Working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, is becoming as outdated in the workplace as the dictaphone machine.
Inflexible work hours have cost many companies good employees-and many potential employees good jobs. So has the refusal to give workers the options of compressed workweeks, officially scheduled part-time hours, job sharing, phased-in retirement and telecommuting.
Now, however, a national project is trying to chip away at such rigidity on the part of the majority of the nation’s employers. It’s called Flexgroup and was organized last year by New Ways to Work, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that is a pioneer in flexible work arrangements. (Its co-directors, in fact, job-share.)
Flexgroup explores workplace flexibility as a key strategy to attract and retain talent needed for a competitive advantage, the organization says. Its findings are geared to help executives manage workers in a global economy.
Founding members are heavy hitters: AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron Corp., Continental Insurance, Hewlett-Packard Co., Kaiser Permanente, Marriott International Inc., Pacific Bell and The Stride Rite Corp.
“Flexibility is critical to today’s and tomorrow’s business strategies, providing a cutting edge companies need in the marketplace,” said Linda Marks, Flexgroup director.
The organization also brainstorms corporate problems that arise from forms of flexibility that companies accept eagerly, such as temporary, contingent and contract workers.
For more information about Flexgroup, contact New Ways to Work at 149 Ninth St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103. Phone: 415-552-1000.
– Diverse diversity. The need for flexible hours is driven by the demographic changes projected for the work force in this decade: Women and minorities, many of them immigrants, will be the majority of new hires.
But diversity, also known as cultural diversity, is such a new concept that not all businesses agree on its meaning.
“The working definitions of diversity vary widely . . . and point out that primarily diversity still is an emerging concept in the U.S. corporate landscape,” according to a survey of 22 companies by Allerton Heneghan & O’Neill, a management consulting firm, and Harbridge House, a diversity consulting firm.
Included in the report is one definition of diversity that goes to the heart of the matter: “. . . empowering all individuals.”
Right on!
– Switching careers. If you have a college degree and are tired of your chosen profession, choose another one: teaching.
To make the switch easier, Glenview Community Consolidated School District 34 and De Paul University offer an excellent teacher-training program-and an Illinois teacher certificate, tuition-free master’s degree from De Paul and two years of teaching in the excellent Glenview public schools.
“There are many valuable teaching candidates out there who are successful in other professions,” said Theresa Fournier, Glenview District 34 program coordinator. “This program provides such candidates the opportunity to make a career transition.”
For more information about the ongoing program, contact Fournier at 708-998-5006; or Roxanne Owens, De Paul program coordinator, at 312-362-6598.
– Narrowing the gap. While female sales and marketing executives still earn less than their male counterparts (the bad news), their pay is increasing at a higher rate (the good news).
In an executive compensation survey by Sales & Marketing Management magazine, published in New York, women reported pay increases in 1993 of 6.1 percent over 1992-compared with 5.4 percent for the industry as a whole.
The survey of 544 sales and marketing executives shows that women earned $70,582 annually, compared with $88,572 for men.
That works out to about 80 percent of what men make, which is 10 percentage points higher than the average national discrepancy between women’s and men’s wages.
But when total compensation figures are factored in, the magazine says, things get worse: The gap widens to 77 percent.
Though the women’s salaries are very good wages, that they are not the same as those of their male colleagues is further reinforcement of the need for pay equity or comparable worth. These terms describe a compensation system in which workers are paid by their skill, training and education-not their gender.
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Carol Kleiman’s columns appear in the Tribune on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday.
