Work-Life Balance

Achieving a balance between work and life has become more complex over time. Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute, has researched and written on this issue for more than 15 years and is a leading expert in the field.

Galinsky was live at 11 a.m. Monday, Aug. 28 to answer your questions about what companies are doing and can do to help employees strike a balance in their lives.

A transcript of the discussion follows:

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Ellen Galinsky: Good Morning! I am delighted to be participating in the Washington Post's Live Chat on Work Life Balance. We have been working on these issues since the early 1980s and have lots of studies and practical experiences. I welcome your questions.

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Washington, D.C.: What is the latest trend in the provision of family-friendly benefits in the workplace? Specifically, I am wondering what companies are doing to support families with young children, including options related to parental leave, flexible hours, support for day care expenses, etc. I was surprised to learn that the federal government has NO paid parental leave benefit.

Ellen Galinsky: We conduct a study of employers with 50 or more employees every few years.

We found that small businesses are helping to drive changes in the structure of work, offering employees more opportunities for workplace flexibility, while large employers are providing more benefits that have direct costs. The 2005 study also finds that employers have largely maintained or increased the overall work life assistance they provide to employees, with cutbacks primarily requiring employees to pay a larger share of disability, health care or retirement benefit costs.

For example: 34% of companies let some employees change their starting and quitting times on a daily basis, 7@ provide on-site child care, 45% let employees pay for child care with pre-tax dollars, and only 3% provide vouchers to help employees pay for child care.

You are right. The government doesn't provide a paid parental leave, though they do provide disability leave for mothers. Only 7% of companies provide any pay beyond disability leave for mothers.

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Reston, Va.: Professional part-time work still seems to be awfully hard to find, yet that would be the best solution for many families struggling to balance work with child-rearing or caring for an aging parent. Part-time care is also very difficult to arrange. What can we do to encourage policymakers and companies to create work that works for all involved? They could get quality work from smart people and pay far less in benefits, which seems like it would work for all involved.

Ellen Galinsky: I agree that professional part time work is hard to find. In fact, 61% of employees feel that people who work part-time are not paid a comparable salary as if they had the same job full time.

I think that is changing. Companies are beginning to see the talent loss, especially in the mothers of young children. I also think that elder care is going to provide a tipping point-with 35% of employees--men and women--providing elder care.

My advice for negotiating a professional part-time job is to do it on a trial basis. Come up with a plan that would work for the employer and for you and have clear ways to measure its effectiveness and ask to try it out for awhile. Then the company will see, as you say, that they will get quality work from smart people, pay pro-rated benefits, and the employees can have the fit between their life on and off the job.

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Washington, D.C.: I teach Family Law at a local law school. This is the question I get the most from the young women: being a lawyer, can I truly have it all? Your answer...

Ellen Galinsky:

This may be a surprising answer. We have found that the most people who do best at managing work and family life are what we call dual-centric. They don't put work first all of the time, but they prioritize their work and their family lives.

Yes, there are daily tradeoffs that each person has to make. And it is important for your students to ask themselves if they are comfortable with the tradeoffs they are making and if not, try to make a change.

In the long run, however, having a rewarding life at home is good for work life and having a rewarding life at work is good for home life.

There is an organization based in Philadelphia, Flex-Time Lawyers, that is working to make the law more family friendly. Have your students check them out.

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Anonymous: Do you have any recommendations on how to convince a manager (usually male or someone without child care responsibilities) that performing a "good" job is not based solely on how many hours you put in? Also, that work-life balance means different things to different people?

Ellen Galinsky: Meet with your manager and ask to have metrics to judge your performance. In other words, help you boss see that hours don't equal performance.

Change is hard and in the industrial age, productivity and commitment were seen as "face time." So you need to replace that measurement in your manager's mind with another way to assess your performance. Then if you deliver, you will hopefully have a convert.

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Washington, D.C.: I missed the ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, when Ellen Galinsky appeared in the "A Closer Look" segment, commenting on the August 22 Forbes opinion piece entitled "Don't Marry Career Women." I would like to hear FWI position on this article.

Ellen Galinsky: If you actually read the studies quoted in the Forbes article, they did not say what the opinion piece said at all. What the studies found is that marital happiness DEPENDS.

It depends on how the husband and wife feel about women working.

It depends on whether the wife feels her husband is doing a fair share of the family work.

It depends on whether the couple has people around them who support their marriage.

Because it was a misreading of the studies and caused some an outcry, Steve Forbes apologized and withdrew the opinion piece.

What I said (and we found this in a study we did of women who earn more than men) is that there are a lot of men who appreciate the women earning money, especially in this time of economic uncertainty. Family incomes has really only remained stable because women have joined the workforce.

In fact, more than two-thirds of men in the workforce who are married have wives who are working!

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washingtonpost.com: Leslie Morgan Steiner's Guest Blog on the Forbes.com Package

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Arlington, Va.: I found Amy Joyce's column in the Business section of the Washington Post yesterday to be really, really frightening. What's the smartest way to plan for maternity/paternity leave? Do you really have to tap out your savings in order to recover from childbirth and begin parenthood? What are some creative ways to manage maternity/paternity leave?

