In response to DiversityInc’s article “The Work/Life Balancing Act: How 4 Companies Do It,” one reader asks how companies that offer these benefits are affected.

Question:
All of this is well and good, but what is the effect on the bottom line? Are the companies that engage in these practices more profitable? Have they seen an increase in profits since adopting these practices?

Answer:
There is a dramatic bottom-line benefit to diversity management and implementing work/life practices. One simple area to think about is retention. Given that the workforce is now at gender parity, including college-educated workers, then making sure the gender that must bear the children in our society finds it beneficial to continue focusing their talent in the workplace doubles a company’s chance to get the best talent into the right positions. My wife said that this would have been obvious a long time ago if men bore half the children. Indeed, work/life efforts have risen as the number of dual-income families have risen because the stress of working and raising a family can be mitigated by good management, to the increased productivity of both men and women, the recruitment of the best and brightest and the retention of your most talented people.

We have written hundreds of articles about bottom-line benefits (there is plenty of documentation on DiversityIncBestPractices.com). It all boils down to relationship building; if a company has a superior ability to build a relationship compared to its competitor, it will command a higher margin and stronger market share. The company will also be able to pull innovation into its decision-making cycle.

Recently, a large retail company called me for help—their board, comprised of seven white men, one white woman and one Black woman, wanted “proof” that diversity had a bottom-line effect. I doubt the male members are sexists, but you have to think about moving the needle with a group whose very composition reflects a failure of process. Admission that diversity management is a benefit would be a self-indictment!

Although there are clearly other issues, I’ll limit this discussion to gender: The simple fact is that more than half of bachelor’s degree earners under the age of 60 in this country are women. Therefore, 22 percent women representation is a failure—ESPECIALLY in a retail setting. Now those white men might just be qualified, but is the board as effective as if it were 50 percent men, 50 percent women? How could it be? And, frankly, it isn’t. This particular company was the first mover in a space that now has a major competitor. (Again, are the white men on that board qualified? Performance might indicate otherwise). Surely, the board couldn’t be “all that”—otherwise, this major competitor never would have happened. There’s a penalty for not having good diversity management—although most people don’t see it clearly.

I won’t tell you how I advised the retail company; I should have charged them for the advice (they do no business with me), and if another retail company wants the answer, just let me know and I’ll tell you what my hourly rate is. It was a simple answer (my detractors tell me that’s all I’m capable of), but it worked.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

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By Barbara Frankel

Are flexible workplaces going the way of VHS tapes and the Palm Pilot? I’ve heard grumblings from several people, mostly women with children, since Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban telecommuting and Best Buy told its corporate employees they have to start working in the office.

I was never a big fan of workplace flexibility because I was one of those women who tried to do it all, including going back to work at a demanding job when I had a 4-year-old and a 6-week-old baby. But I had a supportive husband (with a job that eventually paid well), parents who could back us up financially and, therefore, the ability to hire good help. In recent years, working with Millennials who blur the line between office and home, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the ability to work when I am at my most effective (early in the day) and where I need or want to be.

The concepts of work/life and telecommuting are alive and well—but only for companies that use them correctly. Like any other “benefit,” flexible workplaces only help the business if they are put in place with best practices, goals and valid metrics to assess success, and with constant review.

Flexible Workplaces: What Works—and What Doesn’t

I remember the days when there was no flextime. Everyone had to go to work at the prescribed time and you never left before your boss did. I recall being a young newspaper editor with babies at home. I was always a fast worker, and I’d finish all my tasks for the day by 5 p.m. Yet I’d sit at my desk doing busywork until 6:30, because that’s when my (male) boss left. I desperately wanted to go home—and I wasn’t very effective in that last hour and a half—but the culture made leaving earlier career suicide.

There have been many studies on how Millennials (those born between 1982 and 1993) don’t buy the 9-to-5 workplace, and how many of them prefer flexibility over higher pay. We all know that with today’s technology, those of us who are compulsive email checkers (I am definitely in this group) are wired to our jobs 24/7 and can do our work from anywhere.

Today’s question isn’t about whether you CAN work from home but whether it is beneficial to your employer. The answer is yes—and no.

Academic studies show telecommuters work more hours and often have increased productivity. Anecdotally, most of us would agree with this. When we’re in the office, we get caught up in side conversations and constant interruptions. When we’re home, most of us can lock ourselves in quiet rooms and focus, focus, focus.

