employment- jobs and career

by WFC Resources

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by WFC Resources

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from Jeffrey Krivis

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1. Let people tell their story. Allowing people to speak their minds may increase the level of conflict, but that’s okay, says Krivis, because feeling heard can dramatically change an angry person’s outlook. And in the process, new information may surface that allows a solution to naturally emerge.

2. If someone refuses to budge, take the spotlight off them. When there is one hardliner refusing to budge during a multiparty conflict, suggests Krivis, just begin “settling around” them and work with the other parties. The holdout quickly sees the value of compromise when his or her perceived power is neutralized.

3. When someone seems “locked up,” dig for the emotion behind the stone face. Krivis recommends asking, “What is it you really want to achieve here?” Tapping into the person’s repressed emotion may provide the key to a solution.

4. When people are “picking flyspecks out of pepper,” come in with a reality check. It’s the mediator’s role to bring people back to reality by “wrenching their attention away from the grain of sand and having them focus on the whole beach.”

5. Identify the true impediment. In every conflict, says Krivis, ask yourself, “What is the true motivating factor here? What is really keeping this person from agreeing to a solution?”

6. Learn to “read minds.” Krivis suggests paying attention to body language and emotional tone as well as a person’s words. If you give people an opportunity, he says, most people involved in a dispute will gladly talk about themselves, which gives you a chance to ask more questions and gain more information about their perspective. That helps you anticipate how they might react, and manage the negotiation accordingly.

7. Think creatively about ways people can cooperate rather than clash. Spend your time building up the relationship, Krivis suggests, rather than just divvying up the matter in dispute.

8. “Edit the script” to help people see their situation in a different light. Retell their story in positive, forward-looking terms, says Krivis, and you can “give them the words to see their options in a new light.”

9. Avoid the “winner’s curse” by carefully pacing negotiation. When a solution seems too easy, people may experience second thoughts about whether they could have cut a better deal. Don’t rush to a conclusion even when you know you can wrap things up quickly, says Krivis. Keep the negotiation proceeding normally, for a reasonable amount of time, before the inevitable settlement.

10. Finally, realize that not every conflict can be solved. “Not every negotiation is going to have a win-win outcome. Not everyone can live together in harmony. ... There are times you just have to accept that both parties are going to leave the table equally unhappy.” When that happens, Krivis recommends, “Isolate the participants if possible and just move on.”

Improvisational negotiation, says Krivis, is “kind of like jazz. ... The chords you use depend on the chords you hear from the other participants, and vice versa. It’s a conversation. It’s organic. There are no limits on what can come out of mediation, and that’s what makes it such a powerful skill.”

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Employment Jobs

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Employment Jobs

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Employment Jobs

Leading employers have begun shifting the focus of their work/life initiatives that support employees caring for aging relatives, offering employees access to empowering experiences like on-line skill-building courses and telephonic support groups. This new approach complements and goes beyond the traditional elder care information and consultation model. This article describes two such efforts:

• “Powerful Tools for Caregiving,” an initiative of the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care (ABC) and Mather Lifeways Institute on Aging and
• the AT&T Telephone Caregiver Support Groups.

In the late 1980’s, pioneering companies like IBM, Johnson and Johnson, and others began offering elder care consultation and referral (C&R). Modeled after childcare resource and referral programs, these initiatives gathered vast amounts of information about elder care programs and services and made the information available to employees via trained counselors. The idea was to both cut the time the employee spent looking for information and to improve the quality of decisions that employees made about elder care situations.

Over the past 15 years, the information-based model has evolved to include user-friendly databases that include every conceivable topic related to elder care. Today’s corporate elder care programs deliver instant access to such information via the Internet. Some have added telephonic and on-line information sessions on elder care topics and even company-paid geriatric care management services that arrange for an in-home assessment and development of a care plan for the older relative.

Beyond Information: “Powerful Tools”

Recent research has documented the financial cost of unrelieved caregiver stress in terms of negative health outcomes and increased medical costs. The key to avoiding such costs – and keeping employees with elder care responsibilities healthier – is to intervene earlier. This means not only providing information about services, but expanding the employee’s coping skills, thus empowering the employee to take control of this vitally important aspect of life.

The Mather Lifeways Institute on Aging (Mather) developed “Powerful Tools for Caregiving” to help family caregivers of elders cope. First offered in community settings, “Powerful Tools” began as a six-session series of interactive workshops, with an accompanying 300-page Caregiver Helpbook.

