How Have Employees and Employers Managed During the Global Economic Crisis?

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:

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?
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)”