Three Downsides to Flexible Workplaces

1. Those same studies that tout increased productivity also cite less innovation from teleworkers. This makes sense since the greatest innovation occurs through collaborative efforts of diverse teams, and that requires human interaction—the old bouncing ideas off of each other. The Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki spoke at one of DiversityInc’s Innovation Fests! He highlighted the human tendency to interact with people from similar backgrounds and how diversity initiatives enable different ways of thinking in organizations, leading to innovative solutions. If everyone sits at home in those quiet rooms, this interaction doesn’t happen.

2. Some people cheat the system. This is what Mayer says has occurred at Yahoo! With a general loose policy on people working wherever and whenever they want, the company has had a whole lot of people taking advantage, collecting paychecks and really not doing much of anything. Some even started their own side businesses. (Mayer’s ban reportedly mainly targeted 200 employees who worked at home full time.) At Best Buy, the policy had been “results oriented.” So if you made your numbers, nobody cared where you were. Best Buy has been in financial trouble, but new CEO Hubert Joly’s focus on improving efficiency, including the telecommuting cutback, is making Wall Street analysts more optimistic.

3. Flexibility without flexibility fails. The companies that really “get” this understand that they can’t just have a blanket policy that you can work from home X hours a week if you do this or that job. Look at Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization initiative, which creates a variety of models to climb the corporate path.

How to Succeed With Flexible Workplaces 

The companies that are making this work well—Accenture, ADP, Aetna and PricewaterhouseCoopers, to name just a few—have some things in common.

1. They clearly communicate their expectations to managers and workers.

2. They use metrics to assess the engagement, retention, promotion and productivity of teleworkers, and they evaluate gaps

3. They engage their resource groups to promote more virtual interaction. A growing trend in DiversityInc Top 50 companies is groups for teleworkers; these groups enhance the collaborative relationships of employees and allow them to find solutions to the hindrances to effective performance.

4. They continue to innovate and never rest on their laurels. Several companies that have been considered early pioneers in workplace flexibility are looking at ways now to change the model, such as having top salespeople not spend so much time on the road, especially globally.

Sixty-three percent of U.S. companies now offer some degree of flexible workplaces—and ALL the DiversityInc Top 50 companies do. We aren’t going to return to the days of yore when you were chained to your desk whether you did good work or not. But it is valid for any company to assess what is working to engage employees so they can perform at maximum capacity.

The post Is This the End of Flexible Workplaces? appeared first on DiversityInc.

“Mental illness does not discriminate,” says Bob Carolla, director of media relations at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “It can strike anyone at any time.”

President John Quincy Adams and author Iris Chang (“The Rape of Nanking” and “The Chinese in America”) battled depression. Media giant Ted Turner and broadcaster Jane Pauley have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

There are about 57.7 million adults experience a mental health disorder in a given year and one in 17 lives with a serious mental illness, according to NAMI. And the cost of untreated mental illness in lost productivity, accidents, and high absenteeism and turnover to corporate America is steep—at least $105 billion in lost productivity annually, reports  U.S.A. Today on research by Harvard University Medical School.

• More than 200 million workdays are lost each year because of mental disorders (Center for Prevention and Health Services’ An Employer’s Guide to Behavior Health Services). Those with depression miss an average of 4.8 workdays, plus experience 11.5 days of reduced productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Employees who have depression—the most common mental disorder in the workplace, affecting up to 6 million men and 12 million women in the United States annually—cost companies $44 billion per year in lost productivity (The Journal of the American Medical Association).
• Nearly 20 million Americans suffer from depression, or about 10 percent of the population, according to National Institute for Mental Health.
• Absence, disability and lost productivity related to mental disorders cost employers more than four times the cost of employee medical treatment (Partnership for Workplace Mental Health’s A Mentally Healthy Workforce—It’s Good for Business)
• More than 90 percent of employees agree that their mental health and personal problems spill over into their professional lives and have a direct impact on their job performance. But 75 percent of employees who seek care for mental-health problems see substantial improvement in work performance after treatment (Mental Health America).

Moreover, “‘Parity’ with other illnesses generally cost businesses less than $1.35 per employee per month,” notes Carolla, who has lived with bipolar disorder for the past 20 years.

Which Racial Groups Are Most Affected?

While mental-health disorders impact everyone, some racial groups face more stigmatism than whites, explains Carolla. This can serve as a barrier to seeking treatment. Other underrepresented groups experience greater trauma and/or lack of access to quality care.

