short term and the long term.  These companies use flexibility to respond to the changing needs of their workers at various stages of their lives and careers—going back to school, raising a family, or to retain mature workers.
• Flexible work options are being used in businesses with continuous operations that need weekend coverage or whose business hours extend beyond a 9 to 5 eight-hour day.  This includes voluntary part-time positions as well as flextime and compressed work schedules.

Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers was researched and written by WFD Consulting and supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Publications , Research , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger June 1st, 2009

Vibhuti Mehra is the Communications and Development Director for the Labor Project for Working Families. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

The Labor Project for Working Families has launched a FREE online labor education and resource network – LEARN WorkFamily – to help unions build a family friendly workplace culture. This unique resource network features the nation’s only online database of contract language on work family issues such as family leave, childcare, elder care, flexible work options, adoption, bereavement leave and much more.

Each day millions of working families are being forced to choose between caring for their families and holding on to their jobs. Workers should not have to choose. “In these tough economic times when our working families are making impossible choices between family caregiving and job security, it is more important than ever that unions lead the way to create family friendly workplaces. LEARN WorkFamily is an essential resource for unions in these times,” says Gordon Pavy, Director of Collective Bargaining at the AFL-CIO.

LEARN WorkFamily offers unions a valuable opportunity to exchange information, ideas, strategies and experiences on organizing and bargaining for work family benefits. Unions can use this online network to:

• Search the online database for negotiated work family contract provisions on a wide variety of topics.
• Get tips on bargaining for important work family benefits.
• Learn techniques to build a strategic, progressive and successful work family bargaining agenda.
• Find information on state laws that impact bargaining for work family programs.
• Download resources such as bargaining fact sheets, work family training curriculum for unions, studies on work family issues and more.

LEARN WorkFamily also offers unions a rare opportunity to read and share stories of successes in negotiating for family friendly contract language and programs. For instance, unions can visit the LEARN WorkFamily website to find out how the SEIU Local 1877 won contract provisions to help members participate in their children’s school activities or how the United University Professions won family leave provisions at the State University of New York.

“We created this network because we wanted more than just a contract language database – we wanted people to be inspired by others’ stories and find new ideas for bargaining that they had not known about before,” says Netsy Firestein, Executive Director of the Labor Project for Working Families.

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Publications , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger May 11th, 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.

Those of us who promote flexible work practices generally agree that the culture must support these practices or they will not be viable, it’s not so easy to articulate exactly what a flexible culture is. Here is what I think comprises a fully flexible organization:

People are treated as an ASSET:

• As with any asset, people are invested in – their learning, their health, etc. — are considered a good investment because their interests and the organization’s are seen as aligned.
• There is an emphasis on matching people with the right job and then retaining them.

In a truly flexible organization…flexibility RULES:

• Quite literally: flexibility is the rule, rather than the exception.
• It is applied broadly, to employees at all levels, and in a wide variety of forms.
• People across the organization recognize that flexibility is not just beneficial for employees, it is also strategically important to the business.
• Leaders and managers are committed to making flexible work viable.
• People working flexibly have equal access to advancement, status, and good quality assignments. Their work is an integral part of the business.
• The fact that employees have lives outside of work is recognized and respected. Employees know they can set boundaries on their work time or accessibility without penalty, as long as they get their job done.
• Messages that come from the top—about values and mission and vision—explicitly recognize the value of employees having choice and control over how, when and and where they work.

Flexibility is used to ATTRACT good employees:

• Talent acquisition processes and messages appeal to people who value flexibility and the fact that flexible work is possible is clearly communicated.
• Hiring practices are designed to make it easy to hire people who need and/or want to work flexibly.

Flexibility is part of a strong employment BRAND:

• It’s part of the organization’ss internal and external self-image, or brand.

Flexibility is recognized as an expression of DIVERSITY:

• There is recogntion that without flexibility, full inclusion is impossible to attain.
• Flexibility is used to knock down any barriers to full inclusion.

OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS are aligned with flexibility:

• Flexible ways of working are embedded into organiztional systems and processes — built into performance management programs, leadership training programs, career development programs, health and wellness initiatives, facilities planning, technology, etc.

