RELATIONSHIP TIPS
BALANCING WORK AND FAMILY
This tip was written by Keith H. Hammonds in New York, with bureau reports
You're a solid manager and, word has it, a decent guy to work for. You treat your people well. But you've also got product to move--and since last year's restructuring, the proposals and requests have come at you like a wicked tsunami. Your staff seems a little frayed at the edges--no surprise, really, since they're in at 7:30 a.m. for the daily briefing and don't leave until past six. You're still trying to make just one of your kid's soccer games. And you can't remember the last long talk you had with your wife (though you do swap E-mail).
``Work and family''? Yeah, right. You've heard about some program the company offers. Child care, flexible hours, that sort of thing. A few employees actually use it, but they're mainly women with young kids--not people who want a career. Not your boss. And not your staff. Frankly, you think it's a load of hooey.
CLEAR GAINS. You might want to talk to the folks at First Tennessee National Corp. Three years ago, they started taking family issues seriously, treating them as strategic business questions. The bank got rid of a lot of work rules and let employees figure out which schedules worked best--``because they know what needs to be done'' both on and off the job, says Becky Tipton, a department supervisor. Then it carted in a kitchen-sink-load of programs to ease family distractions, marketed them relentlessly, and sent Tipton and 1,000 other managers through 3 1/2 days of training.
In short order, clear gains in productivity and customer service emerged. As employees got control over their workplace, ``managers had to change the way they did business,'' says CEO Ralph Horn. Ultimately, though, supervisors rated by their subordinates as supportive of work-family balance retained employees twice as long as the bank average and kept 7% more retail customers. Higher retention rates, First Tennessee says, contributed to a 55% profit gain over two years, to $106 million.
Disbelievers, skeptics, working stiffs, take note: Work-family strategies haven't just hit the corporate mainstream--they've become a competitive advantage. The exclusive province of working mothers a decade ago, such benefits now extend to elder-care assistance, flexible scheduling, job-sharing, adoption benefits, on-site summer camp, employee help lines, even--no joke--pet-care and lawn-service referrals. The titles ``work/life coordinator'' and ``director of diversity'' have entered the bureaucratic lexicon; the ranks of consultants in the field have mushroomed. At the political conventions in August, family-friendliness was all the rage.
It is a phenomenon, in other words, that executives deny at their own risk, now that the two-income family is a fact of life. So BUSINESS WEEK, together with the Center on Work & Family at Boston University, has embarked on a new initiative to rate companies on their family-friendly strategies.
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