• The number of diagnosed cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for both veterans and active-duty servicemembers jumped 757 percent from 2003 to 2009, increasing from 1,632 to 14,000 (The Pentagon).

• About 70 percent of Southeast Asian immigrants to the United States who receive mental healthcare have symptoms of PTSD (National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association).

• American Indian/Alaska Natives have a higher rate of traumatic exposure, with a 22 percent rate of PTSD, versus 8 percent for the general U.S. population (U.S. Surgeon General)

• One-third of all Americans with a mental-health problem get care, and the percentage of Blacks receiving care because of lower incomes and other factors is one-half that of whites. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, one study found nearly 60 percent of older Black adults were not receiving needed services. “African Americans are also less likely to receive accurate diagnoses,” adds Carolla.

• Suicide among Black male tweens increased dramatically from 1980 to 1995. The rate of suicide among all children ages 10 to 14 increased 120 percent during that period, but the suicide rate for Black males in that same age group increased 233 percent (U.S. Surgeon General)

• In a survey of students at more than 150 high schools nationwide, Latino youth were significantly more likely (10.7 percent) than white students (6.3 percent) to report a suicide attempt. Latinas were more than twice as likely (14.9 percent) as Latino males (7.2 percent) to have reported a suicide attempt (USSG)

• Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds, and LGBTQ youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers (The Trevor Project)

• According to a report by GLSEN, “Ongoing physical and verbal abuse isolate [LGBT] students from their peers, often leading to depression, low self-esteem and sometimes even suicide. One study showed that LGBT youth who experience harassment are 400 percent more likely than LGBT youth who do not to make serious suicide attempts.”

To educate the public about LGBT youth suicide prevention, GLSEN released a video featuring Sirdeaner Walker. Her 11-year-old son, who was being relentlessly bullied at school, committed suicide last year. Listen to her speak at the fifth annual GLSEN Respect Awards:

How Can Employers Help?

1. Communicate mental healthcare options: Employee-assistance programs (EAPs) can provide assessment and short-term counseling and make referrals for individuals at risk of mental disorders or facing trauma, such as divorce or the loss of a loved one. Unfortunately, too few employees take advantage of this benefit, so it’s important to “promote it and remind people of the support that’s available,” advises Carolla.

At Eli Lilly and Co., the company’s EAP is promoted on the corporate intranet and can “be used 24/7 even if someone feels stressed or has job burnout,” says Charlie McAtee, a communications consultant at Lilly. “Our employees or dependents can get up to three short-term counseling sessions at no cost.”

Employers that provide EAPs for mental health report reduced medical, disability and workers’-compensation claims as well as savings through improved performance, says Carolla. The return on investment in an EAP runs about $3 in savings for every $1 invested, reports Managed Health Network research.

2. Provide support: Daily stress can take a toll on an individual’s health, but support groups may help. “There’s been research that shows some people, not all, have better outcomes when facing depression when they have a support network of people they can lean on,” says McAtee. In March, Lilly re-launched Support Partners Program, an online resource (available in English and Spanish) for people with depression and those who care for them to help: recognize the signs/symptoms, find a doctor, create a support-partner relationship and keep track of progress.

Corporate-sponsored resource groups also offer both support and help to educate all employees about mental health. At Bank of America, employees started a military-support affinity group; at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a special-needs caregivers networking circle is available.  

3. Build awareness: The stigma associated with “emotional instability” prevents many people from seeking support or treatment. ButERG leaders can start a dialogue by collaborating with mental-health organizations such as NAMI and holding awareness events that dispel myths and allow speakers to share inspirational stories. “Use opportunities like Mental Health Awareness Month in May and Mental Illness Awareness week in October to encourage workers to take care of themselves and each other,” says Carolla.

4. Train managers: In addition to making sure supervisors know about mental-healthcare options, mental-health compliance issues must be integrated into diversity-training programs. Otherwise, companies risk liability. In Lizotte v. Dacotah Bank, et al. (D. N.D., 2010), an assistant vice president was medically cleared to return to work after recovering from a mental disorder. But upon his return, he was let go and subsequently sued. The court found for the plaintiff, ruling that the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits employees from being discharged “due to accumulated myths, fears and stereotypes.”

5. Make accommodations: These can include flexible or adjustable work hours, a paced workload, modified job responsibility and “frequent guidance and feedback about job performance,” suggests Carolla. IBM has created a remarkable flexible work environment that helps all employees and is especially beneficial to parents, people with eldercare issues and people with disabilities.