The outcomes of all this flexibility are MEASURED and used for planning purposes:

• The organization tracks the various forms of flexibility used, how it all works for individuals, teams and managers and how it affects their performance.
• The organization measures its progress relative to its peers to ensure that it keeps moving forward toward greater integration of flexible practices.
• It also tracks the overall impact of the flexible practices on its performance as a business.

In short, in a fully flexible organization, obstacles are removed and flexibility is embedded into all of the functions of the organization. It is considered the normal way of working and managing — an ‘of course; that’s the way we do things around here.’

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger April 24th, 2009

Juliet Bourke, BA, LLB, LLM (Hons), is a partner at Aequus Partners in Sydney, Australia. Aequus Partners is a highly respected management consultancy that combines the disciplines of psychology and law to assist organizations with flexible work practices, diversity and well-being. This blog originally ran on the Huffington Post on April 6, 2009. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

Since December 2008, Aequus Partners has been tracking the response of human resource (HR) professionals to the global financial crisis (GFC) — in terms of agility (how quickly can HR turn on its toes and change tack — e.g., from talent acquisition to retention?) and thought leadership (how can HR help pull businesses back from “knee jerk” retrenchments?). In particular, we have been looking at whether and how HR professionals have been able to wrap their minds around a new agenda for flexibility and the centrality of that agenda to business survival.

Of course we have been looking at public reports, but to identify under-the-radar practices, we facilitated a workshop on “Navigating rocky business waters with flexibility” at a national conference of HR professionals  in early April in Sydney, Australia. Our intention was to stimulate a discussion among HR leaders about the strategies they have been using to position flexible work practices (e.g., reduced hours, taking voluntary leave and working from home) as critical and viable alternatives to layoffs, because these practices can help reduce capital and labor costs yet retain talent for the upswing.

Our bottom line proposition was that the global financial crisis provides HR with a unique opportunity to demonstrate its value to business — namely, how to survive, if not thrive, under extremely challenging conditions. One hundred percent of the HR attendees agreed that talking about flexibility was relevant to their business’ needs, so what was distressing was the lack of quality of the discussion among this group about what they are doing (indeed 77 percent said that the information we provided was new to them so they were nowhere near the “how to” phase ). It’s as if they are looking for someone else to lead the way.

To be fair, we are all working this out as we go along. But what I want to say is: this is the moment HR has been waiting for, so seize the day. Lift your heads up from processing layoffs to think strategically. HR can be the business partner it should be by developing a sophisticated flexibility versus layoffs equation (which takes into account the obvious and hidden costs — e.g., the lower levels of engagement demonstrated by “survivors”), and then presenting business with clear, step-by-step, flexibility implementation options. Those options include developing a flexibility policy with an authentic statement of intent (i.e., communicating that flexibility is good for business because it will help to navigate the GFC), offering flexible work practices to staff across the board, skilling up managers to be able to implement the new agenda (e.g., by addressing their negative mindset or lack-of-confidence issues), and looking at job-redesign. As the Chinese proverb says, a crisis in an opportunity riding the dangerous wind. It’s not rocket science that is needed right now, but smarts and the courage of HR professionals to step up and demonstrate that we can help navigate this crisis with thought leadership.

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Featured Guest Blogger April 13th, 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’m usually out in the trenches, talking with employers about flexible work practices or others who monitor their attitudes. As I hear their questions and hunt for answers, I notice some that seem to not yet have been answered. So, I pass them on to those of you who do research and discover answers so well. I should say up front that if anyone’s already doing this work, I’m eager to know about it. Let’s get the word out.

I’ll mention three in this blog:

1. Who Requires What Type Of Flexibility?

Overall, it would be great for research to now get very specific. We know most people (across genders and generations) want more flexibility in general, but we seem to know less about how important specific forms of flex are, especially informal flexibility and the newer forms of flex, like reduced work schedule options and career flexibility. We also don’t know much about those preferences by the types of jobs or education level. It would be great to show employers that highly skilled or people in shortest supply (engineers, medical technologists or IT people), for example, crave a reduced work hours option or some other option. Employers understand that flex is valuable, but not how valuable, what types of flex exactly, for whom, and in what situation.

