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Judi Casey November 4th, 2009

This blog by our Director/Principal Investigator Judi Casey originally ran on The Huffington Post on October 27, 2009.

Summer vacation season is over and we have definitely moved into fall. As we celebrated National Work and Family Month this October, I wanted to look back to see if workers took vacations this summer, identify the benefits of vacations and discuss the status of vacations in the U.S. Vacations are a critical work-family issue as they provide an opportunity to relax, reconnect with the important people in our lives, and have time to pursue our personal passions.

A poll conducted from August 1-September 11, 2009 on the Sloan Work and Family Research Network website found the following among 74 respondents:

Are you taking vacation time this summer?

Yes, I am taking the time that I desire ….. 23%

Yes, but I am taking less time than I want to ….. 30%

No, I don’t have the money for vacation this year ….. 27%

No, I’m too busy at work ….. 14%

No, I am afraid that it will put my job at risk ….. 7%

So, what does this tell us? Granted, this is a small, rather unscientific sample, but only about a quarter of respondents took the time that they wanted. Another 30% took some time, but wish that they could have taken more. Just under half (48%) did not take vacation time because they didn’t have the money, were too busy, or were afraid that it would put their jobs at risk. Half of the respondents did take some time off, but almost half did not. Should we be concerned?

An interesting article by David Rock in Psychology Today found that if you are a knowledge worker who thinks for work, there are benefits to a break. He reports that time away from a problem allows you to get unstuck from your typical way of viewing situations and promotes new perspectives. Research also finds that we are more effective at solving difficult problems when our minds are less cluttered, which is more likely to occur if we get our heads out of work — for example, by taking a vacation.

A new report by the Families and Work Institute, “The State of Health in the American Workforce,” found a decrease over the past 6 years in the number of employees indicating that their overall health is “excellent” (from 34 to 28%). Co-author Ellen Galinsky says, ” …organizations can promote wellness by monitoring overwork and providing and encouraging employees to take their vacations.” Other indicators of poorer health include more stress, clinical depression, difficulty sleeping, and medical conditions such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol. Read more here.

Author Joe Robinson echoes these findings in his book, Work to Live. People who take vacations are less likely to have heart attacks or other illnesses compared to those who don’t take vacations. “But it only starts to work that way when you take at least a two-week block of time,” says Robinson. A long weekend or a few days off doesn’t promote better health; we need a chunk of time off to reap positive health benefits.

Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is an outlier around vacation time with 137 countries (including all industrialized nations) mandating a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation time. In the U.S., there are no laws requiring employees to have any paid vacation time so employers offer paid vacation time at their discretion. As noted by Julie Weber here on the Work and Family Blog,

“The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that about one fourth of the U.S. workforce has no paid vacation in the course of their work year. Part-time workers, low-income earners, and workers in small establishments (fewer than 100 workers) are less likely to receive paid vacation and paid holidays, and when they do, these workers receive fewer paid days off.”

Thankfully, there has been some recent attention in the U.S. to mandating vacation time. In May of this year, Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to require that employers provide a minimum of 1 week of paid annual leave to employees at companies with at least 100 employees. Advocates of the bill note that vacations are important for family well-being as well as for improving workplace productivity.

Vacations — who needs them? We all do! What is it going to take to move us from a nation of overworked, unhealthy, stressed out Americans with no time to relax, explore our passions or engage with our families? Of course, we have to start by taking care of ourselves as much as that is realistic given our financial and employment situations these days. We definitely need to prioritize taking vacation time, but this can’t just be an individual responsibility. Supervisors and managers have to support our efforts to take a vacation, so we can return to work as more productive and healthier contributors.

Employers have to support the use — not just the availability — of vacation time. This requires changing the culture of the workplace and moving our thinking from vacation as a burden for the work team and for the organization to an opportunity for employees to recharge so they’ll return to work more creative and engaged.

• Leave , Organizations , Overwork , Research , Scheduling , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger November 2nd, 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.

We connect with millions of people across the globe, yet we have trouble sitting down to share a meal with those we love. We’re often so busy being “productive” that we wind up racing right past the important moments in life.

I’m thinking about time because I just wrote one of my “Balancing Acts” columns in the Globe on the declining health of the American worker. Our experience of time is a key to understanding how we can gain a better quality of life, with deeper human connections.

The new report by the Families and Work Institute shows that too many of us are fat, sick, sleepless and inactive. Just 28 percent of U.S. workers say their health is excellent, down from 34 percent six years ago. Workers in poor health are less likely to be loyal, engaged and satisfied with their jobs, the findings show.

