Smoothing the way to work for women - and men

In today’s Wall Street Journal is an article about how companies are attempting to overcome the difficulties they are having retaining valuable female employees. One of these involves the use of flex-time, which enables women to work around the family duties which they continue to almost exclusively shoulder, particularly for those with small children.

Unfortunately, as flex-time was designed for women, many men cast aspersions on it as a special privelege designed to coddle a class of worker that otherwise couldn’t cut it. The taint has become so socially and emotionally burdensome, that a device designed to help women avoid having to make a choice between family and work is causing them to make that very choice. And many women, to avoid the ostracism associated with flex-time, are chosing family.

To avoid this unexpected failure of flex-time, some companies are confronting the issue head on by attacking the prejudices associated with its use. Cleverly, however, they aren’t resorting to PR campaigns to chastise men for their attitudes about it - they’re marketing its use directly to them. They are publicly promoting the use of flex-time by men, highlighting stories of those who successfully use it, and making it clear that those - of either gender - who do are able to continue to advance through the company.

This is encouraging. It is important for organizational designers and managers to continue to move away from thinking of their organizations as entities that are statically positioned in space or time. They exist, in fact, wherever and whenever their employees (and even non-employees involved, in one degree or another, with the organization) think about or engage in their work.

HR policies should continue to move beyond merely establishing safe working environments, setting job descriptions, salaries, and career patterns, and providing decent arrays of health, retirement, and vacation benefits. They should help examine what obstacles may exist anywhere that prevent employees from focusing with clear, undistracted minds on their work. This could be anything from helping with commutes through subsidizing mass transit, providing a company service vehicle, or designing shifts around traffic hours, to helping spouses of reassigned employees to find work in a new location, or subsidizing - or even providing - child care.

This isn’t a path to developing a sort of factory-farm employee, shackled heedlessly to a workstation while all bodily and social needs are cared for automatically by others. It is simply an intelligent organization that understands the part that work plays not only for its own well-being, but also for that of its employees as a part of a well-rounded and effective life. Such employees and such organizations will undoubtedly serve each other well.

Some companies are making a start toward this approach. It’s only a beginning, but a clever one: the provision of a company concierge to help employees deal with unusual situations that would otherwise negatively influence their ability to work.

Efforts, such as these, to universalize flexible work patten initiatives, and to make them gender-neutral where appropriate, are encouraging. Unfortunately, it seems that they are mostly being promoted by professional-services firms, such as those employing accountants, financial and management consultants, and attorneys. More work needs to be done to find creative solutions to these needs more broadly across the working landscape. These solutions are there to be found, and managers genuinely focused on the work will find them.