Sometimes, it only takes subtle nudges to tip the scales in balancing work and personal life. As part of a company experiment to test how flexible scheduling affects productivity, bank executive Maria Barry has been working from home one day each week since last year.
The arrangement didn’t cut her child-care costs or dramatically lengthen the time she spends with her kids, ages 3 and 5. Some of her colleagues at Fleet Financial Group reported they were unable to keep to their flex-schedules during the company experiment, and researchers said early implementation of the program amounted to a “rocky start.”
Nevertheless, Barry and officials for Boston-based Fleet consider the experiment a success. Barry can now make quick trips to her child’s school or meet the carpet cleaners on her at-home days, and a day spent in her home office without the distraction of meetings means less weekend work. For Fleet, the arrangement has produced more-satisfied workers even after cuts of nearly 6,000 jobs companywide in recent years, and it has meant faster turnaround times on key reports generated from the Providence, R.I., facility where Barry, 35, is a senior vice president. “With 40 people working for me, this arrangement gives me one day with fewer interruptions,” she said.
The Fleet study is a first step at disproving the conventional wisdom that work-life programs are costly distractions to improving business conditions, said Paula Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute of Cambridge, Mass., which performed the study. While the experiment fell short of documenting any direct improvement in profits, it did record productivity gains that were viewed by senior management as helping the company’s bottom line.
“In an industry not known at all for being family friendly, one that is marked by conservatism, even in this environment, one can put into effect work reorganization that is a win-win equation for workers and the company,” said Rayman. “This gives me the sensibility that even in turbulent times for a company, these kinds of programs can be useful.”
For the study, Radcliffe researchers examined two Fleet departments, a 20-person underwriting group in Framingham, Mass., and a reporting/management information systems group in Providence. Both groups introduced flexible scheduling or telecommuting and also made some changes to the way work was distributed within the group. In the Framingham office, the number of workers reporting stress-related sleep disturbances dropped from 79 percent before the changes to 50 percent afterward, which in turn was perceived as improving on-the-job productivity. In Providence, workers on the new flexible schedules boosted output of credit reporting data by 15 percent, compared to a 9 percent increase during the same period for workers not using flex time. Nearly every worker using a flexible schedule reported being more productive because of having uninterrupted work time, either at home or during early morning office hours before others arrive.
Researchers in Providence noted the experiment was conducted during a time of particular stress because workers were under pressure to assimilate merger partner NatWest, had unusually early deadlines to get reports done for board meetings and were short staffed.
“Nonetheless, there was general agreement that the experimental changes lessened to some extent the misery of the quarter and that life would have been considerably worse without them,” the report said.
Still, there were clearly some bugs in the initial program, and workers struggled with technical difficulties. Employees with computers in their homes sometimes couldn’t log onto the company’s network, and some complained they were bringing computer viruses home with them at night. There were also communications problems. Customers were sometimes told telecommuting workers were taking the day off instead of working offsite, for example.
The whole experiment also took an enormous amount of staff time to implement, a factor Barry said any manager should keep in mind if she decides to try such changes at her own workplace.
Fleet, now with 30,000 employees and $52 billion in assets under management, is undaunted. The banking firm is planning to roll out similar experiments at four other locations shortly.