Why are we so unhealthy? Certainly, many of us don’t exercise or eat right, and at the heart of these poor habits is often a time drought. About 60 percent feel they don’t have time for themselves, and an equal number report a lack of time for a partner or spouse. Chillingly, 75 percent report not having enough time with their children.

Moreover, those who most often don’t have enough time for the important people in their lives report poorer health – more depression, higher stress, more minor health problems. Nearly half of people who often or very often don’t have time for family and friends show signs of depression, compared with a third of those who sometimes feel this kind of time famine.

Vacations boost health, too. People with paid vacation time are less depressed and stressed than those without any paid holidays. The longer the vacation taken, the more likely a worker is to show few minor health problems. Still, 40 percent of workers don’t take all their vacation time, and the longest vacation taken on average in 2008 was nine days.

I believe that as a result of the mechanization of the Industrial and Digital Ages, we now pattern ourselves after our machinery. We seem to believe that we can be 24/7 beings, who interact in snippets and tweets, measuring our worth quantitatively. This collective adoration of the machine changes our experience of time, and squeezes the serendipity, mystery, and poetry out of our lives. And it just might be killing us, too.

• Overwork , Scheduling , Spillover , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger October 19th, 2009

Brad Harrington is Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family and a research professor in the Carroll School of Management. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

This week you will likely hear quite a bit in the media about a report being published by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress called A Woman’s Nation. The goal of this undertaking has been to provide an in-depth look at the status of women in America from a number of different perspectives and across a wide range of sectors - healthcare, higher education, law, public service, policy, etc. It replicates a report that was done by Eleanor Roosevelt in the early 1960’s at the request of President Kennedy (Ms. Shriver’s late uncle.) Look for a Time cover story and extensive coverage on this week’s “Meet the Press”, “NBC Nightly News”, and “The Today Show” (for those of you in the United States) regarding the report and its findings. As part of the report, I was pleased to be the lead author, along with Professor Jamie Ladge of Northeastern University, of the chapter on women in business. We titled our piece “Got Talent? It isn’t Hard to Find” for a very simple reason. Present recession aside, we have heard for so long about the war for talent and the tremendous emphasis leading HR departments put on talent management. I often find these discussions ironic in light of the fact that there are so many talented individuals right under our noses (i.e., women) who are either lost to an organization (i.e., they leave their present employer or opt out altogether) or underutilized due to outmoded management thinking. In our chapter, we lay out six key points, none of which will be surprising to you who are so close to these issues:

• The case for women in business is a talent management one, pure and simple. For a knowledge-based economy like ours, the numbers are truly staggering. Fifty-seven percent of all college degrees are awarded to women each year. Yet many organizations are still reluctant to make even minimal adjustments to ensure they are creating jobs that fit the needs of their “most valuable resource.” If women made up 10 or even 20% of new college graduates, one could argue that organizations don’t have to adjust to retain top talent. But modifying HR practices for 57% of new grads isn’t an accommodation, it’s common sense.
• We have made progress on gender equity on many work fronts, but when it comes to home life women with children still contribute twice the number of hours to dependent care and domestic tasks as men do. That’s reality. So while men have increased their commitment to care giving, the “second shift” that we discussed 20 years ago is still alive and well.
• In spite of the progress women have made in business, they are at the helm of only 3% of the Fortune 1000 companies. This means that women must continue to operate in organizational cultures that are designed by and for men. This creates a myriad of challenges for women who need to adapt to male dominated organizations and ground rules and adopt male oriented ways of operating in order to succeed. Much recent research suggests that women’s ways of leading is at least as effective as more male-oriented approaches, but unfortunately the dominant culture can easily discount new and different forms of leadership as being inappropriate simply because it does not fit pre-conceived stereotypes of how leaders should behave.
• The highest impact actions that employers can take to help women thrive in business cost almost nothing. These include letting go of outdated mental models that suggest there is only one way to work, there is only one place to work, that a 40+ hour work week is the only model for contributing, and a standardized, rigid career path for all is a desirable norm. Rather, we should aim for highly flexible career models that can be customized to maximize the contributions of all employees, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Those companies that do offer innovative and flexible approaches to work too often limit their offerings to professional and managerial staff. The case for innovation and flexibility are at least as appropriate for hourly workers who often face greater work-life challenges than salaried workers do. And in many industries, retaining this talent base is every bit as important. Hourly workers in a wide variety of businesses (think retailing, banking, restaurants, hotels, etc.) are the critical means for delivering an organization’s value proposition and provide the company’s face to the customer.
• Finally, the United States federal government must take a more active role in developing and encouraging family friendly policies. FMLA, our great legislative triumph in the work family arena over the last 20 years, places the U.S. as one of only four industrialized countries in the world that does not by law offer paid maternity leave. Can we seriously view ourselves as world leaders in gender equality when this is the only mandated support we provide to working people with acute dependent care issues?

