Rewriting the 'Social Contract' Between Work, Family

Charles Leadbeater has always been good at trends.

After all, the former newspaper editor helped create "Bridget Jones's Diary," a newspaper column about London singles life that spawned two books and a Hollywood movie.

These days, though, Leadbeater spends most of his time thinking about technology and how it changes the way people work.

The tension between work and family creates new opportunities for companies, especially large firms, bent on attracting the best candidates, Leadbetter argues in "The Weightless Society," his new book on the future of entrepreneurship and the shifting relationship between workers and their employees.

As a growing number of start-up companies fold or announce layoffs, some top workers already are beginning to drift back to more traditional and stable enterprises. The challenge for large companies is to retain those workers with programs and policies designed to make it easier to balance work and home life--what Leadbeater calls "the social contract."

But for many businesses, that's easier said than done. Persuading firms to actually allow a moderate percentage of their workforce to telecommute, for instance, has proved more difficult than management consultants and harried employees had expected. @Work readers frequently request information about companies that offer liberal telecommuting policies. At a majority of firms, even in the high-tech industry, regularly working from home is a perk available only to their most experienced employees.

Such inflexibility, says Leadbeater, not only leads to high turnover, especially among women, but also hurts the productivity of employees who must tend to a sick child or parent.

"The tension between the way we work and the way we run families is so huge and unresolved," says Leadbeater.

Not too long ago, Leadbeater, 40, confronted the issue in his own way. After 11 years spent climbing the corporate ladder, he realized he'd had enough of meetings and strategy sessions. So he took a job that combines writing, speaking and advising and became a kind of high-tech consultant.

Now he shuffles between his writing career, commitments at Demos, a British think tank, and sitting on a tech policy unit for Prime Minister Tony Blair. Leadbeater said he wished he had made the change sooner.