Read His Lips: Workplace Flex Not a Women’s Issue
A few things really struck me at the first ever White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility today.
The first is that President Obama said “Workplace flexibility isn’t just a women’s issue.” Even if no public policy results from today’s session, the culture change that comes when people like Obama say things like that is big.
The President continued to stress the huge disconnect between the needs of our families and the demands of our workplaces. Many employers, he noted (and employees, I’d argue) see flexibility as a special perk for women rather than as a critical part of a workplace that can help all of us. How we treat our employees and each other at work “reflects out priorities as a society…raising the next generation and caring for our loved ones is the most important job you have. “ He asked the audience to spread the word and said, “my administration is committed to supporting efforts” to extend flexible workplaces.
Let me be clear that flexibility at work does not mean working part time. Flexibility means that workers have the right and ability to schedule their work hours and make time for their lives outside of work. This could be childcare or elder care. It means people can go back to school to continue their education or learn new skills. In some lucky workplaces, it means you can pursue your dreams or even work at the hours that suit you best (as Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young said, flexibility means I can email you at midnight if that works for me. It also means you don’t have to answer the email until the morning). Study after study shows employers who provide flexible workplaces have lower turnover, higher employee productivity, and a stronger bottom line. A study released today by the Joint Economic Council contains hundreds of supporting figures.
The second remarkable thing is that the Federal Government –in the guise of the Office of Personnel Management–has hired Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler, founders of ROWE (and authors of a book called “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It). ROWE stands for “results only work environment,” and it was pioneered at Best Buy a few years ago. When you work in a ROWE, you have no schedule, no PTO, and your time is pretty much yours as long as you get you work done. The OPM will be pioneering a ROWE project with 400 workers. I know that President Obama wants to make working for the Feds “cool” again. This would seem to be a good start.
The third issue is the thorniest and reflects the tenor of most debates these days. Are flexible work practices borne out of innovative businesses, or from public policy guidelines? There is no agreement on this issue, but there was much discussion today among the assembled business leaders (including the CEO’s of Ernst & Young and Campbell’s Soup), union leaders, and public policymakers.
Dr. Christina Romer of the Council of Economic Advisors led a roundtable discussion of leaders from all areas of work (such a cool room: Cokie Roberts to Joan Blades of MomsRising to Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School and Ellen Galinsky of Families and Work Institute). Business leaders at firms can point to the innovative workplace practices among their roving teams of accountants and consultants and say, we’ll innovate ourselves because our assets are the people we employ. Flexibility makes sense for such firms. Their biggest problem, it seems to me, is controlling the overwork that accompanies technology and roaming offices. As Leslie Perlow of Harvard noted, it’s not that high-end workers spend so much time “at work,” it’s that they are always on- always online.
Those who represent low-wage workers tell a different story. 79% of low wage workers who happen to be women don’t get any paid sick days at all. Public policy protection in the name of paid leave and the right to request flexible scheduling provides a baseline of protection. Low-wage workers need support from policymakers- they have the opposite of workplace flexibility. They don’t make schedules- and as the President put it, they run on a highwire act. If one piece of the caregiving puzzle falls apart, they can easily be fired. If we are a society that believes in putting family first, said one union leader, we need to put family-supportive policy in place. We are behind 170 countries in terms of policy: the US has no paid parental leave, for example.
The First Lady noted that having her mother around made all the difference. She laughingly challenged the room, “We all need one of those, so can you figure that out.”
Isn’t that the truth? But how many of us have a grandma at home? At the end of the day, whether your workplace is supportive of your needs or punitive, you’re going to have to scramble for care. Most of us depend on a web of support, both paid help and family, to make it work. Mrs. Obama said when she was once in a work and childcare crisis she thought, “this shouldn’t be this hard.” It shouldn’t- but it usually is. Smart employers need to understand that we will give them more if we are allowed to take the time we need to manage our lives. It’s common sense. I’ll close with this comment from Lisa Belkin’s New York Times column. Does this sound like your workplace? Or do you have flexibility?