Not much is new to your ears here, I’m sure. But now is the time for the business community to stop debating and begin embracing the world as it really is today. The subtitle of A Women’s Nation is “This Changes Everything.” And it’s about time that it did.

• Publications , Research , Scheduling , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger October 5th, 2009

Juliet Bourke is a partner at Aequus Partners. She works with leading organizations to develop and implement organizational change strategies to promote equity and diversity, deliver training programs, and conduct workplace investigations and mediations. Juliet Bourke is also a part-time chairperson with the Government and Related Employees Appeals Tribunal, in which capacity she conciliates and determines workplace disputes. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

I recently experienced the visceral alienation of those who fall outside the “work/family” paradigm and it brought me up short. Of course I have written about a “work/life” approach–in an effort to be inclusive–but if I am honest I probably had more of my heart in the “work/family” camp.

My wake-up call came about this way:

Last month, I was commissioned to write an on-line opinion (for a national news service) about the recently introduced “right to request flexibility” (“r2r”) laws in Australia.  Under this law, from January 1, 2010, eligible employees will have the right to request of their employers access to a flexible work arrangement.  The legislation also provides that an employer must respond in writing in 21 days and that a request can only be refused on “reasonable business grounds.”

I’m a big fan of the r2r, but I titled my opinion “Looking past a golden opportunity” to highlight some research we had conducted that found that  3 months out from the start date of the r2r, the majority of employees and managers are unlikely to be aware of their new rights. Given that the legislation provides a workable framework for transparent conversations about flexibility and evidence-based decision-making I see this knowledge gap as problematic. And that was the focus of my article–or so I thought.  What was picked up by the deluge of on-line comments was the unfairness of legislation which gives rights to some people (namely parents with children under school age, or children under 18 with a disability), and not others. For example:

• “It’s always the breeders who take the rights. What about special consideration for those caring for aged or infirm parents or siblings or partners? When I hear ‘family friendly practices’ I want to vomit.”
• “Those of us who choose to benefit the planet rather than selfishly pass on our own equally worthwhile genes, by remaining childfree get what? Stuff all …”

I was stunned.  I had struck a nerve, but not the one I had intended.  I had thought that readers would see the logic of a legislative starting point that was relatively narrow in nature, i.e., one that would allow employers to get used to the new regime and then lead to expanded rights over time for all carers, which is exactly what had happened in the United Kingdom.  What (some) readers saw was exclusion: working parents are in an inner circle that is deemed worthy of primary support and they are not.

It struck me that they are right.  So many of our legislative initiatives have working parents at the center, working families (e.g., those with elder care responsibilities) in the outer ring, and working “lifers” (do we even have a name for this group?) left out. This carries over into workplace policies.  We may entitle the policy “work/life”, but what we really mean is “work/family”, and what gets pride of place even in this group are “parents”.  How can we expect employees to behave in a collegiate way towards each other if our workplace practices endorse a hierarchy of “needs”?  I may have opened a can of worms here, but isn’t it time we face-up to the practical consequences of paying lip-service to the work/life agenda?

• Flexible Schedules , Policy , Publications , Workplace
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Julie Schwartz Weber September 30th, 2009

While part-time work has been a viable option for many workers attempting to balance work and family lives, it has not, generally or traditionally, been available to most law partners. In fact, historically, working part-time in the law has been seen as professional suicide. However, a new study just released by The Project for Attorney Retention, Reduced Hours, Full Success: Part-Time Partners in U.S. Law Firms, demonstrates that there is evidence that providing part-time partners options to employees can be a “win-win” for employees and firms. More specifically, this report shows that law firms can successfully implement reduced-hour programs and that part-time lawyers and their law firms will prosper because of these programs.

