RELATIONSHIP TIPS
BALANCING WORK AND FAMILY - page 2
The nearly year-long study's goal: to identify employers' best practices by asking both companies and employees to describe their work-family balancing acts. How do employers keep productivity growing while addressing family concerns? Can employees have a life and still get ahead? The results add up to a compelling agenda for corporate managers. Yet they also reflect a yawning divide between family-friendliness in theory and in practice. While 48% of the 8,000 employees in BUSINESS WEEK's survey said they could ``have a good family life and still get ahead'' in their company, 60% reported that management didn't, or only ``somewhat'' did, take people into account when making decisions. More telling, more than two-fifths said that work had a negative impact on their home lives. ``I may have flexibility to accommodate family needs...but I'm home working until midnight to get my job done,'' wrote one employee. Indeed, says Bradley K. Googins, director of the Center on Work & Family, ``while many companies offer benefits and programs, the underlying cultural issues still aren't very well addressed.''
Ten companies with impressive strategies and results did emerge from BUSINESS WEEK's study (table, page 76). Some of the leaders were hardly surprises: DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola, among others, have led innovation in the work-family arena for a decade or longer. Others aren't as well-known. Eddie Bauer Inc., for one, combines a strong people-oriented culture with a host of leading-edge benefits. And Marriott International Inc. heads a small group of employers seeking solutions for the problems presented by a predominantly low-wage workforce.
The biggest surprise, though, was the company that won the highest overall grades: First Tennessee, a midsize regional bank that only recently has won attention for its progressive work-family response. First Tennessee offers luxurious benefits such as on-site child care or vouchers, job-sharing, and fitness centers. But it also demonstrates an intelligent strategic view of the problem. Work and family, it argues, are not discrete phenomena. They necessarily touch one another, often profoundly. The solution, then, is to build consideration of family issues into job design, work processes, and organizational structures--just as one would consider marketing concerns, say, or engineering input.
In practice, that means that Constance E. Wimbley and her seven co-workers in the bank's Alcoa (Tenn.) account reconcilement department determine work-family balance for themselves. Freed from attendance guidelines, the clerks adjust their schedules to match the work--and their lives. ``We're all grown adults,'' Wimbley says. ``It makes me feel good about working here.'' When Wimbley works overtime, her team members let her 4-year-old daughter, Chelsie, wait in the office while they finish. Another clerical group opted to work fewer hours in the middle of each month to balance the overtime they put in when month-end account statements went in the mail. Turnaround time on statements was cut in half.
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