Ninety percent of my work could be done remotely if it were acceptable at my company. But face time is still important here. We use Web conferencing all the time to talk to employees in other offices, so why can’t we use them to conference wherever we are? Currently they get 8 hours of work out of me because it is 50 min commute (5 min to drop at daycare) – work – 45 min commute timed to get there before daycare closes.
How great would it be to do 5 min walk – work – 5 min walk back to home office?
Blogging from the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility
I’ll be at the White House tomorrow covering the first ever Forum on Workplace Flexibility.
You can watch the meeting stream live starting at 1:15 on WhiteHouse.gov.
For incredible perspective on the historic nature of this event, please read Ellen Galinsky’s column on the Huffington Post:
The idea of having a White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility would have been beyond anything I could have imagined when a literally handful of us came to the independent conclusion in the 1970s that work was “not working” for employees.
We came from very different places in arriving at the same conclusion. My own research had been on children and families as had others’; a few had conducted research on the workplace; and a few worked for large corporations or for business schools. And even before the Internet would have made finding each other easy, we did manage to connect, to meet, conduct studies, and implement more family-friendly programs and policies (as they were called in those days).
At a meeting of the Conference Board’s Work Life Leadership Council (where many of us convened on a regular basis beginning in 1983), we once went around the room, round-robin style, to share why we cared so much about this issue. The reasons were all profoundly personal–one of us had had a boss who was not flexible during a difficult pregnancy, another had huge support during the death of a parent, and another had a daughter who was treated differently than her male colleagues. The reasons were all about our own families and personal lives.
Although those of us who joined forces to help create the field of work and family life were men and women, we began by focusing on women and child care. We used to say, “demographics are destiny,” meaning that the rapid influx of women into the workforce made workplace change inevitable. Our words, however, hit many brick walls–the prevailing attitudes were “if women can’t hack it in the workplace, they should go home.” So while the business champions argued that these shifts in workforce demographics were here to stay, they still had the need to make a strong business case for addressing child care (turnover and absenteeism were costly) so that they could “fix” the problem. And frankly, some truly believed that they could fix this problem and then move back to serious business issues.
But, of course, child care problems were not so easily “fixed,” and the business champions among us got more deeply enmeshed in doing more with child care, then in adding elder care and workplace flexibility to their portfolios.
Still there was strong resistance. Work and family life were seen private issues, not business concerns. I can’t tell you how times we heard, “if you give employees an inch (flexibility), they will take a mile.” In a worldview where “presence equals productivity,” the business champions found the road to workplace change full of pitfalls.
What’s more, we all understood the resistance. The view that “presence equals productivity” is appropriate in an industrial economy. Furthermore, managing in new ways to work can be difficult.
Wolf at BestBuy- Women’s Affinity Group with Bottom Line Effect
I’ve been fascinated by BestBuy’s Wolf program (their women’s leadership program) for a long time. I’m also a member of Julie Gilbert’s excellent WolfPack Online Community. Julie founded Wolf when she worked at BestBuy and has since left to start her own Wolf venture.
At the Conference Board Work Life Conference in DC current Wolf leaders Mary Stoddart and Liz Haesler talked about their strategy. It’s a bit shocking to a purist. Wolf is a women’s leadership- or affinity group- made up of BestBuy hourly employees, BestBuy corporate/executive employees…and BestBuy customers. At some level, it’s meant to sell more appliances for BestBuy. But it also seems to function as an effective way to promote women’s leadership and professional growth at BB. They noted that “six years ago women weren’t banging down the door to work at BestBuy,” now, apparently, they are. Unlike a lot of corporate affinity groups, the Wolf model helps literally push the company’s bottom line.
There’s a whole Wolf language but the concept is simple: networking events with local customers create pilot groups of “Omegas” who give BestBuy advice. Local store employees drive these groups, and then get help from corporate women to put together proposals, business cases, etc.
Dr. Leslie Wolfe of the Center for Women Policy Studies said, it’s “Basic community organizing.” Well, yes, but community organizing that gets corporate attention and money by driving sales in a slow sector for BB- appliances. It’s actually very smart.