The program’s design included an evaluation component from day one, enabling Mather to document the program’s impact. Statistically significant findings from the original community groups show improvements in self-confidence, self-care activities (relaxation and physical exercise) and increased use of support services, like adult day care, chore services, care management and support groups.

Judy Presser of WFD Consulting is coordinating implementation of the “Powerful Tools” pilot project at ABC champion companies ExxonMobil, IBM, and Texas Instruments. She says that the fact that Mather had the evaluation data to show program results provided the impetus needed to fund an adaptation of the approach to the workplace setting. “The stress of caregiving and the related illnesses and use of medical care and prescription drugs was a concern,” says Presser. “We wanted something that could be replicated, not tied to geography. And it was an evaluated product where you could say ‘This works.’ “

The ABC pilot project is underway. It offers a self-paced, on-line learning module, combined with a weekly telephone call-in time and on-line chat groups. About 200 employees from the three firms have taken the six-week course so far. The ABC pilot program will also measure job performance.

Do the ABC companies have an ROI target in mind? “We will be looking for some health and wellness outcomes, says Presser. “You could translate this into an ROI. We went into this hoping that it will help employees manage their caregiving roles better. If this is achieved, then there will be an ROI, even if we don’t measure it. If it’s successful, you’ll know there is an ROI.”

Dan Kuhn, Mather’s education director, says “The experiment is to find out if caregivers using the web-based model can derive some or all of the benefits that caregivers have derived in the live experience at our sites in Chicago area. We’re grateful for the opportunity to test this out and we hope it’ll be effective and become available to other companies and individuals who are interested in taking care of themselves via this course.”

AT&T’s Telephone Support Groups

AT&T is taking a telephonic approach to employee caregiver empowerment. The company began offering its employees and their spouses access to telephonic elder care support groups in March 2003. Today, seven support groups meet on a weekly basis.

The support groups are limited to a maximum of seven participants each, and they meet at a variety of times of the day and days of the week, drawing callers from all over the U.S., according to Aimee Barr, an elder care counselor who facilitates some of the groups. Barr is an employee of Atlantic Health System, the contractor who operates the service with funding from a grant from the AT&T Family Care Development Fund.

How it works

1. Employees learn about the availability of elder care support groups in many ways, including word-of-mouth, AT&T’s internal website, AT&T publications, and through the efforts of Bernadette Fusaro, Director of the Family Care Development Fund, who visits work sites and informs managers and employees about this and other programs supported by the Fund.
2. When an employee calls or sends an email expressing interest, Barr or another elder care counselor conducts a brief telephone interview to determine if the telephone support group is an appropriate option for the caller.
3. If appropriate, the employee or spouse is informed of the dates and times of the support groups, selects one, and is given a passcode to join the conversation, as well as a book entitled “Caring for You, Caring for Me,” developed by the Rosalynn Carter Institute.
4. After participating in all or some of the ten weekly sessions, the employee receives a follow-up call from an elder care counselor to obtain feedback on the experience and to assure that the employee or spouse is directed to follow-up elder care resources, if needed.

After participating in all or some of the ten weekly sessions, the employee receives a follow-up call from an elder care counselor to obtain feedback on the experience and to assure that the employee or spouse is directed to follow-up elder care resources, if needed.

• A stronger sense of the importance of their dual roles as employee and caregiver
• Fresh ideas from others who have “been there, done that”
• More insight into what their older relatives are going through
• Better understanding of the resources available, both from AT&T and from public agencies like Medicaid and Medicare, and
• New ways to find out about long term care options in the community

“We have two goals in operating this program,” says Barr, “ First: Don’t compromise confidentiality. Second: Don’t compromise convenience. We have people who are sometimes working 12-16 hours per day. The telephone access allows them to do this at their office or at home, whatever’s most convenient. We bring the service to them.”

Although no one is asked to reveal his or her name or job title in the course of group discussions, Barr says she has gleaned enough information from the conversations to know that the groups have drawn employees from every level of the AT&T.

The groups are diverse in terms of the elder care situations that participants face, as well, according to Barr. “Some are caring for persons with Alzheimer’s disease, some with Parkinson's or other ailments. The diversity allows people to gain perspective and allows those who are new to caregiving to connect with those who have experience. They are great at sharing resources that have been helpful to others, like suggestions on who to find a good geriatrician or elder law attorney.”