6. Recognize mental-health ambassadors: Volunteers who share their personal stories must be encouraged and commended. Eli Lilly started a Welcome Back Awards program in 1998 to recognize the achievements of people nationwide who are fighting against depression and the associated stigma. Each year, a panel of experts selects honorees in several categories who are then each awarded from $10,000 to $15,000 to share with a nonprofit of their choice.

“They’re the unsung heroes,” says McAtee. “It’s a small way to say ‘thank you’ to the people on the front lines making a difference.”

Corporate Awareness Building: A Case Study

Angela Oakes learned she had major depression 15 years ago and has since been diagnosed with borderline personality, bipolar and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, likely resulting from the sexual trauma she suffered at age 6. After a divorce and losing custody of her two sons, Oakes battled several downwardly spiraling years before making a slow and remarkable recovery

Today, not only does the 42-year-old woman stick to a structured routine of exercise, sleep and a healthy diet, but Oakes has found her calling in the mental-health movement: serving as an ambassador and sharing her inspirational story with organizations throughout Charlotte, N.C.

In honor of National Mental Health Awareness month in May, Oakes, an administrative assistant at Wells Fargo & Co., collaborated with the bank’s diversity leaders to orchestrate two companywide mental-health presentations, including a film on suicide prevention.

After Oakes’ recent presentation, she opened the floor to questions and “people were still talking 30 minutes later,” she says. “It’s really hard to explain that darkness to somebody … but you can’t be afraid to reach out and talk about it.”

The post How to Create a Mental-Health-Friendly Workplace appeared first on DiversityInc.

In an era defined by an escalating “war for talent,” many employers are providing their workforces an environment that allows employees to better balance the competing demands of careers and personal lives. This is particularly important to Generation X and millennials, many of whom prefer greater control over their personal time. As an alternative to the Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 schedule, these “work/life programs” have become increasingly popular. Examples of work/life program components include:

• Flexible work arrangements such as flex-time (e.g., flexible hours, compressed work week)
• Part-time schedules
• Telecommuting
• Discretionary or floating leave (e.g., paternity leave, educational leave, community-service leave)
• Job-sharing
• Shift-swapping

For more on work/life benefits and diversity management, watch our diversity web seminar on work/life.

Although the program is usually created at the headquarters level, programs must also be implemented locally, at field facilities or offices. The typical process requires an employee to approach her/his manager with a specific request for flexible or alternative work arrangements. The manager then must decide whether the request is consistent with the parameters of the company’s program and the needs of the business unit, since approval is not guaranteed. Often, human resources is involved in the decision-making, or review, process.

There are many positive reasons why employers initiate work/life programs. These include:

• Increasing productivity
• Retaining staff and decreasing turnover
• Expanding the talent pool, attracting and recruiting new employees
• Enhancing diverse recruitment and retention

See “Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility,” Executive Office of the President, Council of Economic Advisors Report, March 2010.

For more on diversity management and recruitment, watch Diversity Web Seminar on Recruitment: 5 Workforce-Diversity Strategies to Find, Engage & Retain Talent.

Properly designed and consistently implemented work/life programs can provide employers a competitive edge in attracting and retaining a diverse, highly productive workforce. (Here’s a comprehensive listing of diversity-management articles demonstrating the effectiveness of these programs.) Unfortunately, if improperly designed and inartfully or inconsistently implemented, these programs can backfire. They then may be an unintended source of depressed morale and possible legal exposure for the employer.

To begin, there is nothing per se unlawful or illegal about a work/life program. Indeed, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) encourages employers to offer such benefits to their employees. Potential legal problems arise in the implementation of these programs. Similar to many other new workplace initiatives, these programs:

• Depend on local and individualized processing, deliberation and management
• Grant substantial discretion to field managers and human-resources representatives
• May implicate federal employment laws (e.g., Americans with Disabilities Act, as amended; Family and Medical Leave Act; and Fair Labor Standards Act) and state law.

Employers should identify potential problems in the design and implementation of work/life programs and take steps to minimize risks from the beginning. Some companies experiment with a pilot program. This allows them to further study program implementation before deciding whether to continue with it or make it available company-wide.
We describe below several instances where work/life programs may implicate certain federal (and state) employment laws, and we offer suggestions for minimizing potential legal complications and maximizing the benefits to the employer’s business and workplace.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Preventing Discrimination

While the EEOC has strongly encouraged work/life programs, particularly in the caregiving context (e.g., for children, elderly parents, etc.), such programs present another potential source of discrimination allegations. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires equal treatment and nondiscrimination with respect to the terms and conditions of employment—such as compensation, benefits and application of company policies—for covered employers regardless of race, color, religion, sex or national origin (“protected classes”).Most work/life programs empower local managers and/or human-resources representatives to determine whether employee requests for flexible schedules, for example, are consistent with the needs of the business and should be granted. Local discretion creates an opportunity for aggrieved employees to claim unlawful discrimination.

