Juggling Life And Work

Scripps Howard News Service
Judy Olian
(Judy Olian is Dean of Penn State's Smeal College of Business and a leading expert in strategic human resources management.)

The juggling act is getting tougher. While job satisfaction is generally high, many employees - - men and women - - are finding it harder to balance life and work. Ninety-five percent of respondents to a Rutgers University Survey in 1999 worried that work is taking too much time away from their families. In a 2000 survey of over 2500 graduating students from 11 countries, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that for 57% of these graduates, balancing work and personal life was their most important goal, up from 45% 2 years ago. This is true also for young men. The Radcliff Public Policy Center asked over 1,000 males aged 20-39 about their job preferences in 2000. Spending more time with their family was their most important career goal. Seventy percent of men in their twenties said that they were willing to give up some pay in exchange for more family time. Is this a new breed of man?

The fact is that in 60% of married couples, both partners are employed. Only 17% of families conform to the 50s model of the working dad and stay-at-home mom. The number of dual career couples is unprecedented in history, affecting both men and women who end up in a search of the holy grail of work-life balance. Are there solutions to this quagmire?

Many companies are increasingly offering flexible and mobile work arrangements to enable employees to better juggle work and home life. Even then, these offers might not be taken at face value. The Families and Work Institutes National Study of Business Work Life (1998) reported that 40% of responding employees felt their careers would be negatively impacted if they took advantage of their employers' offers of flexible schedules, or took time off for family reasons.

Deloitte & Touche, a big 5 public accounting firm, has been at the forefront of advancing flexible solutions in the workplace as part of it's Initiative for the Retention and Advancement of Women. This Initiative was launched in 1993, when Deloitte & Touche observed its low number of women partners and lower retention rates of women in its pipeline towards partnership. The firm decided it had to create a more flexible environment, offering mobile and flexible work solutions, a culture that genuinely promoted balance and flexibility, and actively mentored women in their advancement. The Initiative attempted to remove any stigma attached to working reduced hours, taking time off or temporary leave to attend to family or personal matters.

All men and women partners in the accounting firm were required to take a 2-day awareness workshop to advance the legitimacy of balance, establish standardized policies for arranging flextime, telecommuting and other forms of flexible work, and help managers become better mentors and agents of career development for their junior associates. Deloitte & Touche established goals for promotion and retention of women in the partner pipeline, and managers are being held accountable. The CEO got out in front of this initiative and called any reluctant partners to sign up. The issue was protection of intellectual capital. When men and women drop out of the pipeline because they can't obtain satisfactory balance between their personal and work lives, the firm loses.

It's interesting that from early on, Gen Xers emphasize the quest for balance. A 2001 study by the London School of Economics of over 2,000 employees showed that 80% of Gen Xers and 93% of 18-25 year olds say they would be more likely to remain in their jobs if they were allowed more balance in hours worked. This isn't just a family-juggling act, it's a personal juggling act. Companies that create more flexibility and legitimacy to the balancing act will become preferred employers. And, the offer of flexibility has to be real, without penalty.

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REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu .

Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the eBusiness Research Center, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.

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