Order

TABLE OF CONTENTS

§ The Separation of Life and Work
§ The Strategic Linking of Work and Family
     Wanted: Employees Without a Life
     When Individuals Try to Change
     Putting Work-Family Issues on the Table
§ The Process of Change: A Case Study
     An Overview of Our Approach
     Site Background
     Looking at Work Through a Work-Family Lens
     Applying the Findings to a Critical Business Need
     Pressing for Change
     Stepping Back
§ Lessons and Challenges
     Creating Safety and Minimizing Risk
     Engaging Resistance
     Challenges
     Relinking Work and Family Life

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Rhona Rapoport is codirector of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London, England. She coauthored the first publication on dual-career families and is the coauthor of several books, including Dual Career Families Re-examined: New Integrations of Work and Family (Harper Colophon, 1977); Leisure and the Family Life Cycle (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Men and Women as Equals at Work. She is currently a consultant to the Ford Foundation and other organizationsworking on gender equity and organizational change. She is also a founding partner of Lume International, LLP, a company dedicated to working with organizations to redesign work practices in line with a dual agenda: to help male and female employees integrate their work with their private lives and, at the same time, to help companies more effectively achieve their business goals.

Lotte Bailyn is the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She served as the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at Radcliffe's Public Policy Institute for the period 1995-1997. Her latest book is Breaking the Mold: Women, Men, and Time in the New Corporate World (Free Press, 1993). She is also a founding partner of Lume International, LLP.

Deborah Kolb is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management and director of the Simmons Institute on Leadership and Change. She is also a senior fellow at the Program on Negotiation, Harvard University, where she codirects the Negotiation in the Workplace Program, and is the author of several books on mediation and work. She is also a founding partner of Lume International, LLP.

Joyce K. Fletcher is an associate professor of cooperative education at Northeastern University and Asa S. Knowles Research Fellow at Northeastern's new Office for the Study of Work and Learning. Her PhD dissertation, "Toward a Theory of Relational Practice in Organizations: A Feminist Reconstruction of Real Work," grew out of the research for this report, and will be published as a book by the MIT Press. She is also a founding partner of Lume International, LLP.

EXCERPTS

The Process of Change: A Case Study

Making significant changes in the workplace to help employees better integrate their work and personal lives requires an intensive method that actively engages the way people think and act. We call this method collaborative interactive action research. Unlike more traditional forms of research or consulting, our method is aimed at both increasing knowledge and effecting change. Research and intervention are intertwined. The process is one of mutual inquiry with our partners at the sites. It is not only we who are learning something about how the system works or introducing changes; nor is it only we who have the expertise and make the recommendations. These are all shared with our partners.

We illustrate the key tenets of our research method by presenting a case study below of the changes at one specific site: a large sales and service district of the Xerox Corporation. We highlight how looking at work through a work-family lens can clarify ways to deal with critical business issues. And we show how, by doing this, employers can promote the dual agenda of benefiting the business while addressing employees' concerns.

What we want to illuminate is not so much the particular changes brought about at the site, but the process of ongoing inquiry that connects work to family and community, links work-family issues to the way work is accomplished, and does so in a manner that is equitable for both men and women.

An Overview of Our Approach

Our research method has three key aspects. We start out by looking at work practices through a work-family lens. When we speak of using a "work-family lens," we mean engaging people in a process of reflection on aspects of the work that make it difficult to integrate work and personal life. This process of reflection helps people make a link between individual experiences and systemic issues, such as how work is structured, how time is spent, and how employees demonstrate commitment and competence. Since this process is not usually undertaken in corporations, it is generally greeted with some astonishment and often with resistance. But it is the process of collaboratively engaging such resistance by respecting it and talking about it that often leads to insights about alternative ways of working.

Second, we seek to link what we have learned about the work culture and practices to a salient business need the particular group is facing. Making this link establishes a mutual agenda, connecting individual work-family needs with business goals in ways that can potentially benefit both.

Finally, we press for change throughout the process—during employee interviews, roundtable discussions, and in experimental interventions like the one highlighted on p. 6. And we challenge assumptions about "unchangeable" conditions while encouraging out-of-the-box thinking about work practices.

Site Background

At the time of our research, the sales and service district had approximately 600 employees. They worked in three main functions: sales, service, and administration. The sales organization, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, was organized to serve different product lines and different types of customers. The service technicians, mostly men, were responsible for maintaining equipment in different geographic areas. Administrative workers, primarily female, processed orders and scheduled installations. A senior management team (four men and one woman), drawn from the three functions, jointly managed the district, although one of the sales managers acted as the team's senior manager.

On paper, at least, the district enjoyed a companywide work-family benefits program, with flextime, compressed workweeks, job sharing, and other provisions. But such provisions were rarely used. Some managers were willing, off the record, to make short-term, informal accommodations for people who needed them. These workers, with few exceptions, were women in administration who were granted slight variations in their daily schedules, or what amounted to a limited form of flextime. While work-family issues were rarely, if ever, talked about openly in the district, they simmered under the surface and were frequently the topic of informal discussions.

Looking at Work Through a Work-Family Lens

We started our research at this site by interviewing more than 60 men and women at all levels across the three functions. To the surprise of respondents, and the active resistance of some, we focused not only on work-family issues, but more broadly on their ability to do what needed to be done on the job and still have time and energy for outside interests. In time, however, even resistant respondents shared their experiences with us.

In general, talking with employees and managers about the boundary between work and personal concerns was often an emotional experience. People spoke about the stress in their families and how that affected their work. One sales manager, who had had the highest employee satisfaction ratings the prior year, talked about how devastating his divorce had been and how he worried now that his ratings were below par. Others took the opportunity to tell us that the work-family problem was merely one of women's greed for an elevated lifestyle.

These interviews and, indeed, the entire data-collection process offered us opportunities to engage and challenge people's assumptions about the roles of men and women and the unspoken rules of the workplace. For example, we discussed other reasons besides "greed" why mothers might work and provided alternative scenarios for managers to think through some of their fears about workday flexibility.

As part of our data collection, we also conducted an employee survey, in part to help legitimize the issue in the eyes of a new senior management team. The survey confirmed our initial findings that work-family concerns cut across the work force, occupying men as well as women, managers as well as frontline employees.