In a recent television commercial, a woman dances across the floor. She looks great in her red dress except for the fact that her head is a computer monitor. “It’s like your mind is a million miles away,” her partner quips.
Suddenly, she gets an idea, and the monitor head disappears. Now Stephanie is an attractive brunette who’s hit on the solution to a client problem that was occupying her mind.
“Unisys. We eat, sleep and drink this stuff,” is the tag line.
Officials at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys say the aim of the new commercials is to reinforce the company’s shift to information services from computer hardware. “We wanted to shake things up a little bit,” said Kerry Baker, director of worldwide advertising. Research shows people remember the ads, he said, and employees like them.
Whatever they’re doing for Unisys, the monitor-head ads also seem emblematic of the times.
As business becomes more global and more competitive, the workweek keeps stretching. Technology helps employees work any time and anywhere but it also makes it harder and harder to leave the office behind.
It also means employees can get mixed signals from their bosses. Employers, eager to retain and recruit top talent, offer flexible schedules and tout work/life programs that recognize a life outside the office. Yet at the same time they advertise and reward around-the-clock responsiveness.
One outcome is a blurring of the boundaries between work and home, according to a survey released in October by Pitney Bowes Inc. The office products company identified 20 percent of U.S. households as “high message” homes that largely because of work obligations receive twice as many missives via telephone, pager, e-mail and snail mail as the average U.S. household. (Some homes, of course, just have gabby teenagers.)
“There seems to be little distinction in time of day and geography in where you conduct either business for your employer or business for your home,” said Meredith Fischer, co-author of the study.
That’s not necessarily bad, Fischer said. The same households that report checking e-mail and voice mail constantly from home also had no problems checking out a family vacation site on the Internet at work. In other words, the blur is starting to work both ways, she said.
“In my own case, I get up very early in the morning to exercise. But to kind of free my brain, if you will, the first thing I do when the alarm goes off is listen to my voice mail,” Fischer said.
That way, she said, she catches up on any international or late-night calls and feels no guilt about taking time to exercise. “It’s allowed me to be at my desk at 8:30 instead of at 8.”
Baker, the Unisys advertising director, said the company wants people who both play hard and work hard. “We’re looking for people who have a passion for what they do, whether it’s skiing or developing customer solutions,” he said.
Unisys honors its employees’ non-work pursuits, Baker said. For instance, the company highlights a volunteer of the month and makes a contribution to the employee’s favorite charity.
Some of its ads seem to tout taking a break as a spur to creativity. In this year’s annual report, for example, an employee talks about going sailing for the weekend and magically finding a solution for his client while on his boat.
That’s all fine so long as the employee retains some control, said Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice president for research and advisory services at Catalyst, a New York-based research and advocacy organization for women in business.
Despite what some businesses say, Catalyst’s research found that some workers are feeling real pressure from the need to be accessible well beyond the usual eight-or nine-hour workday.
If workers feel they must be checking voice mail and e-mail at all times, she said, “then it becomes another form of face time,”‘ jargon for measuring employees’ productivity by their presence at the office.
The issue of conflicting demands was serious enough at Ernst & Young that the firm launched a work-redesign study under its recently created national office of retention, headed by partner Deborah Holmes.
Ernst & Young looked closely at the assumptions it was making about client service and has redesigned some work as a result, Holmes said. For instance, consulting teams now rotate the duty of checking voice mail and e-mail on weekends and vacations.
Project management software which has always listed dates on which tasks needed to be completed now also lists personal responsibilities for individuals in the consulting team, so others can fill in.