Ellen Galinsky: It is great that Amy Joyce is making people aware of the situation in the US (so unlike most other countries in the world).

If parents made it clear to policy makers that solutions are need for this issue, financially, there would be change.

Given today's realities, how can you best plan?

1) See if your company provides disability leave--some portion of your salary for the period of pregnancy and childbirth disability, usually lasting for 6 to 8 weeks after childbirth. Almost half of companies provide this and it is required in five states.

2) See if your company is one of the companies that provides some pay beyond disability.

3) Can you use paid vacation days or sick days?

4) Does your company have a leave bank where other employees can contribute paid time off to other companies. This is more common in the public sector than the private sector.

5) Start saving as early as possible and monitor costs.

6) Press your legislators for change.

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washingtonpost.com: Amy Joyce's Too Often, Family Leave Leaves Much To Be Desired

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Boston, MA: Hi there,

I'm a brand new first-time dad of 4 months. So far fatherhood has been a blast. My wife and I are taking the financial hit with her staying home with our son for the first few years; it is pretty tough. This leads me to a question:

With election season approaching, what questions should I ask of the candidates, and what actions can they promise to to take, to make my family life a little bit easier?

Ellen Galinsky: Great question. Our studies do show that new dads are a lot more involved in being fathers than fathers in the past were.

Ask your legislators if they can come up with creative solutions for helping families manage leaves.

There is paid leave, but there are also other ideas..such as a fund where people borrow against future earnings to pay these costs.

Also companies are coming up with creative ideas to maintain their involvement with women who stay home for a time. Some companies provide a three to five year leave, but invite people in for training, connect them to a work mentor, perhaps have them cover for people on vacation so they work one or two weeks a year, help them with getting back up to speed if and when they want to returns.

We need to rethink of careers..not just as a ladder, but as offering times to step on and off, for childbirth, perhaps for the teen years, for elder care, etc.

We are in a time of transition and companies and policy makers need to rethink the way that work is organized so that it works better for families and for employers.

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Washington, D.C.: "Family incomes has really only remained stable because women have joined the workforce."

Isn't this really a "chicken or egg" question? Hasn't the competition from women workers had a depressive effect on men's incomes?

Ellen Galinsky: A bigger issue that that women are now more likely to have a four year degree or more than men--among employees under 50, 32 percent of women and 23 percent of men have a four year degree or more.

It does vary among people in different ethnic groups and with different family incomes..but the overall finding is very important.

That is an issue that is very worrisome and one that needs to be addressed. Education is the biggest predictor of income.

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Washington, D.C.: Could you generalize, either by industry (ex. healthcare) or locality (ex. Northeast) of where the most headway is being made in making work-life balance a priority? Who are the leaders in this field? Thank you.

Ellen Galinsky: Interesting, high tech companies, financial services, and accounting firms are currently more likely to make work life a priority than other industries. Perhaps that is because they understand the importance of making the idea of "people first" more of a reality than rhetoric.

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Philadelphia: Provided that most families in this country requires either two incomes (i.e. both parents working) or, in the case of a single parent household, work two jobs... doesn't this contribute to children raising themselves, children being unaccountable, and make them at risk to delinquency and the like?

Ellen Galinsky: Again, perhaps surprisingly, children on average have more time with their employed parents than the children of employed parents did 25 years ago. That is because mothers are spending the same amount of time that mothers did in the past, but fathers are spending more time.

Furthermore, families are more likely to value family life than families in the recent past did.

This is not to say that families aren't multi-tasking more when they are with their children.

Also, the quality of non-parental care for children is pretty uneven..studies show.

And the time between 3 and 6 is the time when a lot of delinquency takes place.

In communities where they have invested in having good quality child care and good quality after-school programs...and in companies that provide employees with real workplace flexibility without career jeopardy for using that flexibility, children can do fine.

It is up to us whether we want to create communities and workplaces that make work "work" for employers, families and children.

But I do think we will pay a price if we don't--in the citizens and workers of the next generation.

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Eastchester, NY: In terms of long work hours - you suggested talking to the manager about performance metrics that are not based on "face time". In my experience (and perhaps it is just my industry) the managers have very little say in this. We often are expected to work long hours, and on weekends, because of customer crises, or overly ambitious development deadlines set by executives much further up the chain. I don't see this improving. There are very few women in software development, and I think this is part of the reason. Any ideas on how to deal with this?

Ellen Galinsky: It has been said that companies don't see the light unless they feel the heat.

Is there any problems in your industry that can be tied to long work hours or overtime? Turnover? Performance? Loss of key talent? Mistake rates? Inefficiencies? Absenteeism?

If you can make a business case to top management, I would suggest the following time-limited experiment, with the sanction of management.

1) Create a work team that gives itself the assignment of maintaining or improving productivity while increasing workplace flexibility.

2) Have the group brainstorm as many solutions it can.

