Truth and Myths of Work-Life Balance

A full decade has passed since leading corporations first installed comprehensive work/life programs designed to draw more talent into the workplace and help employees focus on the tasks at hand. Despite the time and money poured into these programs, few claim unmitigated success, and on an aggregate level, little has changed.

Workplace surveys still register high levels of employee stress stemming from work/life conflicts. Large groups of women and minority workers remain unemployed or underemployed because of family responsibilities and bias in the workplace. And in too many cases, the programs have reached only the workers who need them least.

Workforce sat down with HR executives from leading corporations to take a closer look at work/life policies and benefits and their tangible results. The September roundtable discussion, sponsored by The New York Times Job Market,produced both solid responses and notable silences.

The participants, a group of nine HR executives and experts from top companies and consultancies, uniformly agree that their companies are committed to promoting work/life balance. Most offer flextime and extensive work/life benefits. Many acknowledge the difficulty, however, in creating a culture that supports these programs, extending flexibility to nonprofessional employees, and building solid tools to measure results.

Culture and communication
Jennifer Lacy, director of research for The New York Times Job Market, presented the findings of a survey of 300 job-seekers in the New York are conducted for the New York Times. Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported that workplace stress had an impact on their decision to look for a new job. However, “there is a general perception among employees that working long hours is important for career advancement,” Lacy says. This notion, and the pay and promotion policies that support it, often undermine attempts to promote work/life balance.

All of the roundtable participants say that corporate culture and the examples by top managers can make or break work/life programs. “A culture can be very subtle,” says Joseph Gibbons, a Brooklyn-based consultant in human capital management at FutureWork Institute, a workforce consultancy. “It might be a manager who is permitted to roar at others, but it can also be a feeling of subtle competition in the culture—that 28-year-old who is putting in 60 hours a week and got the promotion. Senior-level modeling of work/life balance may be a key issue here.”

Within a company, “culture may vary from department to department,” says Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice president for research and information services catalyst, a New York City-based nonprofit research and advisory organization.”In one department or location, employees may feel very comfortable using flexible hours, for example, while at another location in the same company with the same policy, no one would consider using flexible hours.”

At the New York Times, modeling work/life balance at the managerial level meets department boundaries. “We have a senior vice president who works four-day weeks, so we work with that and try to promote it, but it has limitations,” says Dennis Stern, vice president for human resources. “The vice president has a small department where there is flexibility in scheduling, but it doesn’t automatically translate to other parts of our business.”

Ana Mollinedo, vice president of diversity, communications, and community affairs at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc., headquartered in WhitePlains, New York, says their work/life program has support from the top down. The hotel giant employs 110,000 people worldwide. “If you don’t have support from the top, you’re somewhere in the middle trying to push up and spinning your wheels.”

For senior management at Macy’s, a New York City retailer with 30,000employees, “work/life balance was a foreign concept and it was not embraced automatically,” says William Ives, group vice president for benefits, compensation, labor, and employee relations. “Now, as a company, we are beginning to believe that a satisfying personal life affects an employee’s job.”

Limited flexibility
Participants from companies with large numbers of professional employees, such as Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Goldman, Sachs & Co., easily incorporate flextime and flexplace arrangements that help create balance. However, for employers with substantial numbers of administrative, maintenance,or customer-facing employees, flexibility is clearly more problematic.

Starwood offers flexibility for employees at corporate headquarters but often can not extend the same consideration to workers at the hotel properties, where shift work is common. Macy’s faces similar limitations on flexibility for employees at its stores, where the hours of work are customer-driven.

Arthur Brown, university director of human resources management services, City University of New York, sees the same limits on flextime opportunities forCUNY’s 30,000 employees. “Academia has the image of having a lot of free time, but there are many more administrative staff than faculty,” he says. “Weare also facing a shift to the idea that students are customers. We now often have someone at the registrar’s office and the bursar’s office at 7:00 a.m.because that’s when students want to go there. That makes it difficult to create work-life balance programs everyone can use.”

Diversity as the driver
What motivates companies to provide work/life programs, particularly when top management may not readily recognize the problems addressed? “We would like to say that we have a senior management team with an altruistic view of workforce needs, but we recognize, as many employers do, that there is a direct line of sight to our bottom line,” says Emmett Seaborn, principal at Towers Perrin in Stamford, Connecticut. “Towers Perrin sees work/life as an enabler ofdiversity, and diversity is critical to our existence. We have to have diversity of thought and diversity of connections with our clients, or we become irrelevant.”