Barr says the call-in approach appears to be a good cultural fit for AT&T: “Because we work with people who are very good communicators on the phone and people who are technologically savvy, they are used to dealing with things on a technological level. Some are in virtual office situations that allow them to work from home, relying on communication via telephone and their personal computer.”

The program includes an evaluation component, measuring each participant’s degree of “perceived caregiving burden” before and after participating in a support group. “Coming into the groups, participants are all over the place (in terms of perceived caregiving burden),” says Barr. At the end of the sessions, the results have been positive. “The employees have written in very positive comments on the evaluation forms,” she says.

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Employment Jobs

by Professor Joan C. Williams

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What is caregiver discrimination? The most obvious type is when a supervisor demotes, fires, or fails to promote a woman because she is a mother. In one Virginia case, a woman’s boss fired her when she phoned to arrange her work schedule after maternity leave, opining that women with children are not dependable, and that she belonged at home with her baby. Another supervisor refused to promote a pregnant women, looking straight at her pregnant belly and saying, “I was going to make you head of the office, but look at you now.”

We call these jaw-droppers. What leads people to make such inappropriate remarks? A new issue of Journal of Social Issues documents the “maternal wall” that affects all too many mothers. Experimental psychology studies show that, while “businesswomen” are seen as highly competent, similar to “businessmen,” “housewives” are rated as extremely low in competence, alongside the elderly, blind, ”retarded,” and disabled (to use the researchers’ words). Thus, in a story famous among women lawyers, a Boston attorney returned from maternity leave to find that she was given the work of a paralegal; “I wanted to say, look, I had a baby, not a lobotomy.”

What happened? She fell from businesswoman to housewife. Another study found that mothers typically have to do more to prove their competence than fathers do, including putting in longer hours are work – this helps explain “schedule creep,” in which the hours of part-timers creep back up towards full time, as the worker tries to establish that she is still committed and competent. Other studies document the stereotypes associated with part-time work. One found that women who work part-time are considered to be less warm than housewives, but less competent than businesswomen: they seem to get the worst of both worlds. These studies help explain the stigma so often associated with part-time work and flexible work arrangements. That stigma appears to track documented patterns of gender stereotyping.

Fathers, too, may experience caregiver bias if they seek an active role in family care. There appears to be a threshold effect. If a father does just a little – an occasional visit to the pediatrician – then his career actually may benefit as he is considered not only competent but also warm. But if a dad seeks an extended parental leave or a flexible work arrangement, he may well experience even more severe stigma, and career stall, than do mothers do. Gender stereotyping, again: in this case, the stereotype that a “real man” does not cut back on work for family reasons.

This new research has important implications for work/life professionals. It suggests that effective handling of work/life issues is not just an issue of optional benefits, to be offered to employees when times are flush, and cut back when budgets are tight. Increasingly, it is a risk management issue. An increasingly important component of the business case for family friendly policies is that a company who does not manage work/life issues in a pro-active and enlightened way faces the increasing risk of legal liability. At WorkLife Law, we are seeking funding to develop a training for employers and HR professionals to bring them up to speed on the emerging fields of caregiver discrimination and work/life law.

by Chris Ortiz

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Finding a balance between work and family is tough. Both require devotion, loyalty, respect, and hard work. Unfortunately, in today’s society, those attributes seem to be more directed toward our jobs. There is a serious imbalance in how American workers juggle the hours they are at work and how much time is spent with their families. Sound like you?

The United States is now the most overworked industrialized nation in the world and manufacturing has become one of the main contributors to this dilemma. Is it worth it? Can people be productive after 10, 11, or 12 hours a day? It is time for a change. The 40-hour workweek has run off into the sunset, and working overtime has become a reality for millions of Americans. With the onslaught of jobs going overseas and massive corporate downsizing, Americans are overwhelmed with large workloads, high expectations, and the pressure to work as much as possible.

So why is it like this? Many leaders today have lost the ability to recognize skill sets in their employees. Also, they forget to take interest in the personal lives of those employees making them rich. Employees' families are perceived as the internal competitor to upper management, both vying for time. Extra hours rarely equal better performance. Corporate leaders and even middle management embrace the workaholics of a company as a perception of loyalty, while the truth is that employees who have very good time management skills and can juggle multiple projects at one time are more valuable than someone who is simply in the building for 12 hours a day.

Employees need to be embraced as the only true asset to a company. Turnover is extremely expensive when compared to investing time and money into enhancing those assets. That's why it's important to not only identify employees' positive attributes, but also their shortcomings. Managers need to balance the workloads of their employees to ensure their success. And at the same time, managers should provide the necessary training and challenges that will provide the employees with an opportunity to make them more valuable to the company.