The Mommyblogging Mystique
Cross-posted from Huffington Post:
If you’re a mom, you probably work. But isn’t there at least a little fantasy piece of you that would prefer to work when you wanted to, or from home? Wouldn’t you love to have a personal brand that allows you to get recognition and respect without having to show up 9-6 in an office with a long commute? Well, according to the New York Times, if you were a successful mommyblogger, you could do just that: toddler in lap, laptop buzzing.
Smart women online are up in arms about the Times’ Styles section piece. For example Joanne Bamberger put words into many mouths when she wrote in response to the piece on mommybloggers, “Was it really necessary to write a story on a professional blogging conference with the title Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. She’s Busy Building Her Brand? The headline alone drips with mocking condescension that says to the world that it’s perfectly acceptable to continue to belittle women for the exact same things that men are doing in the online world today. We’ve come a long way? Not.”
This is not the first such mommyblogger story and yet it conforms to a pattern. Like the stay at home mom cum CEO of her own organic foods brand, the well-paid mommyblogger is a fantasy figure for our time. I believe the fantasy of mommyblogging (different than the reality, which is as heterogeneous and varied as the Internet itself) is part of our modern day Feminine Mystique. The fantasy of mommyblogging as portrayed by the mainstream media allows women to gain some power and recognition, but only in the safest possible way. Because after all, these moms are at home with the kids, at least when they aren’t at blogging conferences. Mommyblogging is seen as safe and non-threatening (although if you actually read the best of it, it is far from safe). Women have been getting paid to write about kids stuff for centuries.
Why do we need the fantasy? Because most women feel ambivalent about the reality of our work lives, which is that we have to work, long hours usually, and we have less flexibility than we need. The truth is, we are all of us, men and women, ambivalent about the increasing financial responsibilities women face, which means less time for home pursuits and time with kids. Women earn 44% of household income in the US, and this will only increase, as we’ve just become half the workforce.
A Pew study finds only a small minority of Americans (19 percent) now think women should return to their traditional roles in society. But Pew also finds that most parents think that moms working part-time is ideal. Most parents experience work-life conflict. A 2002 Catalyst survey found 49% of working mothers who were not the sole breadwinner said they would leave their jobs if their husband earned enough money for the family to live comfortably.
Robin Marty writes on Care2, “The obvious problem [with the article], which Mom 101 points out so succinctly, is that it’s still assumed that women who blog are a homogeneous group that sit at home and write up their day to day moments raising their cherubic cheeked progeny in between folding the laundry, making the dinner and catching up on our soaps.”
The public fascination with the mommyblogger is that it’s a non-threatening fantasy of successful womanhood in the Digital Age. The media likes this message too. Part of us want to go back to that life. But since we also have the pressure to use all of our education and earn money (well, in truth, most of us have to earn more than a little money, but we’re talking fantasy here) what better, and more femininely appropriate way to do it than mommyblogging!
Dual-Income Parents: The Exhausted American Middle
Cross posted from BlogHer.com:
Back in the mythic 50s and 60s, housewives like Betty Friedan and Betty Draper were very bored. The Feminine Mystique opens with this description of an average housewife’s day: “Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”
Contrast this to the average day of 2009’s Janice Ramos, featured in Joan Williams and Heather Boushey’s new study, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict.”
Janice Ramos is a married, 30-year-old registered nurse who lives in a home she owns with her husband, a technician, and two children, an eight-year-old son and a 14-month- old baby. She works the night shift so she can be home with her kids during the day. Her husband, whose shift starts at 9:00 a.m., gets the children up and fed and takes
the baby to a neighbor’s and the older child to school. Janice arrives home at 8:30 a.m. after they have already left. She sleeps for five hours, then picks up the baby and meets her son at the bus stop around 3:00 p.m. She spends a few hours helping with homework and playing with the baby, and then goes to sleep when her husband returns from work around 5:00 p.m. She sleeps until 9:00 p.m., when she leaves to arrive at the hospital at 10:00 p.m.