Building a diverse workforce rests on an employer’s ability to attract and retain female and minority employees who may not be able to work without flexible scheduling or benefit programs designed to help them meet personal needs and family responsibilities.

At the New York Times, “diversity certainly motivates work/life programs,”Stern says. “We spent time defining diversity, and one of the important points is encouraging a diverse workforce by promoting work/life flexibility.” Goldman Sachs, work/life benefits are a recruitment tool. “For the company as a whole, work/life balance is a priority because it allows us to be competitive and attract a diverse slate of candidates,” says Michael DesMarais, vice president, of human capital management, for the New York City-based company, which has 20,500 employees worldwide.

Macy’s also associates work/life programs with the need to build diversity in the workforce. “When we speak of diversity, we speak of work/life, and it’s always in the same context,” Ives says. “We asked, ‘How do we promote the company as an inclusive work environment that respects different thoughts and needs, and then, how do we meet those needs?’ Diversity and work/life go hand-in-hand.”

At Starwood, where more than 50 percent of the U.S. workforce consists of people of color from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, “a lot of work/life issues are tied to differences in culture,” Mollinedo says. “For example, for many Hispanics, parents are dependents. Starwood is sensitive to that. Different work/life issues arise with other cultures. If the internal culture of the company is not inclusive, you are less likely to have an understanding of the issues that show up in work/life.”

Measuring ROI
How do employers measure the return on their investment in work/life programs, and what metrics do they use to justify programs and budgets? Starwooduses an annual associate satisfaction survey with questions about all aspects of the workplace, including work/life issues. “The survey is detailed and extensive, and it’s successful because employees see that senior management take the results seriously,” Mollinedo says.

Macy’s also uses employee-satisfaction surveys that include work/life questions, but Ives believes that the experiences of individual employees provide additional evidence of the success of the programs. “We have vice presidents who work four-day workweeks because they want to be home with their children, and we know they would have left the company without that accommodation. So we have tangible evidence that these programs make a difference on an individual case basis, and we believe that’s enough,” Ives says.

Some companies also use exit interviews to monitor program effectiveness. Information requested from participants after the roundtable, however, revealed that few of the companies systematically collect and review data on employee participation in work/life programs and the impact of these benefits on unscheduled absences and turnover.

From his vantage point as a consultant in the field, Seaborn offers a more detailed approach to calculating ROI. “We look at the linkages between three components: the impact of programs on employee behaviors, how these behaviors drive customer intent to repurchase, and how the customer intent to repurchase drives financial results. To maximize ROI, we compare one portfolio of programs with another, including the more quantifiable items such as pay and benefits, as well as environmental factors such as work/life balance. Relevant questions are: If we increase our investment, what will be the impact on employee behavior in terms of turnover, engagement, and commitment to the organization? Then, if we enhance those factors, what will be the customer and bottom-line impact?”

Stalled out
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests slow or no growth in work/life programs in recent years, and the companies at the roundtable report few new programs. At Towers Perrin, sabbaticals are under consideration, “but we are struggling with the impact on our bottom line,” Seaborn says. Goldman Sachs has introduced emergency on-site daycare for people with children who learn that school has been canceled or whose regular daycare is not available.”We offer employees an allotted number of days that they can bring their children site to our licensed facility and staff,” DesMarais says. Goldman Sachs, Starwood, and Macy’s have installed programs for employees to do volunteer work.

When asked about work/life programs that employees have requested but companies have not been willing or able to provide, only two participants could recall such requests. In both cases, on-site daycare was the desired benefit. Mollinedo says that Starwood employees have asked for daycare and “we are talking this through to see if it is feasible given our location and space.”At Macy’s, “daycare has been a major request for many years, but it’s difficult to put in because of the liability and costs,” Ives says. Macy’s offers a daycare referral program and created an emergency daycare service five months ago.

The past decade has produced notable advances in work/life programs. Still, progress may be stalled. Until employers build a supportive corporate culture across all departments, the talent pool will remain underutilized, and diversity may be a fragile and tentative achievement. n

Workforce, December 2002, pp. 34-39 — Subscribe Now!