My leadership approach differs from traditional management techniques. I call it the 5 Leadership Rules for Creating a Work/Life Balance

1. Hire People with Passions Outside of Work

It is good to surround yourself with employees who understand the importance of family and leisure life. People who have passions in life generally have a good work ethic. I want well-rounded employees on my staff because creating an environment with diverse people is exciting.

2. Do NOT Hire Workaholics

Workaholics create imbalances within a group. My people are allowed to have a life outside of work and their fellow employees should respect those lives. Imbalances create animosity between people. Tension can build because those working excessive overtime will start to question the loyalty of others. I do not want to hear “leaving already?” I work very little overtime myself. I do not want to give a bad example to my people.

3. Create a Comfortable Interview

My interviewing process is more centered on them as a person. I ask perspective employees what kind of interests they have outside of work. Do they ski? Are they affiliated with certain organizations and clubs? I ask them what kind of hobbies they enjoy.

I try to create an interview process that encourages a sense of self worth and lets them know that I will recognize the importance of their personal life. Toward the middle of the interview I talk about my family and how I enjoy being home with them. The positions in my department are highly technical and job candidates come to me with all the necessary skills needed to perform the work. My job should be to balance their workloads to ensure they can enjoy life away from work.

4. Be a Result Driven Leader

I am a result-driven leader and I do not care about hours. Most of my employees are salaried and I pay them for results, not time. If someone can get their work accomplished in thirty-five hours a week; great! If they feel the need to work forty-five hours one week to get caught up on an assignment, so be it. However, it is my responsibility as a leader to identity their positive qualities and balance their workloads so they can be successful for me and be away from work to enjoy their lives.

5.Create an Efficient Workplace

It is very difficult to have work/life balance when your company operates inefficiently. I create structure and organization within my department so my people know precisely what needs to be done. My employees do not walk around looking for things to do. Their assignments are given to them every week. An inefficient workplace automatically creates overtime because employees participate in wasted work.

So, what have I gained? This philosophy has allowed my department to have the lowest turnover and absenteeism in the company. My people are at work and on time everyday. They are able to leave work for family emergencies and can adjust their hours as needed as long as their work is complete. Since I am result driven, I expect my people to complete their work as required, and if they slip, it is addressed. They are given a lot freedom, and when that freedom is abused it is dealt with in a positive professional manner. Turnover is expensive and I don't have the time to constantly be hiring people.

We as leaders need to realize that a company's people are its number one asset. Leaders have a tremendous amount of responsibility not only to improve the bottom line but also in the way we improve it.

by WFC Resources

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This month, one of our Newsbrief stories quoted experts who say while a solid diversity program is more important than ever before, it's time to be more subtle about it. Advertising your company as an Equal Opportunity Employer just doesn't do it any more. It can even be a turnoff, making minority job-seekers think they're being courted just to fill a quota. Here are some steps that companies say have helped them to build a successful diversity effort, reported in the latest issue of Staffing Management.

View diversity as a business advantage

"It has to be a business goal," says one recruiter. The Urban League reports that most companies noted for good diversity practices have been involved in those efforts for more than 20 years. The most important traits are commitment and involvement of top leadership. That doesn't happen unless it's linked to business.

Define Diversity, set goals and measure progress

Looking across the board at your company, says Texas Instruments' Diane Johnson, is not always a good assessment of diversity progress. Many times minorities and women are well represented in the workforce but not in leadership positions. She studies U.S. census data to find out how many engineers are in the population, the graduation rates and the percentage of women, blacks, Hispanics and other groups in those pools. "Then we compare our current population to see if we're on target" and set hiring goals. Managers make the final decisions, and their buy-in to hire diverse candidates is critical.

Hold managers accountable

At Pitney Bowes, diversity metrics are built into the corporation's business objectives and management compensation is tied to diversity. Managers are also held accountable at Allstate, which has mandatory diversity training. The company has moved away from emphasis on affirmative action and looks at having a diverse workforce as business strategy, as opposed to a legal mandate.

Tap the college market. Building a strong campus relationship requires a presence that is constant, positive and consistent. Staples has established ties with the student chapters of minority professional organizations, and brings in students as interns with an eye toward eventually hiring them as employees.