The premise of the report is that part-time partners are “key to the law firms’ long-term financial health” and that providing part-time partnership options affords firms the opportunity to attract and retain excellent lawyers from a larger pool of applicants, including groups that value work-life balance (e.g., mothers and Generation Yers). This report also asserts that providing part-time partnership options helps firms “save recruiting costs by hiring fewer new lawyers, retain a diverse group of lawyers, reduce attrition costs, attract new clients, and increase the satisfaction of current clients.”

Some of the key findings of the report include the following:

1. Part-time partners rarely work set schedules and their schedules are mainly driven by client needs (with many such partners regularly working more than 40 hours a week);
2. Reduced hours programs attracted and retained many partners, and in fact, many lawyers were drawn to their firms because of the possibility of reduced hours;
3. Client service is not compromised by part-time schedules, and in many cases, clients are unaware of the part-time schedule due to the responsiveness and availability of the partners;
4. Many part-time partners are financially successful at their firms, and that, in fact, part-time lawyers generate significant revenue both from their own billable hours and from the origination of new business;
5. Most part-time partners (60%) from the study reported they did not feel stigmatized because of their part-time status.

In addition to its main findings, the report also includes “Best Practices Recommendations for Law Firms,” which provides specific steps firms can take to invest in their part-time partners and thus their firm’s bottom line. Moreover, this new report includes “Recommendations for a Successful Part-Time Partnership,” drawn directly from respondents’ experiences and written for attorneys who are hoping to be successful part-time partners.

• Part-Time Work , Publications , Research , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger September 21st, 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.

If we are to see truly flexible workplaces anytime soon,  it’s important that we get beyond our own circles and collaborate with new partners whose interests align with ours. I’d like to see us pay more attention to business continuity planners.

It’s easy to superficially add ‘business continuity’ to the list of advantages brought by flexible workplaces — businesses can continue operating in an emergency if teams are skilled at flexible work. But as I read more deeply about it, I find some gems that make my eyes pop out. One in five US businesses suffers a disaster that causes it to cease operations for a time. Of course there are the big ones — earthquakes, tornadoes, horrific man-made disasters, but did you know the scale? Seventy-five of them in 2008, says FEMA. And, 43% of companies that go through a severe crisis never open their doors again; another 29% fail within 2 years. Add to that the day-to-day, basement-flooding variety that may not put a company out of business but still throws a big kink into productivity, and it’s clear why disaster plans need to be taken seriously.

Disaster plans typically involve paying to reserve alternative space in which to operate in the event of a disaster. Ah, but if people are already equipped, trained, and comfortable working from home or some alternate workplace (that serves lattes), it means those costs are avoided and can be added to the plus column of direct savings (aka ‘hard dollars’) from flexible work. Put that in your flexibility ROI analysis! I certainly added it to our white paper on the business case for workplace flexibility public policies: Flexible Work: In Whose Best Interest?

The real kicker, though, is this: we proponents of flexibility struggle to get businesses to ‘offer’ flex. As disaster planners see that teams who can work on the spur of the moment from anywhere, anytime can literally save the business, the disaster planners have begun to do something we have not. They have begun to require (yes, I said ‘require’) that teams (individuals, managers, and executives) practice working flexibly on a regular basis. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people will not remember the access codes, know the tricks for sharing documents, etc. — all the things that are critical to smoothly functioning in an emergency.

When the disaster planning team says, ‘you will do this’….everyone listens. Now that’s a partner.

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Publications , Workplace
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Judi Casey September 16th, 2009

We just finished our Year 2 (July 1, 2008-June 30, 2009) report for the Sloan Foundation.  It’s been a great year! Traffic to the Network website has tripled over the past year to over 300,000 unique visitors and over 550,000 page views (compared to 104,318 visits last year, when our visits doubled from the previous year). Through direct outreach and site traffic, we added 682 new affiliates.  Lastly, we received two Apex Awards for our high-quality monthly newsletter, the Network News.

According to Google Analytics, the top five downloaded documents were:

1. Flexible Work Schedules Fact Sheet, a compilation of stats in Q&A format by topic,  answers the following questions:
   • Are workers satisfied with their work-family balance?
   • How do families deal with the work-family time crunch?
   • Do workers have access to flexible work schedules?
   • Much more!
2. Effective Workplace Series: Flexible Work Schedule, a one-page summary of our Topic Page, considers:
   • Why are organizations implementing flexible work schedules?
   • What are the benefits of flexible work schedules?
   • Why are flexible work schedules an important workplace issue?
3. Women in the Workplace Fact Sheet focuses on
   • How many women are in the workforce?
   • Where are women working?
   • What is the impact of women in leadership positions?
4. Generation X/Generation Y Fact Sheet looks at
   • How have gender roles in the workforce and at home changed for Generation X and Generation Y?
   • How does Generation Y make employment decisions?
   • What does Generation Y expect from and value about their careers?
5. Changing Definition of Families Fact Sheet explores
   • How have families changed?
   • How have marriage trends changed?
   • What do we know about households today?

