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Calling for More Work/Life Balance
First Lady Michelle Obama said she's just like any other working mother with two young children -- she struggles to find a balance between her work and personal life. "I personally know the challenges of leading a busy life at work and at home -- trying to do a good job at both -- and always feeling like you're not quite living up to either," she said May 7 at the annual meeting of Corporate Voices for Working Families, based in Washington. "I know few people who don't want to do their very best at their job," she said, "but in order for them to do this they have to feel like their home life is stable and manageable."
(Obama did acknowledge that, unlike other working moms, she now gets a chief of staff and personal assistants and joked that all working parents need the same thing). She called for more employers to offer flexible scheduling, which gives employees "greater ability to attend to important family responsibilities like child pick-up." The First Lady also challenged corporate America to attempt to provide quality on-site child care. "That keeps many of us up at night as families," she said. "You're just wondering, where are we going to put our children where we feel like they're being safe and being loved?" Increased work/life benefits would certainly sit well with employees. About four in 10 workers (41 percent) are dissatisfied with the level of work/life benefits being offered through their employer, according to a new poll released by Workplace Options, a work/life services provider in Raleigh, N.C. And nearly half (49 percent) would consider leaving their current job for one that offered better work/life benefits. In her speech, Obama also called for paid leave to deal with a serious illness in the family or the birth or adoption of a child. That's a mighty big agenda during an economy that has forced many companies to cut staff and many employees to work longer and harder to get the job done. Obama, however, said that work/life initiatives can actually propel productivity because employees entitled to those benefits will work harder and stay with that employer longer. "I found that as I've managed staff, the more opportunity I gave them to be good parents, the more commitment that they made to working with me, the less likely they were to leave because they wouldn't find the same sort of situation somewhere else," she said. "This isn't just about family balance; this about making workplaces stronger and more effective and keeping and attracting the most qualified people," she said. While HR executives may laud such ideas, the labor market is hardly ripe for such sweeping work/life changes, says Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of global human resources at the New York-based American Management Association. "When unemployment is low, organizations are almost forced to pay more attention to the [work/life] issue to attract and retain talent," he says. "When unemployment is high and labor is readily available, organizations don't have that labor-market pressure to deal with because most employees are just happy to have a job." Nevertheless, the First Lady's endorsement could bring considerable awareness to an issue that's been on HR's radar for some time, says Avramidis. "I think what it'll do is capture a lot of people's attention and have a lot of people think creatively -- both from the employee and employer side -- and perhaps revisit an issue that they haven't thought about much in the last six to 12 months," he says. Dan Yager, senior vice president and general counsel for the Washington-based HR Policy Association, warns that if Obama's attention on the issue leads to governmental mandates on work/life issues, it would be a mistake. He says that employers are already struggling, not only with the economy but with the time and productivity lost while employees miss work under existing mandates, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act. He also says that any mandate would most likely be too absolute, since there are such vast differences from company to company. "[Businesses are] getting mandates now at the state and local level, which is resulting in inconsistencies and really making it very difficult for large employers to have uniform plans in this area," he says. "I think right now employers are struggling to cope with the mandates that are already in place. ... Now would not be the time to start adding new layers." May 14, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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