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.
Presidential Leadership Qualities and Why They Matter
I just wrote about this in Huffington Post. I study leadership- and it’s a skill as well as an inherent quality. But what are the leadership qualities a president needs to possess? Are they similar to those a CEO needs? A military leader’s suite of skills? A parent’s, bringing along unruly toddlers?
“Imagine if you were interviewing John McCain and Barack Obama for a CEO post. You might ask:
Tell us about a high performing team that you’ve built. What made it high-performing?
Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?
Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble?
These are questions recently drafted for Barack Obama and John McCain by a room full of leaders from many walks of life. While we would consider such questions crucial insight to gain from a potential senior executive, to my knowledge we’ve never asked them of our presidential candidates. Here are some more leadership questions for our potential chief executives:
What are the attributes and competencies you value most in yourself that will serve you well in the White House?
The internet and technology have flattened the political playing field, allowing for more participation and collective decision making. How will you create a more participatory democracy and give people the opportunity to influence decision making?The president’s role requires decisiveness. Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble. In retrospect, what would you have done differently?
Tell us about a time when your judgment was tested in crisis. What do you want us to appreciate about your judgment?
And so, a group of eminent leaders from many domains, from popular leadership authors such as Ken Blanchard and Patrick Lencioni, to social entrepreneurs to military leaders and clergy gathered at Harvard to develop a list of core questions about presidential leadership.
Leadership is not a soft skill. It directly impacts the bottom line in business, and I hope good leadership will lift our country’s bottom line. Research from the consulting firm Hay Group shows 35% of the difference in employee engagement and discretionary effort is directly a result of the work environment leaders create. How would that translate into Congress’ ability to get things done? Plus, the climate a leader creates accounts for up to 25 percent of the variance in an organization’s performance – and this is the bottom line: productivity, growth, profit.
But what does presidential leadership mean? What, indeed does leadership mean? It’s an overused word, aligned more with airport paperbacks than the true test of one who can help us find our way in the dark. When I spoke with many of the day’s participants, their answers varied, but they came back to the same core qualities: a leader must serve as well as lead. A leader must listen, learn, and be willing to fail. A leader can’t go it alone. Sounds trite. But imagine if our current Chief Executive had developed such attributes. Would you ever hire a CEO without knowing how he makes decisions? What if George W. Bush had said to the American people when asked, “well, I prefer to make unilateral decisions based on the advice of a small, inner circle of advisors and I never, ever listen to people outside that group.” Next candidate, please.
For more, click here for the Center for Public Leadership
Me and Nicco and Dave Winer talk change
Dave Winer is on to something, which he mentions in this podcast.
I first got the idea from my colleague Matt Wilson at the Kennedy School, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Obama’s real power to change this country doesn’t end on Election Day: it begins on Election Day. Citizenry is a job, a vocation. We’ve forgotten that.
Winer’s Sunday Gang with Nicco Mele and Morra Aarons
Scripting News here
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 >>
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