Check them out if you haven’t read them.

• Definition of Family , Flexible Schedules , Gen X/Gen Y , Publications
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Featured Guest Blogger September 7th, 2009

by Liz Watson, Legislative Counsel, and Jessica Glenn, Communications Specialist, of Workplace Flexibility 2010.

This year, workers and their families across the country felt the impact of serious economic downturn, with unemployment reaching a 26-year high. While recent news suggests things may be improving, we cannot forget that for many low-wage and hourly workers–who now represent over a quarter of the U.S. workforce–the recession only exacerbated their ongoing struggle to hold down quality jobs while caring for their families.

Low-wage workers face many of the same challenges that the rest of us face in reconciling our work, family and personal lives, but for many of these workers, it’s simply a whole lot harder. Low-wage workers are more likely to face involuntary part-time work, rigid or unpredictable schedules, or night, evening and weekend work, all of which can have serious consequences for families, including unstable and inadequate child care, poor health outcomes, family instability, missed work, lost and unstable income and job loss.

A persuasive case has been made that access to various forms of time off are critical to low-wage workers’ job quality, economic security, and family and individual health. More recently, research has shown that Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs)–including meaningful input into work schedules, as well as predictable and stable work schedules–are also important parts of the solution. Although FWAs cannot ease all the complex struggles facing low-wage workers, they are a key part of a larger solution that will increase low-wage workers’ ability to raise healthy families and achieve financial security.

FWAs can help workers provide care for young children, aging relatives, and other loved ones while remaining effective on the job. They can enable workers to stay on top of their own medical care, which reaps benefits for employees and employers alike. FWAs can also help workers access advanced job training in order to expand opportunities for meaningful work and to build family assets. For employers, FWAs help achieve a more stable and predictable workforce and improve employee engagement and productivity.

This year, WF2010 has taken a close look at the role FWAs can play in improving job quality for low-wage workers and increasing workforce stability for employers across a range of industries, occupations and work schedules. In January, we hosted a community forum in partnership with Step Up Savannah, an initiative that works to reduce pervasive poverty in the community of Savannah, Georgia as an economic development strategy. During the forum, we heard directly from local employers, nonprofit and government agency representatives and community advocates about the challenges facing Savannah’s low-wage employees–specifically, the negative consequences that arise from a lack of needed control and predictability in their work schedules. We engaged in in-depth conversations on how innovative workplace flexibility policies can help Savannah’s low-income workers maintain meaningful employment while allowing the city’s employers to reduce turnover, enhance job performance, and increase their competitive advantage.

In July, we co-hosted a briefing with the New America Foundation that examined the particular challenges low-wage workers face in balancing the vicissitudes of life with work schedules that are often rigid or unpredictable. Panelists presented the latest research on scheduling challenges and best practice solutions to these challenges from the research and business community. The briefing also highlighted the increasingly powerful business case for expanding access to flexible work arrangements for low-wage workers. Employers now implementing FWAs for hourly and low-wage workers are reducing costs associated with turnover and overtime in addition to improving workers’ satisfaction and well-being and increasing productivity. We know that FWAs make a tremendous difference to low-wage workers and their employers and yet very few low-wage workers have access to FWAs.

Our goal is to identify which types of FWAs are most salient to low-wage workers and their employers across a range of industries, employers, and occupations and develop a range of public policy ideas for making those FWAs widely available. In the private sector, innovative pilot programs have explored what types of FWAs can make a significant difference in the lives of low-wage and hourly workers and to discover which FWAs can improve business outcomes. In our Public Policy Platform on Flexible Work Arrangements released this spring, we called for the federal government to begin a pilot program requiring federal contractors to offer hourly workers at least two types of FWAs and to fund similar pilots in the private sector, with both researchers and businesses at the helm.

Although FWAs are historically associated with middle and higher-income workers, innovators across a range of perspectives are working to change that.  (See an extended list of resources on FWAs for Lower-Wage Workers here).  In the coming months, we hope to contribute to this dialog a robust range of policy ideas to make FWAs more widely available to low-wage workers.

