Make the Workplace Flexible

It's an unhappy paradox; employers are offering more and more flexibility to their workers, but their employees aren't taking them up on it.

Consider a 1993 survey by the Boston-based consulting group Work-Family Directions Inc., which found that less than two percent of employees use flexible scheduling options such as telecommuting, job-sharing and part-time work. Or look at last month's study by The Conference Board, a business research group, which showed that although 83 percent of 129 companies surveyed offered part-time schedules, only six percent of their employees had ever worked from home.

The overriding reason for this? Fear. Employees rightly worry that working at home--spending less "face-time" at the office--will hurt their chances for a promotion or even for keeping their jobs.

"There is a gap between what companies offer and their unwritten rules, said Michael Wheeler, research associate with The Conference Board. "The company may have offerings, but frequently management isn't supportive."

That means that if you make phone calls from your home office before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m. in order to spend time with your children, the time can go unnoticed, or if you leave work at noon to visit your father in a nursing home, pick up your kids and then write a report from 2:30 to 5 p.m. at home, you don't punch the time clock enough, so to speak.

Language of time clocks and factories is apt, for many companies' expectations hark back to a century ago, when factory work was the norm. Standing on the assembly line meant you were working; being at home meant you were not.

Long after factories have disappeared from the lives of many workers and after humane labor laws have been passed, we are still die-cast in a factory mentality--as much as if most U.S. employees still spent eight hours a day working with molten steel.

This situation must change, for parents' responsibilities are changing within families. Fathers are shouldering much more of the child-care and housekeeping. By necessity, the family structure must influence the work structure, or the market will lose many of its best employees.

Take Ellen Kossek, who has a Ph.D. from Yale and teaches at Michigan State University. With her first two children, she decided to take only brief maternity leaves, worrying about negative consequences at work.

Finally, she received tenure. Feeling that she was secure in her job, when her third child was born she chose to take an eight-week maternity leave--still, less than two months--to stay home with her newborn. After many years of superlative reviews and substantial merit raises, her next evaluation was not stellar and her raise was lower.

"It was hard," Kossek said. "If you engage in anything that symbolizes that your family is equal to or more important than your work it will affect how people view you."

Her boss and university officials finally saw her side and agreed to increase her wages in the future to make up for the loss in her raise, but she had to work hard to convince them of the merit of her case. It seems that although many companies give lip-service to family commitment and flexibility, you really can't have it both ways--sometimes, it doesn't even matter if you have tenure at a large university.

What this country needs is nothing less than a complete shift in the way work is done and perceived.

First of all, we must move part of the workplace from the office to the home, if necessary. With cellular phones, laptop computers and fax machines, parents with toddlers should be able to stay home with them and work from a personal office. The quality of work will not necessarily suffer and may even improve; knowing that their children are safe at home will add to workers' peace of mind and allow them to focus entirely on work for a few concentrated hours.

This concept may be easier to implement now that fathers are more involved in the care of their young children. If it's pregnant women asking to work at home, employers can brush off their requests much more facilely than if it's a good percentage of their male and female employees wanting the same thing.

To accomplish that, we need to change ingrained attitudes and gender stereotypes. In an office the other day, I heard someone say that "Ed" was on a four-month maternity leave. I thought I'd heard wrong. In fact, the person speaking was acknowledging a more and more common occurrence--men staying home with a newborn. Our society needs to accept and encourage men's moving into traditionally female roles.

Second, we need to make it acceptable for workers, especially women, to take time off from their careers. They need to be able to take six weeks, six months or six years with a child--how-ever long they feel they need. After that period, they should be able to bone up on their field of expertise, re-enter the workplace and be considered as qualified as ever for high-level positions and promotions, if they deserve them.

Although our society talks a lot about the importance of a solid family, it seems that many high-powered companies do everything they can to prevent their workers from spending time with their spouses and children. More companies need to include children as part of their plan, by allowing generous maternity leaves, creating in-house daycare centers and being sympathetic to couples with small children. A teacher I know says that when she plans the year's classes for her department, she gives first priority for free periods late in the day to teachers with small children at home, so they can leave work early. That's a step in the right direction.

A seasoned veteran in my office said the other day that when she was hired in the early 1970s, many bosses thought that women her age were useless because they would just get married and have kids. Twenty-five years later, that perception has not changed as much as it should have Although a woman--or a man, for that matter--may take time off to care for children, that does not mean that she somehow loses a vital part of what made her a desirable employee in the first place. After having her child, she will likely return with more experience and perspecctive--valuable assets for any forward-looking company.

Nor should age be a stigma in the workplace. As many middle-aged executives will tell you, the race is not necessarily to the young, and should not be. As the retirement age continues to move upward and life-expectancy increases, returning to a career at 35 or even 40 should not exclude workers from reaching high levels of management. After all, they still have 30 or more productive years left on the job.

Only when we accept that healthy families are critical to healthy families are critical to healthy workers, that time spent in a workplace does not necessarily correlate to productivity or creativity and that age is not a burden--only then will we effect true change in the way our society perceives work. And if cases like Ellen Kossek's or studies like Work-Family Directions' are any indication, we need that change soon.