Connect with diverse professionals

Pitney Bowes has been recognized for its strong support and sponsorship of minority professional organizations and CEO Michael Critelli is current chairman of the National Urban League. Supporting such groups is one way the company stays on the leading edge of the diversity movement. One of their newer initiatives is an MBA Leadership Summit for members of Hispanic and black MBA associations, which is focused on career and technical development. They attend career fairs and national meetings, sponsor sessions and provide speakers for professional organization conferences.

Make community connections

Both Texas Instruments and Allstate reach all the way down into grade schools, supporting programs that target diverse seventh and eighth graders. Allstate is involved with numerous community programs that deal with tolerance, inclusion and diversity, partnering with the NAACP, the National Crime Prevention Council, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement and the Hispanic Association of Police Commanders. They support the Women's Business Development Center and the Entrepreneurial Youth Institute, a partnership with the NAACP that teaches entrepreneurial skills to young people. All enhance their reputation as a company that is tolerant and inclusive of minorities.

Focus on a long-term strategy

Companies that have effective diversity efforts view diversity as a long-term strategy and use multiple vehicles to find viable candidates. That means committed time and resources. Said one executive, "Leadership commitment has to be real, not ceremonial. . . It means being an advocate. . .We as leaders must do this job ourselves. Diversity can't be delegated."

by WFC Resources

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by Leslie DiPietro

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Reflections on Culture Change in the Academy

“We’ve come a long way, Baby!” That was the sense I got at the CUWFA (College and University Work/Family Association) conference in Santa Barbara in March. There was more talk about strategic planning and a focus on what Linda Siebert Rapoport (University of Illinois, Chicago) termed “total institutional transformation” – broad scale shifts in culture, rather than piece by piece change efforts. Work/life practitioners at universities are getting much more skilled in finding ways to integrate and “brand” what they are doing to further the overall mission of the school.

I also had the sense that the upper echelons of administration at many schools are—(finally!) beginning to “get it.” Several work/life directors came with their bosses (or their boss’ boss!) in tow, and they seemed actively engaged in the conference.

Competition for human capital is the driver here, expressed most frequently in terms of faculty recruitment. Academia is only just beginning to understand the impact of the large numbers of faculty who are fast approaching retirement. The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) calculated that in 2003, 35% of all full-time faculty were 55 and over. Work/life directors and practitioners are finding ways to calculate the percentage of potential retirees – both staff and faculty – and broadcasting ways the work/life program can help.

However, I did not hear a lot about the need to target programs or policies to staff, particularly hourly workers. (There are notable exceptions, i.e. UC Berkeley and Ohio State). Although there is general support and some movement toward flexibility policies, I didn’t hear of many institutions that were actively making progress towards adopting new policies, let alone policies that had an appeal process. Likewise, I didn’t find much movement toward management training for flexibility – something that we all agree is necessary to bring about a real culture change. This may be a function of many “old school” HR administrations, where a majority of work/life programs are housed, but work/life programs need to figure out how to make change in this arena.

Childcare services have (finally!) come into the limelight, particularly in terms of infant and toddler care. Several of the “top tier” schools, such as MIT, Harvard, Michigan and UC Berkeley, have built, or are building, new centers, and it's just a matter of time until pressure from peer institutions brings more schools into the fold. Many are choosing to outsource the management of these centers, although some have formed creative partnerships between the work-life programs within the University and outside vendors. Most of the change in this area seems to be coming from the need to recruit top-level faculty by showing the “bricks and mortar” commitment, whereas students’ childcare needs are by and large being met through additional scholarship money. In this way, more student-parent families can be served than would be the case if they were allotted a small proportion of spaces in campus childcare centers.

If you had asked me a year ago whether domestic partner benefits were prevalent at universities and colleges, I would have said a resounding “yes” (with the exception of some Bible Belt schools.) Today, however, I am less optimistic, given the voters’ repudiation of Affirmative Action policies in states like Michigan, where the courts recently overturned domestic partnership benefits in public universities and colleges.

Also, there are clear indications that students are leaving school – both graduate and undergraduate – with staggering amounts of debt. This may be an area with which work-life programs (the ones that serve students, at any rate) may be able to help by sponsoring financial planning workshops for students, for example..

I asked some attendees if they thought there were areas where business could learn from colleges and universities, and Sam Hester, CUWFA President and work-life manager at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, had this to say: One of the strengths of the academy is its emphasis in providing and nurturing an environment that promotes creativity and freedom of though and expression. Some of the “great” companies have created a corporate culture that fosters creativity and open expression of ideas. I think that our long history of academic freedom might provide a model to business in creating this type of open environment.”

