Juggling a career and family is a tough act, but some Chicago-area employers are trying to make it a little easier with job-flexibility programs and special employee benefits.
Concerned about losing top-performing employees to the pressure of family responsibilities like child and elder care, employers are offering more permanent part-time jobs, flexible work schedules and other modified employment plans that keep employees working while they fulfill family needs, human resource consultants and employer experts say.
Employers also are offering continued health benefits, child care and employee assistance programs (EAPs) to their employees on flexible arrangements to aid in the balancing act, they say. And it’s all good business management.
In the wake of the Family and Medical Leave Act, employers finally are starting to realize that it makes sense to have a “strategic plan aimed at re-taining trained employees,” explains Marie Lipari, a work and family life researcher and consultant with Hewitt Associates in Lincolnshire.
“Though many people see flexibility programs as a benefit to employees, the main benefit is to employers who can retain expensively trained employees who may otherwise leave the company,” she says.
Part-time work, compressed work weeks (four days at 10 hours per day), flexible schedules and telecommuting all are options employers are using to help employees meet their combined work and family goals, Lipari says.
According to a national survey of more than 1,000 major employers conducted by Hewitt in 1993, about 60 percent offer flexible scheduling and close to 80 percent offer child care and employee assistance programs to help workers balance their work and family needs.
Chicago employers rank a little ahead of the pack in flexible scheduling, according to the survey, with more than two-thirds of 102 surveyed companies offering flexible scheduling. Local firms rank a little below the norm in other benefits.
Flex-time and part-time work are the most prevalent flexibility programs in the area, Lipari says, followed by work-at-home options and job-sharing.
Telecommuting (working at home with computers and facsimile machines) and job-sharing (two or more part-timers splitting a full-time position) sometimes pose problems with very traditional managers who believe that employees need to be seen to be properly managed, she says.
“But as more programs are perceived as successful, the more these managers are coming around.”
Thomas Kuhlman, vice president in the Chicago office of Towers Perrin, a human resources and employee benefits consulting company, agrees. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on out there,” he says, “and employers are willing to modify their practices to help keep good performers.”
Some Chicago-area employers have been experimenting with job flexibility for a long time and have established programs. Household International Inc. in Prospect Heights began flexible scheduling in 1978 when it moved to the suburbs from downtown.
“We had people commuting from as far away as Indiana and we knew that in order to keep them, we needed to give them some flexibility in their commuting schedules,” explains Household employee benefits vice president Frank Spaulding.
The program has been very successful, he says, and provides the same flexibility to employees with family responsibilities that it does to long-distance commuters.
About 10 percent of Household’s 4,000 Chicago-area employees are part-time workers, he adds. Part-time employees earn full employee benefits for a schedule of 20 or more hours per week. Shorter-schedule employees receive prorated benefits but continue to have access to health care and other services.
Household has experimented with job-sharing arrangements but without a lot of success, Spaulding says. “It’s hard to do, and the employees who have tried it have struggled with it. It takes a couple of people who work very well together to balance out their responsibilities,” he says.
Telecommuting, however, may be the real wave of the job-flexibility future. Spaulding wrote a telecommuting policy for the company in 1992, specifying the conditions under which the program would be appropriate. Since then, the company’s internal audit staff has been successfully telecommuting several days a week.
The technique is particularly useful for employees who work with computers and who can link with office computer networks using telephone modems and home computers. More and more professional employees now use computers as their main work tool, he notes.
Allstate Insurance Co. in Northbrook has offered flexible and part-time work schedules for some employees for nearly 20 years, says Mike Snipes, director of compensation and employee benefits. The company expanded the program to all employees as a work-and-family benefit in 1986 and established a telecommuting policy in 1991.
“We started with flex-time for claims adjustors, many of whom are on call 24 hours a day, and our experience with the program taught us that the technique can be applied to virtually all employees, to help with balancing their work and family responsibilities,” he says.
At one time or another, nearly all of Allstate’s 8,000 local employees have taken advantage of some flexibility program, he says, most often to extend leave after a new child.
“Flex programs are not for everyone,” he says. “Many people who have worked a part-time or flexible schedule want to return to a more stable schedule after awhile. But just about everybody, at some time in their work life, has a need for a modified schedule.”
Telecommuting programs are likely to grow rapidly, Snipes says, not only because more employees use computers, but because federal clean-air regulations that go into effect in the Chicago area in 1996 will require employers to reduce commuting by their employees.
“One way employers can comply with the rules is to allow employees to work from home some days a week; that would reduce commuting and meet the standards,” he says.
New technology also is driving the growth of telecommuting, says Jack Doerr, executive vice president in the Chicago office of Sedgwick Noble Lowndes, an employee benefits consulting company.
“There are so many computers and fax machines in homes now that employees have many of their office tools available to them all the time-and they can use them to communicate with the office and customers.”
Job flexibility programs work best when they are part of the corporate culture, says Julie E. Hanson, manager of health services and wellness at Quaker Oats Co. in Chicago. At Quaker, coping with work-and-family issues has been part of the company mission for several years, she adds.
Quaker offers a full range of flexibility options, including job-sharing, part-time schedules, compressed work weeks and telecommuting, and managers receive special training on how to integrate the programs into effective departmental management, she says.
About 10 percent of the company’s 2,000 Chicago-area employees participate in the flexibility programs.
Job flexibility is not just for rank-and-file employees. Even high-pressure, demanding jobs, such as management consulting, can be arranged to fit into a flexible schedule. At Ernst & Young in Chicago, Marilyn Z. Johnson, a partner and manufacturing management consultant pioneered flexible scheduling at the accounting and consulting company.
The first of the firm’s 3,000 partners to work a flexible schedule, after her first child two years ago, Johnson took a standard family leave and then returned on a limited schedule. Now, after having a second child, she is confident that she can balance both her kids and her job.
Johnson works limited hours in her office-three days a week-and works at home two days.
“It’s working great,” she says. “I’m on the telephone a lot and receive electronic mail on my home computer just as I would in the office.”
Her advice: Plan out the program in advance and make sure everyone involved, including management and support staff, knows exactly what to expect.