Ramos is part of what Williams and Boushey call the “missing middle.” These parents, writes Lisa Belkin, are working “highly supervised jobs that often leave them one sick child away from being fired”; these are “Americans who are neither rich nor poor,” and “have a median annual income of $64,000, earning between $35,000 and about $110,000 a year. Their median income has fallen 13 percent since 1979 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).”
The middle is 53 percent of Americans, but the authors say because they are not as vocal and visible as professionals, the infamous “opt-out” group, or as desperate as the poor, they receive the least attention and even less help.
Time is a finite resource. Think of our lives are pies: pieces are divided between work time, home and family time and personal time. Cali Yost explains that conflict arises when our work and home time demands become so great that we simply run out of time. This is the state of many Americans.
Reading the “Three Faces” report is eye-opening and extremely sad because work-life conflict among all income levels is so pronounced. I was most struck by the phenomenon of “tag-team” parents like Janice Ramos in our new two-worker norm. In the study, exhaustion is a common theme of life in the middle. One parent says, “My daughter always wants to do things with me, but I’m too exhausted.”
Are you a tag-team couple? What effects does it have on your relationship and sense of well-being?
Lisa Belkin wrote, “Is work-life balance a luxury? In many ways, yes. Only those with both financial security and some control over their work lives have the freedom to recalibrate it.” Williams and Boushey’s report makes it clear that for married couples, time together as a family is a luxury, much less time for oneself. They also note that tag-team couples are between three to six times more likely to divorce.
Which leads me to the political hypocrisy of our legislators (almost everything I read these days leads me there). The U.S. is hostile to creating federal legislation that supports family-friendly workplaces — and it is this legislation that would help the tag-team parents, those caught in the middle.
Legislation that does exist helps poor women with childcare subsidies. Wealthier women can make more choices about their work and family lives. In either instance, as Williams and Boushey note, “The problem is viewed as not the lack of adequate public policies but rather the personal choices of a small set of mothers who are in families that do not look like most U.S. families. Politicians have actively used these narratives to reject moving forward on a work-family agenda.” Meanwhile, the majority of U.S. families soldier on, with little money, time or breathing room to spare.
Even more ironic?
“Nearly 60 percent of mothers in the middle work full-time or more, but only 42 percent of low-income mothers do. Both parents work full-time or more in more than half — or 51 percent — of all middle-income families as compared with only 15 percent of poor ones. The percentage of full-time work is slightly higher in professional-managerial families —- 57 percent -— but they can do all kinds of things to make life more workable.”
I’m a lucky professional example: The more money I make, the more money I willingly spend to outsource as much as I possibly can.
Families in the middle also pay more, percentage-wise, for childcare than do poor families or those at the top:
In March 2009 dollars, low-income families pay around $2,300 a year per child for childcare for children under age six —- about 14 percent of their income. Families in the middle average $3,500 a year —- six percent to nine percent of their income. Professional families pay about $4,800 a year —- three percent to seven percent of their income.
(Personally, I would be thrilled to only have to pay $4,800 a year for childcare -— I don’t know where that figure is from!)
The report concludes, “If one had to choose a single word to describe life in the middle, it might well be exhaustion.”
Exhaustion is no way to make America great again. The solution, says Williams, “is flexibility without retaliation” from employers. Carolyn Maloney has a bill before Congress: support her. Another key is culture change and recognition: Some hourly based companies with hourly workers DO use flexible work schedules. Working Mother Magazine, for the first time this year, is honoring them, as it has done for years with its “100 Best Companies” to work for.
PS: Listen to BlogHer’s Elisa Camahort Page interview Heather Boushey and Joan Williams.
Morra Aarons-Mele
www.womenandwork.org
About Me
Morra Aarons-Mele utilizes social media strategies to help employers, employees and communities connect. She also consults with leading organizations on how women can use the internet for professional and personal development. In her spare time, Morra enjoys blogging about women and politics. Read her full bio >>
Recent Posts
- Entrepreneurs: not who you think they are
- 10:25 am, Tuesday
- Read His Lips: Workplace Flex Not a Women’s Issue
- Blogging from the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility
- Wolf at BestBuy- Women’s Affinity Group with Bottom Line Effect