There is always a risk that such programs may be implemented in a manner that results in perceived—or actual—disparate treatment or disparate impact against one or more protected individuals. For example, if it appears that most flexible work arrangements have been granted to younger, or white, employees, the employer may be exposed to a discrimination claim.

Recommendations for Diminishing Discrimination Risks

Ensure that senior management exercises the same diligence, caution and oversight over the creation and implementation of work/life programs as it would with planning and launch of any other grant of managerial discretion over employment matters.

• Establish and disseminate clear policies and procedures to assure that supervisors make nondiscriminatory decisions based on sound and demonstrable business reasons.
• Document each decision with clearly articulated reasons. Decision making should be consistent and capable of serving as a potential precedent for future requests and decisions.
• Rigorously and regularly train all managers/supervisors and related human-resources personnel on the EEO/nondiscrimination/non-retaliation requirements of implementing work/life programs, making sure they understand that the programs are a central part of company policy.
• Ensure fairness in application of the rules by periodically reviewing the grants and denials for disparate treatment or adverse impact. Take appropriate remedial action based on the results of the analyses.

Family and Medical Leave Act

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (and many state counterparts) requires covered employers to provide unpaid, job-protected leave to eligible employees for specified family or medical reasons. Since some employee requests for work/life flexibility, such as modified hours or compressed work week, might be prompted by medical or family concerns, employers should anticipate some overlap between flexible work arrangements and the FMLA.

Where an employee asks for a work/life arrangement because of caregiver issues and the manager does not know, or recognize, the implications of the FMLA, a legal issue could arise. Denial of such a request could inadvertently violate the act. Employers should incorporate safeguards to allow consideration of arrangements protected by the FMLA, where they are requested under the auspices of work/life programs. Read FMLA: What Employers Need to Know.

Recommendations

Requests for work/life flexibility based clearly on FMLA causes, such as where the employee expressly says she needs mornings off to care for an elderly parent, should be processed as FMLA requests. In addition, whenever a flexible work arrangement is denied under the work/life program in circumstances where the manager is unaware of the basis, employers should invite employees to request the same or similar arrangements under FMLA. These issues can be both technical and problematic. Managers should recognize and utilize expert advice whenever appropriate to avoid confusion by employees and missteps by management.

Americans with Disabilities Act Concerns

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, recently amended by the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act) generally prohibits discrimination against applicants or employees with defined disabilities and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations where requested, except where doing so would cause undue hardship to the employer. Some work/life requests may be prompted by an employee’s medical or other covered disability. As with Title VII, employers need to be cautious that their actions do not result in disparate treatment or cause disparate impact for employees with disabilities as defined in the statute and regulations. Here, too, expert advice should be sought for challenging or complex scenarios.

Read Embracing Disabilities in the Workplace  and Disability Employment Awareness Month Facts & Figures for more information.

A cautionary note: Regarding the ADA reasonable-accommodation requirement, employers should be aware that granting work/life requests will make it more difficult to argue in a separate but similar ADA situation that the requested accommodation under the ADA would cause an undue hardship; if management has already granted the same request to one employee, how could there be “undue hardship” to grant a similar ADA request to another?

Recommendations

• If there is any reason to suspect that an employee is requesting a flexible work arrangement because of a personal medical or other covered condition, the employer should analyze that request as one for a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
• Alternatively, the employer should provide employees who have been denied flexible work arrangements under the work/life policy an opportunity to renew the request as one for reasonable accommodation under the ADA if their need is prompted by a legitimate physical or medical condition that the business can appropriately consider granting without undue hardship to the business.

Fair Labor Standards Act Wage-Hour Concerns

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), along with analogous state and local laws, generally governs the wages workers receive and the hours they work, including minimum wage, overtime pay and record-keeping requirements for covered employees and employers. Telecommuting, flex- and part-time schedules, shift-swapping and job-sharing can trigger FLSA concerns. This is especially true where tracking hours becomes challenging, for example, with telecommuting or flex-time. Read about American Express’ virtual resource groups for telecommuting employees in Why Resource Groups Are Business-Resource Groups.