For example, what is the importance of flexible options or a flexible climate in whether an employee chooses to stay or leave? In these days of job loss it’s easy for employers to think that people will work in whatever way the company requires. To enlighten them, it can help to show if and for whom flexibility is a requirement rather than a “nice-to-have.”

2. Flexible Rightsizing vs. Layoffs

There are great conversations now happening about the advantages to employers of ‘flexible rightsizing’ (using flexible work options to reduce personnel and other costs) in lieu of layoffs. I’m participating in an effort spearheaded by WorldAtWork that identifies the various savings from across-the-board layoffs vs. the advantages of flexible rightsizing.

If an organization chooses flexible rightsizing and invites, for example, employees across the board to choose a reduced work schedule or to take time off without pay with job protection, there are direct and indirect benefits. All are ripe for research. An earlier study by Wayne Cascio (Responsible Restructuring, 2002) found that organizations that downsized unilaterally weren’t even more profitable in the short run, let alone the long run. An update of that analysis would be very valuable. Research exploring the other effects would be incredibly valuable right now, especially if it can be done quickly. For example, researchers might look at how layoff survivors behave (perhaps less risk-taking) vs. the greater focus, sense of security and reduced stress of employees in organizations that use flexible rightsizing. I’m especially curious about whether allowing people to take unpaid downtime or work on a reduced schedule for a while gives exhausted people (which is most of us) a chance to rest and rejuvenate. I wonder if it’s true that they are qualitatively more effective from this break, and in what ways, e.g., more focused, creative or relating to coworkers and/or customers differently. It makes sense to me, but it would be great to explore and document.

3. How to Do it Well – Flexibility

There has been much research groundwork laid about why it’s important for organizations to transition to a flexible way of managing people. What has been investigated less is what it means to do it well and how doing it in specific ways impacts desirable outcomes for employees, teams, and organizations. We know that culture and communication matter, but it would be great to take it another level and get very specific for those seeking to apply research findings in their organizations.

I celebrate and appreciate the important research you all do and invite your comments or questions.

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Julie Schwartz Weber April 8th, 2009

As a lawyer -mom, who knows first hand how challenging it can be to balance law and family, I was not surprised by the new Catalyst Quick Takes Report, “Women in Law in the U.S.” This report reveals that female lawyers have yet to achieve parity in position and salary to male lawyers. Highlights of the report include:

• While women make up almost half of the student body at most law schools and nearly 1 out of every 2 law firm associates, they account for only 1 in 6 equity partners.
  *     Catalyst predicts that women will not achieve parity in law firm partnerships until 2088.
• Women were general counsels at 82 (16%) of Fortune 500 companies in 2008.
• “Women lawyers made 80.5% of men lawyers’ salaries in 2008.”
• “90% of law firms reported that their highest paid lawyer was a man.”
• “Nearly half as many men lawyers as women lawyers (44% v. 84%) have a spouse that is employed full-time.”
• 1 in 8 women lawyers work part-time, while only 1 in 50 men lawyers do so.
• Women of color face additional barriers, as they represent only 10.7% of all associates and 1.9% of all partners.

Unfortunately, the back story is not new: Women lawyers are opting out or being pushed out of traditional legal positions due to competing responsibilities, or perceived responsibilities, in the home arena (childcare, care of the elderly, tending to the home) and/or due to their exclusion from traditional male networks and mentoring opportunities.

Still, there is good news–there are a number of groups that have a continued and impassioned interest in helping women achieve parity and work/life balance in the legal field. For instance, the Project for Attorney Retention (PAR) works to “reduce unwanted attrition among lawyers, a benefit for both legal employers and lawyers, by promoting work/life balance and the advancement of women in the legal profession.” Similarly, FlexTime Lawers consults nationally to “law firms, corporations and lawyers on work/life balance and the retention and promotion of women attorneys.” Even law students, male and female, are getting in on the action, and seeking change in the legal work structure.

Some people say that the legal profession is not able to change, and that the profession, by its nature, is “a jealous mistress and requires a long and constant courtship.” Others, however, think differently:  Can the “long and constant courtship” still occur against the backdrop of flexible work arrangements and alternative career paths? Shouldn’t these flexible courses be available to both men and women? Isn’t this good for men, women, and families?

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