Family-Friendly Benefits (Jeff Hankins Commentary)
by May 9, 2005 12:00 am 70 views
One of the primary reasons employers are reluctant to implement family-friendly initiatives in the workplace is the concern over the impact on the bottom line.
I’ll submit to you that failing to embrace a “family-centric” culture over a “work-primary” environment will ultimately have a negative impact on your financial performance.
Arkansas Business Publishing Group sponsored the Arkansas Governor’s Family Friendly Employer Awards recently, and keynote speaker Kathie Lingle of the National Work-Life Initiative explained how a company’s culture and financial performance are directly correlated. A new study of Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work” showed that the collective stock returns performance of those companies outpaced the average of Standard & Poor’s 500 over a comparable time frame.
Employers traditionally have de-manded that work be prioritized over everything else. Long hours, “work is the boss” attitudes and rigid schedules are the norm. This is a work-primary environment.
“There are probably companies in Arkansas that haven’t gotten the news” and are still expecting work-centric behavior, Lingle says.
A growing number of companies are trying to become dual-focus operations that enable an employee to balance work and family concerns. Lingle says dual-focus workers are the “new human capital” because they are:
Several factors contribute to an effective workplace, including workplace flexibility, job autonomy, challenging work, continuing learning opportunities, coworker support and involvement in management’s decision-making process.
Workplace flexibility is the leading initiative that employees prize, and many of the honorees in the Arkansas awards competition use job sharing and flextime as primary benefits. The result is lower turnover and happier employees who are more productive.
Several of this year’s award winners are in the health care industry. Baptist Medical Center, St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center and Arkansas Children’s Hospital all were honored for family-friendly employee benefits and cultures that have become mandatory in the fierce battle for a limited talent pool.
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Overworked Employees
About 44 percent of U.S. employees say they experience being overworked often or very often. One-third are described as chronically overworked. Those numbers seem high to me, but they may reflect perceptions more than reality.
Lingle says studies show that overworked employees are more likely to:
Here was one of the more disturbing trends we learned about: More men and women executives are reducing their career aspirations. Why? The sacrifices that would have to be made in their personal lives to take on more responsibility.
Among college-educated men, 68 percent wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility in a 1992 survey. A study in 2002 showed only 52 percent wanting more responsibility. The number of college-educated women with higher aspirations was 57 percent in 1992 but has fallen to only 36 percent in 2002.
You have to wonder how much management talent will be lost in the years to come. Generation X and Generation Y men are prioritizing family over work in a big way, and employers will be hard-pressed to lure them into long management hours even with handsome compensation packages.
The culture shifts and the rise of the dual-focus worker are real and even appropriate in my view. Companies can either make the adjustment or risk facing the repercussions of losing valuable employees who find other firms that have.
(Jeff Hankins can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].)