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Women can have it all… if we get rid of “time macho”

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:49:35 +0000

Want to start a flurry on the internet? Wade into the always fraught discussion about how women should balance work and family commitments. Any piece on the topic is bound to spark a raging debate as Princeton professor and Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter recently confirmed with her Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in which she discusses at length her decision to give up a high-powered State Department job to spend more time with her teenaged sons.

With its catnip title backed up with a thoughtful exploration of a difficult and emotional issue, the article has generated a predictably frantic round of response and recrimination online. But even for those who weren’t dying for another rehashing of the limitations (or lack of them) society and biology puts on women’s life choices, the piece offers food for thought, particularly for those thinking about the future of work and the role of remote collaboration.

Slaughter bemoans the “culture of ‘time macho’—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.” And argues that it’s time to decouple face time and achievement in favor of more tech-enabled flexibility not just for women but for all workers. She writes:

A study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization… Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.

One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon….

Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.”

Do you agree with Slaughter’s diagnosis that “time macho” is a problem and her prescription of tech and thoughtful flex-work policies to cure it?

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3 ways to get middle managers on board with flexible working

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:03:35 +0000

Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But at the same time study after study reveals middle managers resist the idea as undermining their control and burdening them with additional responsibilities. While your initial impulse to this reality may be to throw up your hands in frustration and declare them dinosaurs, a recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation took a more constructive approach.

Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?

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Flexible work isn’t working for most

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:03:01 +0000

Flexible working is often touted not only as a way to improve employee morale and motivation, but also a benefit that helps stretched families maintain their sanity and their budgets despite economic and time pressures. Framed this way, it’s hard for companies to come straight out and declare they’re not interested in supporting employees with flex work policies, but just because most companies now pay lip service to flexible work, does that mean the practice is really benefiting most workers?

That’s what Stephen Sweet, a professor of sociology at Ithaca College and a visiting scholar at Boston College’s Sloan Center on Aging & Work, aimed to find out with an analysis of surveys of U.S. companies in all sectors that the Center conducted in 2009. The results are less than uniformly encouraging for fans of flexible ways of working.

Sweet found that highly educated workers in sectors like law, medicine and higher education are clearly seeing the benefits of employers’ professed interest in flexibility. Workers in these relatively elite professions use the policies to cut back on their hours when they face personal crises large or small and face few negative repercussions from doing so. But the positive effects of these policies have yet to trickle down to lower-skilled workers who, due to their tighter budgets, are presumably most in need of help balancing their home and professional commitments. Lower-skilled workers, Sweet argues, face different challenges that highly educated ones, and this makes them unable to take advantage of helpful flexible work programs. Sweet writes:

Most flexible work options are of the “move work” variety — allowing employees to choose where or when they will do their jobs. These options rarely reduce workloads and only limited segments of the labor force have the resources needed to pause work — such as to take a temporary break from their jobs (to care for a family member, for example). That’s a big problem for many workers at stressful junctures in their personal lives, and leads to overwork, which studies show diminishes productivity. The types of flexibility that workers need most — cutting back on hours or going on leave — are least likely to be within their reach…..

Workers laboring in sectors that rely on low-skilled jobs (such as accommodation and food services) commonly experience the dark side of flexibility. In these sectors, flexibility is not an option to be desired. Instead it’s a source of unpredictability, with work shifts and the number of hours on the job subject to change from week to week. For these people, the problem is not finding ways to reduce workloads but rather, finding ways to scrape enough work together to make a living on low wages.

While one could argue that it’s better for a cleaner or a cook to be able to rearrange their hours around a sick kid or a car in the shop than to be stuck in an inflexible schedule, Sweet isn’t very positive about the current state of flexible working for this hard-pressed segment of the workforce, nor is he hugely optimistic about the future. “The bright side of flexibility is unlikely to be the natural evolution of workplace design,” he says, noting that the declining power of unions prevents them from pushing to make the benefits of flexible working available to a wider spectrum of workers.

“The question today concerns how to expand the bright side of flexible work to wider segments of the workforce – especially the options to reduce work,” he concludes. “Until we are able to do this, lives will continue to be reconfigured to match the workplace, rather than workplaces configured to match lives.”

Do you see any way to bring the benefits of flexible work to lower-skilled workers?

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Study: Dads turning to web work to relieve work-life conflict

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:02:39 +0000

Not too long ago flexible work and work-from-home arrangements were often thought of as a benefit for mothers, allowing working moms more time with their kids. But with Father’s Day just behind us, a new study out of Boston College’s Center for Work and Family reveals that today’s dads are just as likely to need web-enabled flex work solutions.

The center surveyed nearly 1,000 fathers with full-time, white-collar jobs at four Fortune 500 companies about work-life balance issues. Recent articles with gloomy titles like “The End of Men” have painted a troubled picture of contemporary men, but did the Boston College study confirm that contemporary dads are struggling?

In some ways, yes. The researchers note that despite the popular conception that work-life balance stress is worse for moms, in 2008 the National Study of the Changing Workforce found “that fathers in dual-earner couples feel significantly greater work-life conflict than mothers, and this level of conflict has risen steadily.”

Men, it seems, are as ambitious as ever at work, with nearly 20 percent of the survey respondents saying they work 55 hours or more per week. Seventy-six percent want to advance, and 53 percent report feeling that they are constantly working against the pressure of time. At the same time, men were also increasingly likely to take their home responsibilities seriously: For instance, two-thirds of respondents agreed with the statement “To me, my work is only a small part of who I am,” and 77 percent would like to spend more time with their kids.

With fathers increasingly squeezed, flexibility and web work are coming to the rescue, at least informally. The researchers found:

Sixty percent of the fathers said they felt comfortable bringing up personal/family issues with their managers, and nearly the same number felt their supervisor was supportive of employees using flexible work arrangements.
More than three-quarters of fathers reported using flextime on either a formal or informal basis, 57 percent worked from home at least some part of the time, and 27 percent utilized compressed workweeks.
Fathers who utilized flexible work arrangements, either formally or informally, had higher job satisfaction and higher career satisfaction than those who did not.

The researchers conclude that “clearly there are still some obstacles that are restricting the use of [telecommuting and flexible hours],” and they recommend that employers fully embrace these arrangements. “Employees with schedule flexibility and the ability to work from home were often able to work 8–16 more hours per week than employees without such flexibility,” note the authors.

Is web work a solution to the conflicts of modern fatherhood?

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