Linda Rapoport believes businesses could apply the tenure clock flexibility model (the practice of pausing the “time to tenure” clock for faculty who need time off due to birth, adoption or care for a family member with a serious illness) to careers in accounting firms, for example. And Jennie McAlpine, director of the Office of Work/Life at the University of Michigan, pointed out that some colleges have had childcare programs as part of their teacher training curriculum since the 1940’s, and that currently they set a high bar for quality in the communities where they are located.

CUWFA members saw a potential for partnership, agreeing that universities have a lot to offer in terms of research capabilities. Businesses would do well, they said, to tap their expertise.

David Thompson, a friend and former work-life director at both Purdue and Microsoft, once told me that it takes universities about seven times as long to make meaningful cultural changes as it does for private industry. (I don’t know what his source was, but I’m confident he has one!) This fact obviously reflects huge differences in academic culture versus business culture. Although it can be maddeningly hard to wait to see these changes adopted, if I learned one thing when I was in academia, it was that change will happen, and it will be “well-tested” in the process. So hopefully, the change will stick!

by Stewart Friedman and Sharon Lobel

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Business books are filled with common-sense admonitions insisting that leaders be role models. We have reason to question whether this common wisdom is truly wise.

Can a workaholic executive be an advocate for something that does not mirror her own personal lifestyle choices without appearing hypocritical? The executive we call the "Happy Workaholic" values work over other activities and invests her time and energy accordingly. Contrary to popular belief, "Happy Workaholics" can advocate for employees to realize both their company’s goals and what matters to them in their personal lives. They serve as role models, not for "balance" in the usual sense but, rather, for authenticity.

Authenticity means knowing what you truly care about and devoting your attention and activities to these ends. Research indicates that people find a sense of fulfillment from being true to themselves. Happy Workaholic executives know that when employees feel fulfilled in all aspects of their lives then they are better able to add value to their companies.

We conducted about 100 interviews in 25 organizations over a period of 4 years (1999-2002) to find out how Happy Workaholics, who willingly subjugate personal priorities for the sake of their careers, create and sustain cultures in their businesses that support employees’ fulfillment of work and personal life goals. How do they do it? Here’s a summary of what we found.

In one-to-one interactions with their people, Happy Workaholics respect diverse choices about work and personal life, talk to employees about what matters most, help employees take responsibility for their choices, and foster trust. They:

• Assume responsibility for helping employees act on their values and priorities
• Make it easy for employees to discuss personal life challenges when necessary
• Get to know people on a personal level
• Stay abreast of employees’ personal priorities and ask about them

Happy Workaholic executives also engender support for their employees through system-wide actions. They broadcast their advocacy for authenticity (making work and personal life choices that are aligned with one’s values and priorities); tell their own stories publicly; question basic assumptions about how, where, and when work gets done; actively encourage innovation in the design of work; focus on results, not process; and change performance management systems to support authenticity. Happy Workaholics:

• Sponsor discussions that address the impact of the organization’s culture on the expression of diverse core values with respect to work and personal life
• Incorporate support for both work and personal life in the organization’s mission statement, vision, operating principles and management practices
• Provide resources, financial and political, needed for successful change efforts
• Make sure everyone feels free to speak up about new ways of getting things done
• Recognize and reward employees for identifying inefficient work practices
• Ensure that workloads are manageable
• Hold employees accountable for results, not face time at the office

A new generation of senior executive men and women is on the rise. They represent greater diversity in the choices executives make about how they lead their lives at work, at home, in the community, and for themselves. Our bet is that the market for talent increasingly will favor organizations with the highest proportions of authentic executives. Which type dominates yours?

by WFC Resources

Jobs Vacancy, Employment, Job Vacancies

As women struggle with ever-expanding roles, more than 60% are taking some time off from work, says Sylvia Hewlett, author of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps. But while they're doing so for “pull factors” like time for children (45%) or for elder care (24%), they're also motivated by “push factors” such as unsatisfying work (29%) or feeling stalled in their careers (23%). And “women are much more likely to respond to the pull of family,” Hewlett concludes, “when they feel hemmed in by a glass ceiling.”

The loss of women, often just when they're becoming most valuable, is costly for employers. Turnover is expensive, and demand for talent is ramping up. A survey of 4,000 hiring managers conducted by the Corporate Executive Board found the quality of candidates has declined 10% since 2004, and a third of respondents say new hires are less than satisfactory.

