Flex in Real Life
Love this post from Families and Work Institute’s Lois Backon: hits the perfect note re: “Flex isn’t just for moms.”
At this new crossroads of my life, I find myself reflective, and grateful that I work for the organization that I do. I have always been the queen of flexibility.
I needed it: my husband always traveled, and I was essentially a single parent Monday through Friday. I used it: worked compressed workweeks, part time schedules, had daily flex leave for school conferences, paused my career, reentered the workforce. I valued it: I am one of the 87% of people who consider having flexibility to be extremely important when (if) looking for a new job. And I believe that having that flexibility allowed me to be a good parent and a good worker, while always aspiring to positions of more responsibility.
Confession 1: I thought that when I was at this point in my life, I would not need workplace flexibility anymore.
Confession 2: I need it more than ever. Why? Because I have learned, after being in the workforce for 30 years, that in order for me to the best worker, and reach my highest potential and productivity, I need to be whole in my life.
On a personal note, in order for me to be whole in my life, I need, and want to continue to be there for my daughters. I want to be able to move my older daughter into her first apartment, and go to Home Depot and Target, and construct the do-it-yourself furniture. I want to be able to take my younger daughter out to lunch in NYC this summer and hear all about her first corporate work experience. I want to visit my daughters during the year, (both of them are a 3 hour flight away) and be able to leave on a Thursday night, work remotely on Friday, and not have to jam a visit into a 48-hour weekend, because I am confined by the traditional work schedule of being in the office till 5:00 on a Friday and back in the office at 9:00 on Monday.
Is this selfish? Maybe. Who benefits? Definitely me, but I would also argue that my employer benefits just as much. I am loyal (been here 12 years!) and hard working; I’ve never missed a deliverable, and have supported my co-workers when they have needed to take time off for their personal lives. So, I am one of the lucky ones; I have had access to flexibility without jeopardy to my career or advancement.
As I travel around the country for the When Work Works initiative, and speak to different audiences, a key message I deliver is that workplace flexibility must work for the employer first, and then the employee. I am forever learning that workplace flexibility is needed and wanted by individuals for so many different reasons, and organizations are creating so many innovative solutions to this need, that yield positive business results .
So, I ask readers to share- What stage of life are you in? Do you need workplace flexibility? What types of flexibility would best fit your needs at this stage in your life? How would workplace flexibility help make you whole? And, are you one of the lucky ones? Do you have flexibility in your organization?
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.
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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