Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs for a 21st-Century Workforce

7. Employer-Provided Workplace Flexibility

131 7 EMPLOYER-PROVIDED WORKPLACE FLEXIBILITY Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, Sheila Eby, James T. Bond, and Tyler Wigton In the 1970s, Columbia University scholars Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn (1978) launched studies documenting family-responsive trends around the globe. They found that, in contrast to almost every other industrialized country, “the United States does not have an explicit national family policy” (428). This statement remains true today (Heymann 2006a). Not only do U.S. employers, rather than the government, provide health insurance, pensions, and other benefits for their own employees, they have largely assumed responsibility for helping their employees’ families manage work and family life (Kamerman and Kahn 1987; Kahn and Kamerman 1980, 2002). There has been some national family legislation in the past three decades, most notably the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides twelve weeks of unpaid leave for parenting, family, and personal medical care for specified groups of employees. Nevertheless, the American safety net for working families remains primarily voluntary. Family-responsive employer policies are not new. Every time there was a national need for women to work outside the home, such as during World Wars I and II, employers developed creative initiatives such as childcare, take-home dinners, laundry services, and flexibility (Friedman and Galinsky 1992, 168–207). In the last decades of the twentieth century, the impetus for providing family-responsive initiatives shifted. The influx of working women prompted employers to create a “business case” for providing work and family workplace supports (Galinsky and Johnson 1998). 132 GALINSKY, SAKAI, EBY, BOND, AND WIGTON Flexibility The Families and Work Institute (FWI) has followed and documented these trends through nationally representative studies of employees, including the National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) in 1992,1 1997, and 2002,2 with comparisons to a nationally representative study conducted for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1977 (Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg 1998; Bond et al. 2003; Galinsky, Bond, and Friedman 1993; Quinn and Staines 1979). Parallel research includes the Business Work-Life Study in 1998 and the National Study of Employers (NSE) in 2005 (Bond, Galinsky, Kim, and Brownfield 2005; Galinsky and Bond 1998).3 Their data show employer efforts continuing to expand, first concentrating on female employees, then widening to include men, employees’ children, and elderly parents. Employers also recognized that most employees wanted flexibility to deal with their lives outside of work—attending a parentteacher conference or fixing a leaking pipe. But employees knew that, formal time or leave policies notwithstanding, the broader company culture—or their own individual supervisor—might frown on flexibility, possibly jeopardizing career advancement for people seeking these options (Galinsky 2001; Galinsky and Johnson 1998). Workplace flexibility directly challenges the assumptions of how work should be done and how employees should be managed (Bailyn 2006; Christensen 2006; Galinsky and Johnson 1998; Rapoport et al. 2002; Williams 2000). These assumptions include (a) the “ideal” employee puts work first; (b) presence at work equals productivity; (c)“face time”(or the time spent at work) equals commitment; (d) all employees want to climb a hierarchical career ladder; (e) family life detracts from work; (f) if you give employees an inch (i.e., flexibility), they will take a mile and will abuse the flexibility they are given; (g) no one will be at the workplace to accomplish needed tasks; (h) it is difficult to manage employees well if supervisors cannot continually monitor them; (i) companies should not interfere in employees’ personal lives; (j) competent employees can manage their work and personal lives; if they cannot manage, they should not be working; and (k) there is no need for policies or programs; a supervisor can handle issues with individual employees when they arise. Even as the demographics of the workforce were rapidly changing in the 1980s and 1990s, employers typically “worked things out with an individual employee,” accommodating a single person. As such, flexibility often carried penalties. The 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce revealed that almost two in five employees (39%) agree that “employees who ask for time off for family reasons or try to arrange different schedules or hours to meet their personal or family needs are LESS likely to get ahead in their jobs and careers.” This percentage has remained constant since 1992. EMPLOYER-PROVIDED WORKPLACE FLEXIBILITY 133 Over this time period, however, some employers began to see flexibility as a competitive advantage. In the...