Part of the problem is the proliferation of extreme jobs – those high-stakes, high-rewards positions that never let up. Those jobs reinforce and entrench the male-tailored model of the workplace, says Hewlett, that assumes “lockstep, full-time employment,” a model that fits an ever-shrinking proportion of an increasingly diverse workforce.

The first generation of the women’s revolution focused, she says, on providing a level playing field of access to opportunities, assuming that women would then fill the pipeline and begin to work their way up. But waiting for the pipeline to fill hasn’t worked, says Hewlett. Men still are 98% of the CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and 92% of top earners at those companies. The problem, she argues, is not the women. It’s the lockstep linear career model. What we need, says Hewlett, is a “second generation” model of workplace success, with policies that provide alternative pathways for women with nonlinear work lives.

In her new book, she describes a core package of six options that can make a company a second-generational leader, and she offers case studies of companies that are leading the way.

1. Establish a Rich Menu of Flexible Work Arrangements

Work-life options such as reduced hours, flextime, job-sharing, and telecommuting are needed more than ever in a world where “work weeks ratchet up from fifty-five to seventy hours and spheres of responsibility become global.” In second-generation companies, Hewlett says, flexible work arrangements are seen not as an accommodation to women’s family lives, but as a key talent-retention and recruiting strategy. She gives us several examples.

Accounting firm Ernst & Young estimates 82% of its employees use some type of flexibility. Two-thirds say they view that flexibility as a reason for staying at or joining the firm. It's available to everyone, not just women or parents of young children, and the options include flextime, reduced-hour schedules, compressed workweeks, job sharing, telecommuting, and short-term seasonal arrangements. Increased retention has saved the firm at least $10 million annually.

British telecommunications provider BT Group has quantified the results of its "Freedom to Work" initiative. With 75% of all BT employees working flexibly (10% working entirely from home) turnover has dropped to 3%, the average number of sick days per year has fallen to three (compared to the U.K average of eleven), and 99% of employees who take maternity leaves return to work (compared to the U.K. average of 47%). Productivity for home-based workers has risen by as much as 30% per year since 1998. The company saves £5 million a year in turnover costs, £70 million a year in office space costs, and £10 million a year in fuel and other transportation costs. And the reduced travel lowers carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 54,000 tons per year.

Global financial services giant Citigroup set out to create a consistent program focused on retaining and fully realizing talent. It includes a multilingual Website to provide information to Citigroup’s three hundred thousand workers in 100 countries around the world. It offers sample work plans, role models, and success stories. In its first six months the site received 1.3 million hits and in the first year, more than 4,900 employees applied to work flexibly; just 9% of requests were declined. Employees don’t have to provide a reason why they want flexibility, but they do have to provide a work plan for how they will meet their current deliverables on a flexible schedule. Citigroup also provides extensive training globally to help managers become supportive of flexible work and understand its link to business objectives.

2. Create Arc-of-Career Flexibility

Far less common, but just as needed, is the recognition that talented women may need to ramp down and then ramp up again after a stint outside of the paid workforce. At second-generation companies, Hewlett says, “jobs are being unbundled and unpacked, clients are being shared, and work teams are being deployed in ways that allow responsibilities to be handed off seamlessly.”

Booz Allen Hamilton’s Adjunct program, for instance, “unbundles” consulting jobs into “bite-size” chunks that can be done by telecommuters or employees working short stints in the office. Work teams are more collaborative, and full-time and part-time employees are able to hand off assignments to one another. Adjunct workers, the company reports, are contributing equally to profit.

Lehman Brothers’ "Encore" program is designed to recruit women who have left jobs in the financial sector. It targets women who have been out of the workforce for three years or less and who had at least five years of experience before they left. Lehman invites such women (about half former employees and the other half referrals) to events featuring financial sector updates, self-assessment activities, and networking opportunities. After the first Encore event, 98% of the seventy-one attendees expressed an interest in learning more about working at Lehman; twenty eventually joined the firm.

Goldman Sachs has developed a program called "New Directions" to recruit women seeking to return to work full time. The Goldman team invites candidates to a nearly day-long event that features senior managers (both male and female), distinguished speakers, and a panel of Goldman Sachs female executives sharing their on-ramping success stories. Sixty-five women attended the first New Directions event in New York in May 2006. In the following six months, 155 additional women expressed an interest in the program, and the company plans to expand the events to other locations worldwide.

