Introduction
This is a book about how to bring work to life. It’s about both work and life, and how to leverage work-life supports to bring vitality, vigor, and verve to the experience of work—and thus to life. Bringing work to life means that employees are able to bring their talents and passions to a career that fulfills them and in turn produces better results for organizations. Bringing work to life also means that work and life are part of a connected whole. When the demands of life can be a part of work, and when work can appropriately integrate with life, employees benefit and organizations benefit. I will explain, but first, it is important to start with a sense of the demands that organizations, leaders, and employees are facing.
A BLURRED WORLD
Most of us work for a living, and most of us face significant demands from both life and from work. We need to work. We need to achieve a level of fulfillment in our careers. We must foster good relationships with our partners, spouses, children, and other family members. We want to make a contribution to our communities. We need to quench our spirits with our own hobbies or activities. We are required to be at work early for the monthly staff meeting. We must retrieve the kids from dance class. We need to pick up groceries and make dinner. We want to care for aging parents. We are required to work over the weekend in order to finish the report for our boss. No matter who we are we must determine how to navigate these types of demands, and the demands don’t come neatly in containers. They collide all at the same time. The night that a critical meeting runs late at the office is the same night our daughter performs in Fiddler on the Roof. Or just when we get that promotion at work, our son makes the travel team for soccer. Work and life are inextricably linked.
Technology has further blurred the lines between life and work. The line is blurry because things are moving so fast. The line is blurry because it is going away. It is fuzzy and fading. In fact, some would argue the line isn’t simply blurred or fuzzy, it is nonexistent. Because work and life are coming together, we must collectively determine how to create the conditions for work to be a positive experience—one in which workers want to bring discretionary time, energy, and passion to the job. After work, we need the energy to bring our best to our personal lives. In the morning, we want to anticipate a day that allows us to bring our best to our work.
In this blurred world, what are the responsibilities of leaders and organizations? What are the ways employers can help meet these needs? What are the ways we can more effectively bring work to life and life to work? This book explores answers to these questions. Work-life supports are the benefits, policies, practices, and organizational cultural norms that help employees navigate demands. They are benefits that offer provision for both maternity and paternity time off for an adoption. They are policies for telecommuting. They are company norms that allow flexibility for employees who must leave early in order to care for a sick relative. They are tuition reimbursement programs for the workers who want to continue education. They are core work hour arrangements.
However, these are the easy part—these are just the mechanisms that allow flexibility and options for workers. More importantly, these work-life supports must be implemented in ways that ensure effectiveness. It won’t work for leaders to simply pick a few work-life supports from a menu and scotch tape them into an organization’s policy manual. This book describes not only the mechanisms for work-life supports, but also the factors that must be considered in order for work-life supports to be successfully implemented. This book describes the conditions that will make the work-life supports effective in bringing work to life.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS … AND ISN’T
This is not a book about how organizations can wrench more from employees. Instead, it describes how employees can be more fulfilled, as well as the relationship of choice and self-determination that promote this fulfillment. Leaders and organizations create the conditions that allow employees to make more of their own choices more often and work in the ways that work for them. Some workers will want to keep work and life more separate. Some will want to combine work and life. Work is part of life and life should be a part of our work. Leaders and organizations should create the conditions for abundance and joy—plenty of options for choice and fulfillment. Leaders and organizations should create situations in which employees can have it all—as they choose it.
Work-life balance is the wrong notion. We are better served by seeking to navigate and integrate work and life. Balance connotes a zero-sum game in which work and life are separate and mutually exclusive. The concept of bringing work to life requires a broader view that provides for integrating work and life demands, and meeting both fully. It requires a comprehensive approach that increases workers’ capacity and helps mitigate demands, and in turn provides support for navigating the complexities we face in the realms of both work and life.
Accomplishing this integration and navigation of work and life is not a prescription with one right answer. Instead, there are multiple right answers. The best options are aligned with where a company is going and what its culture is seeking to create. They are aligned with an employee and where he is in his life course, and they provide for flexibility throughout a worker’s life and career. Leaders and organizations must find ways to serve the whole person—and in turn help the person contribute his best to the organization’s results.
The topic of work-life integration is not only for women or only for moms. It is for both men and women, since work is a reality for both, and since both men and women lead full lives and manage multiple demands. When we include the whole population in the dialogue and the solutions—not just women—we all benefit. In addition, we gain when we broaden the dialogue to those who may not have children or those who are empty nesters. In 2010 20 percent of women did not have children and 49 percent of those were voluntarily without children.1 Work-life supports must embrace all aspects of life—those associated with raising children and those that go beyond children.
Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management,2 believed that organizations have a responsibility to workers and also to society. He asserted that managers could positively affect workers, who in turn would positively affect organizations, which in turn would positively affect society. Work-life supports are mechanisms that make this contribution to workers, to organizations, and, in turn, to society. This book addresses how leaders create conditions in which workers can bring more of themselves to work, more fully express the full spectrum of their talents in the work environment, and in turn foster a contribution to society as a whole.
Organizations need not provide charity for employees, and leaders should insist on results. Providing work-life supports is good business, and it is good for employees and for organizations. This book builds the business case for work-life supports and articulates why they are important. It also pragmatically addresses how to implement work-life supports, how to adapt them over time, and how to leverage them in order to serve employees and serve organizations.