3) Select one or more of the solutions to try for a limited period of time.

4) Create metrics to go along with this experiments--metrics in turns of productivity.

5) Try out this new plan for a limited time.

In my experience, this team approach to improving work and to improving family or personal life yields benefits for both the company and the employer. I have seen in work in numerous industries, including software development.

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Silver Spring, Md.: I've found that single people often get neglected when it comes to benefiting from work-life balance policies in the office. Are there any trends showing that employers are starting to value a single employee's desire to have a life outside of work just as much as that of a mother or father with young kids?

Ellen Galinsky: It is very important that work life issues not been seen as those only of the so-called traditional family. Most good companies that get involved in these issues don't ask why employees need flexibility or who the employees are (single, married, with or without kids or elder care).

When work life issues began to surface in the '80's, they were seen as issues related mainly to women with children. Happily that is changing..to concern men and women and employees at all stages of their life cycle.

In your company, it is important to make it clear that all employees will benefit if they can have a good life off the job as well as on the job.

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Re: Follow-up: Can you explain this concept of "dual-centric" a little more? So, the person values home and family? How does that practically work?

Ellen Galinsky: We were doing a study of the top 100 men and top 100 women in 10 multi-national corporations. We asked two questions: How often the employees put work ahead of their personal or family life, and in a separate question, how often the employees put their personal or family life ahead of their work. We expected most of these top executives to be work-centric--to prioritize work.

We found that 61% of the executives were work-centric. But we also found that 32% were dual centric. They answered the same answer to both questions (very often/very often or often/often, etc.).

We were surprised and didn't even know what to call this group. But when we looked further, we found that these dual-centric employees (the name we ended up with) were:

* more successful at work -- they had risen higher

* rated themselves more successfully in their family lives

* were more likely to take their vacations, worked five few hours a week

* were less stressed and took better care of themselves.

We are now doing another study to better understand people who are dual-centric.

But it does seem that putting all of one's eggs in the work basket isn't as good for us as having more than one thing in life that we really care about.

We also found, in another study, that people who take vacations do better at work.

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Washington, D.C.: With four children, ages 5 and under, and my husband and I both professionals with full time jobs, I find myself wondering too often when employers will wake up and recognize that flexibility breeds productivity as well as loyalty from employees. What does it take for that realization, and will I be out of the work force (25 years or so) before it occurs? Is there anything professional employees can do to hasten the arrival of that day?

Ellen Galinsky: Take a look at our web site (www.familiesandwork.org)under When Work Works. You will see that we have data on how flexibility is a key ingredient of an effective workplace (with hard data to show that effective workplaces have employees who are more engaged in their work, more satisfied with their jobs, in better mental health, and more likely to stay on the job). There are also tips for employees to get more flexibility, and case studies of companies that are using flexibility as a business tool to benefit the company and its employees.

Also check out the web site for Corporate Voices for Working Families. They have productivity data on flexibility from more than two dozen companies as well.

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Ashburn, Va.: What can be done to encourage companies to hire more part-time or job share workers in management and executive level positions?

Many women I know, with college and masters-level educations, want the intellectual challenge without having to be at the office 40-60 hours a week. And in this part of the DC metro area, many of us spend at least two hours commuting to the good jobs.

Do you see solutions for our future options?

Ellen Galinsky: As I have said, we are moving from an industrial economy to an information/service economy...and as in any transition, assumptions and realities don't align.

But that is changing. For example, when Working Mother magazine publishes its best 100 list every fall, the unsolicited applicants for jobs spike in the winning companies. And I talk to many start-up companies that want to place people in part-time or job sharing management jobs.

Change is slow, but it is happening. The best way to bring about change in your company, as I have said, is to make a business case for an experiment that you test.

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Chantilly, Va.: I've found the secret of a (somewhat) stress-free life when it comes to balancing my work/home life. I discovered that work is that: work. It's not meant to be fun (although if you have fun, more power to you) nor is it meant to be a friend-generating endeavor (although it does help if you have friends at work). Work is meant to put money in your pocket so you can live your non-work life.

Once I discovered this secret and made the appropriate moves at work to reduce the amount of stress I was bringing home, my home life improved 10-fold. Although I was making the same salary (one that allows my wife to stay home), I no longer travel, work regular hours and have a five mile commute to earn a living. I very rarely bring home work to finish up and hardly every complain about work at home. I have successfully separated the two and found that it provides me and my family a relaxing lifestyle.

Being a realist, I also understand that not all people are able to live their lives like this due to a longer commute, different business challenges, etc. I only want to share what I've found to be successful for my situation. Maybe it will work as well for others.

Ellen Galinsky: Good suggestion. Perhaps other people could share what they have found works in creating less stressed lives.

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Ellen Galinsky: Thank you all so much for participating in this chat. I hope to come back to talk with you soon.

In the meantime, our web site has all of our studies available, as well as tips, and examples of companies that are striving to create new ways to make work "work." Please go to http://www.familiesandwork.org/ and check out When Work Works.

Thanks so much again.

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