3. Re-imagine Work-Life

Traditional work-life programs have tended to focus on employees who are married with young children. That model only fits half of all women; the rest are single or childless. But even those who don’t have small children have or will have eldercare and extended family responsibilities. Second-generation policies honor and support work-life challenges that go beyond biological children and nuclear families.

In 2003 Citigroup added a new Eldercare Management Services program to the resource and referral services it was already. It offers the company's U.S. employees up to six hours of consultation per year with a trained eldercare specialist who can make on-site visits, assess care options, provide check-in services, assist with insurance and billing issues, and arrange respite care. Citigroup employees are using the program to assist with caring for employees’ elderly parents, parents-in-law, grandparents, and spouses or partners.

Time Warner has expanded the company’s benefits beyond direct dependents. Now the company’s Employee Assistance Program and company scholarship program are available to “reliant individuals” the employee supports, even if they aren’t directly related.

4. Help Women Claim and Sustain Ambition

Many talented women downsize their expectations for themselves, says Hewlett, and an employer can’t promote a woman “if she herself is not enormously invested in this endeavor.” She recommends that companies foster women’s networks and other leadership initiatives to boost women’s confidence and connect them to their peers. Some examples:

Johnson & Johnson’s Women’s Leadership Initiative provides management and leadership training, networking and mentoring activities, and conferences and events around the world.

Time Warner developed a program called "Breakthrough Leadership" in partnership with the Simmons School of Management in Boston. It’s a symposium that includes leadership skills development, peer mentoring, exposure to role models, and interaction with senior leaders at the company.

General Electric’s Women’s Network has 130 chapters worldwide and over forty thousand members. It hosts an annual “Leading & Learning” event for GE women to interact with customers and build business relationships. The Women’s Network is also involved with the company’s recruitment, leadership development, and succession planning initiatives.

5. Harness Altruism

Women derive a different “value proposition” from work than men do, says Hewlett. Her surveys, conducted with the help of the 34 companies on her “Hidden Brain Drain Task Force,” found that while money is important to women, it’s not nearly as important as it is to men. Women tend to rank it below such values as forming relationships with high-quality colleagues, believing in the products and services their companies provide, and giving back to their communities (both the corporate community and the wider society).

Companies are responding. Goldman Sachs offers a variety of opportunities for community service that include "Community TeamWorks," an annual volunteering day with company-provided transportation, meals, and t-shirts; a mentoring program for inner-city children; opportunities to serve on non-profit boards; and matching gifts to charities that employees support. Goldman Sachs sees community involvement as both a leadership development tool and a means to recruit and retain key talent.

Cisco Systems loans employees to nonprofits for a year at a time through its Leadership Fellows Program. Program participants remain Cisco employees and receive full salary and benefits. Their fellowship work is included in performance reviews, and each fellowship is expected to accomplish something tangible at the nonprofit, to “leave something behind.”

American Express offers a paid sabbatical program of up to six months for employees who work for a nonprofit of their choice. Returning employees are then celebrated in the company’s internal communications. Amex has loaned more than 190 employees to nonprofits through this program.

6. Reduce Stigma and Stereotypes

Hewlett’s focus groups found that women frequently quit their jobs rather than take advantage of flexible work arrangements that were on the books, but that, as one executive put it, “label you as some kind of loser.” One way to reduce stigma is to position flexibility as a means to achieve strategic objectives. For instance, Lehman Brothers’ Virtual Workplace technology for working outside of the office is a key component of its disaster preparedness strategy.

Cisco combats stereotyping with "Microinequities" workshops to help people recognize and eliminate subtle behaviors and messages that devalue other people. Respectful behaviors are reinforced with a quarterly "Courageous Observer" award for an employee who has stood up to or pointed out a microinequity. “You want to catch people doing it right,” explains senior VP George O’Meara. “That’s what the award is about.”

Ernst & Young programs include the Women’s Leadership Conference at the national level, Professional Women’s Networks at the local level, the "Career Watch" mentoring program, and "People Point," a Web-based rating tool through which employees can provide anonymous feedback to managers – ratings that become part of the performance evaluation process.

Flexible options become credible, says Hewlett, only when they are modeled from the top. Niall FitzGerald, chairman of Reuters and former chairman of Unilever, telecommutes on Fridays and bans early-morning meetings so he can have breakfast with his five-year-old daughter. He told Hewlett, “Flaunting my flexible work arrangement is one of the most important things I can do. It starts to change the culture.”