The subsequent chapters advise leaders, influencers, and decision makers within organizations on how to create a work experience where employees are supported and organizations get better results. The recommendations help organizations adapt so employees can bring work to life and life to work, and find a new reality where employees are successfully navigating both.
BUT WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
Why should leaders and organizations care? There is plenty on their plates already. Here’s why: leaders and organizations should pay attention to work-life supports because corporations depend on workers’ commitment, engagement, and enthusiasm. Organizations are dependent on workers’ discretionary time. If workers “quit and stay” (called presenteeism), corporations may be retaining their physical being, but they’re not accessing workers’ best efforts, their most creative output, or those few extra minutes or hours after the workday to complete a project in the most thorough way. Providing work-life supports is good for organizations. Ellen Galinsky, who leads National Studies for the Changing Workforce, found that when companies provide greater work-life supports:
… employees exhibit more positive work outcomes, such as job satisfaction, commitment to employer, and retention, as well as more positive life outcomes such as less interference between job and family life, less negative spillover from job to home, greater life satisfaction, and better mental health.
For employers, having employees who are more engaged and more healthy results in higher retention, higher productivity, and reduced costs for medical expenses. A 2013 article by Gallup says there is a cyclical relationship between engagement and company performance and hiring. In their studies they repeatedly find that when employees are more engaged, company performance improves, and in turn, companies can hire more workers and economies benefit overall.4 The Gallup study also found that engaged employees had lower absenteeism, were more productive, and were more likely to remain with their current employer.5
Work-life supports are important because workers are overburdened and overtaxed. They are deluged with demands, and they feel stressed. Dr. Kathleen Christensen, program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says, “The American Family is experiencing a time famine.”6 As workers seek to navigate all their demands, state and federal policies aren’t much help. Work has changed and workers have changed but U.S. federal policy has not. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), passed in 1993, is the most comprehensive U.S. policy aimed at addressing work and family issues. However, the FMLA only covers employers that have fifty or more workers and only offers unpaid leave.7 While FMLA was recently updated by the Department of Labor,8 our U.S. federal policies still do not offer workers much in the way of support. As for local ordinances, San Francisco is leading the way with the Family Friendly Workplace Ordinance, which became effective January 1, 2014. It allows workers at employers of twenty or more people to apply for flexible or predictable working schedules in order to care for a child under age eighteen, a parent over sixty-five, or an ailing family member.
Notwithstanding FMLA or San Francisco’s new ordinance, in the absence of broad federal requirements, corporate benefits, policies, and practices become even more important for helping families and workers successfully integrate demands of work and life. HR Magazine reported recently that human resource professionals expect benefits—such as health care/wellness, retirement savings/planning, flexible working benefits, and career development—to become increasingly important in recruiting efforts. In particular, 71 percent of HR professionals expect an increase in the importance of flexible working benefits to recruit the best and the brightest.9 Leaders and organizations must pay attention to work-life supports because they are important to employees—both the people they already employ and those they hope to employ.
RECOMMENDATIONS BASED ON RESEARCH
The ideas and recommendations presented in the following chapters are based on evidence and research. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with hundreds of senior leaders in a broad array of industries and locations. I’ve conducted formal research as well as informal research. This book synthesizes all that I have learned and provides evidence for work-life supports in terms of which strategies are most effective.10 I’ve changed some names and details in order to protect anonymity, but the views and perspectives will guide readers in making choices for their company’s work-life support efforts.
A ROADMAP
In section one, Leading to Abundance—Setting Context, I provide new perspectives on today’s reality and a new way to consider the current challenges of work and life demands. I define current challenges as well as the historical foundation for our current realities. I define work life supports and provide examples from companies that are implementing them successfully. In section one, I also show evidence of how work-life supports have positive impacts on key organizational outcomes such as employee engagement, productivity, and growth.
In section two, Leading with Alignment—Considerations for Success, I describe the comprehensive considerations that must be factored in when implementing work-life supports. Based on my extensive research with hundreds of executives, I provide the ten considerations to focus readers’ efforts.
In section three, Leading for Adaptation—Implementing Work-Life Supports, I explain how to make a business case for work-life supports, how to effectively manage change, and how to measure successes.
The considerations I provide may be either obstacles or enablers to the successful implementation of work-life supports. When I work with companies, I frequently conduct a “force field analysis.” Despite the Star Wars-sounding name, the analysis is straightforward and pragmatic. It defines the forces or variables that move an organization forward and those that hold it back. Often these variables are two sides of a coin. For example, a company’s emphasis on performance outcomes is helpful in making work-life supports work. The absence of focus on performance outcomes can derail work-life supports. The considerations for work-life supports are criteria for success. In order to successfully implement work-life supports—in alignment with the organization’s unique needs—they are the criteria that must be met. All of these levers help ensure the successful implementation of work-life supports. They help workers navigate the demands they face. They help workers integrate work and life across the chapters of their life course. When they operate effectively, they bring work to life.
Simple steps to the perfect solution for workers and organizations? Easy tips for bringing work to life? Hardly. It would be ignorant, arrogant, or both to suggest that this is a quick, easy process. On the contrary, successfully implementing work-life supports requires dedication and ongoing effort. It is not a program of the month, but rather a way of managing for the long term. Bringing work to life and creating the conditions for growth, exuberance, fulfillment, choice, and self-determination are worth it for workers and for organizations. Let’s get started on bringing work to life.