For more information on Workplace Flexibility 2010’s recent work, please see our July Network News interview with Chai Feldblum and Katie Corrigan.

• Flexible Schedules , Policy , Publications , Research , Workplace
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Judi Casey August 19th, 2009

As I blogged last month, the IESE Business School of Barcelona, Spain recently hosted the Third International Work and Family Conference on “Harmonizing Work, Family and Personal Life in Times of Crisis.” Some of the participants, including yours truly, made short, videotaped interviews about current work-life trends and issues. The interviewees answered the following questions:

1. How have companies’ work-life policies been affected by the global crisis?  Do you think companies will continue using established work-life polices or will any polices be suspended?
2. How have employees been dealing with the present situation? Do they find that they have more pressure to perform and need to take on additional workloads?

You can hear the opinions of many work-life experts about these issues on this video, including Jeff Greenhaus, Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Tammy Allen and Karen Korabik, to name a few.

For more about how the global recession is affecting employers, the Families and Work Institute (FWI) just released a timely report, The Impact of the Recession on Employers. This nationally representative sample of 400 employers is the only one I know of that specifically investigates the impact of the recession on workplace flexibility efforts. FWI reports that “most employers are either maintaining the workplace flexibility they offer (81%) or increasing it (13%) during the recession….While more than a quarter (28%) have turned to involuntary reduction in hours, a comparable percentage (29%) have used voluntary reductions in hours. And perhaps surprisingly, 57% report giving employees some or a lot of say about the schedules they now work. (pg. 1)”

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Publications , Research , Workplace
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Featured Guest Blogger August 17th, 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.

What makes it legitimate for people to work flexibly isn’t whether their company has a policy allowing it, but whether there is a subtle (or not-so-subtle) penalty for doing so.  Below are four examples of characteristics of a flexible culture, which although rarely focused on, have everything to do with whether the culture supports flexibility.

• Are people who request flexibility or who already work flexibly considered equal in terms of their access to advancement, status, integration into the business, or quality of assignments?

Are those who work a reduced work schedule, for example, considered on an equal par for professional development, as future management material, as ‘high potentials’? Or by definition are ‘high potentials’ the individuals who always put work first and work long hours?  Are the best clients, projects, challenging work opportunities given to the people who work from the office, rather then remotely – because subtly, the manager thinks they are easier to reach?

• Are people valued who–although accomplishing their work well– set boundaries on their time and/or accessibility?

How okay is it to say ‘no’?  When someone consistently leaves ‘early’ (because they may have started earlier than others), or says they cannot do a client meeting when they are on vacation, or isn’t available for spur-of-the-moment overtime, or doesn’t answer email at all hours — do they subtly lose points?  Or is their commitment, engagement, and responsiveness determined by whether they ultimately deliver on their core responsibilities?

• Does the organizational climate recognize and respect that employees have lives outside of work?

Where once the core workforce had an ‘invisible’ support system at home (otherwise known as a wife) that allowed workers to focus exclusively on work when they were at work, those days are long gone.  The typical worker now has a dual focus (navigating work and personal responsibilities at the same time).  But most organizational cultures haven’t quite adapted. So when an employee cannot take on business travel easily, or attend business social events, or needs to take time off in the middle of the day to take children to the dentist – it requires a shift in mindset.  Attendance policies are a good example.  Once they were a key factor in measuring performance – missing 3 days in a quarter was a slippery slope to dismissal.  Now even the best performers must adjust their schedules occasionally.  Attendance alone is no longer a good indicator of job performance or commitment.

• Do cultural norms assume people are not always available to attend to work beyond work hours?

There is an unrelenting tug-of-war between the blessing and curse of 24/7 electronic access.  Do leaders make a point to say, “I don’t expect an instant reply on weekends or holidays”?  What practices do individuals who are considered to be the ‘best’ follow?  Or is there a Jack Welch-like pride in scheduling last-minute Saturday morning meetings that weed out the so-called non-serious team members?  The question is – are long hours and constant availability equated with high performance?  In a human capital environment where the ability to do reflective thinking — be rested and clear-headed, the ability to set your own limits and manage your own attention lead to the best performance.

These ideas, brought to our attention by Lotte Bailyn and her colleagues, rarely receive the attention they deserve.  There is much that must change in a transition from a 9-to-5 culture to a fluid culture that takes advantage of what’s possible now in flexible work (call it ‘anytime, anywhere work’).  Underlying elements like these are among the most important in making it a reality.

• Flexible Schedules , Organizations , Workplace
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