Compressed work weeks (e.g., four 10-hour days) may present overtime issues under state (but not federal) law, where working more than eight hours in a day (rather than 40 in a week) requires premium overtime compensation. While the full range of FLSA and state-law issues implicated by work/life–balance programs are complex and must be considered by legal counsel, the following recommendations address a few of these concerns. Read Successful Career Paths for Women in Corporate Sales for more on work/life benefits and women.

Recommendations

• Establish a process to maintain accurate time records for telecommuters, including strong policies requiring: employees to report all time spent on work-related duties and prohibiting “off-the-clock” work; daily reporting of hours worked; and supervisors to review time records frequently.
• Establish a process for maintaining accurate time records for flex-time employees, such as: requiring “badging” (secure electronic entry/exit) at the start and end of shifts; maintaining badge-swipe data; and periodically comparing badge data to employee time records, among other measures.

Cultural/Managerial Resistance

Although not strictly a legal issue, employers implementing work/life–balance programs often encounter resistance by managers accustomed to a 9-to-5 regimen. These managers may improperly deny meritorious requests for flexibility or evaluate an employee who has taken advantage of a work/life–balance initiative more harshly than one who has not. In most companies, managers hold the keys to the program’s ultimate success—or its failure. Their “buy-in” is critical if the benefits are to be achieved.

Recommendations

• Initial training of managers should communicate the importance of this program to the ultimate success of the company. Effective administration of the program should be an element of supervisors’ performance evaluations.
• Train managers to understand that employees should not be disadvantaged in performance reviews or career advancement because of participation in work/life programs.
• Conduct routine “audits” of employee-performance reviews, compensation and other personnel actions to discern any negative treatment or trends, and institute remedial measures, if necessary.
• Acknowledge and reward managers who demonstrate effective implementation and achievement of anticipated benefits of work/life balance in their business units, and share evolving “best practices” with other business units. Publicize such achievements.
• Encourage employee involvement through satisfaction surveys, group meetings and exit interviews to gain important workforce input on work/life initiatives. Read What Diversity Questions Should Be on Employee Surveys?

Conclusion

This article necessarily addresses only a few of the legal and practical considerations of work/life programs and provides recommendations to avoid legal claims and achieve the anticipated benefits. While work/life programs offer many advantages to employers and their employees, they also can raise thorny legal issues in areas where the law is constantly changing. Employers should work closely with their employment-law counsel to address and eliminate or reduce these concerns. This should take place prior to the introduction of the program and throughout its implementation. Employers may then proceed more confidently in winning their “war for talent.”

– Weldon Latham; John M. Bryson II, a Jackson Lewis partner, contributed to this article.  

Weldon Latham is a senior partner in the Washington, D.C., regional office of Jackson Lewis LLP, chair of the firm’s corporate diversity counseling group, chair of Jackson Lewis Diversity Committee, and counsel to the PepsiCo Global Diversity and Inclusion Governance Council and the Omnicom Group Diversity Development Advisory Committee. He is also a professor teaching corporate diversity at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The post Workplace Diversity: 5 Legal Challenges of Work/Life Programs appeared first on DiversityInc.

In DiversityInc’s work/life diversity web seminar, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Barbara Frankel moderates a panel of executives who discuss how top-performing companies are using work/life strategies to improve business, improve workplace diversity, and attain their diversity and inclusion goals.

The panel consists of Barbara Adachi, national managing principal, women’s initiatives, Deloitte (No. 8 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50); Shaun Hawkins, chief diversity officer, Eli Lilly (No. 29); and Charlotte Hawthorne, consultant, work life and diversity, Eli Lilly.

Those who watch this 90-minute diversity web seminar on work/life (also available as a downloadable PDF) will learn the following about workplace diversity:

• The data correlation between work/life programs and retention and promotion rates
• How Deloitte utilizes a corporate lattice, rather than a corporate ladder, to increase overall engagement to 90 percent and a potential 150 percent growth in revenue
• How employers can begin to tailor flexibility for employees and adapt for enhanced workplace diversity
• What Eli Lilly does to reap the greatest benefits and address work/life abuse and inconsistency
• How to evolve your corporate culture to have a more “flexible” mindset

For more on work/life best practices and workplace diversity, read Successful Career Paths for Women in Corporate Sales and PwC’s Maria Castañón Moats Tells Her Story of Career Redemption.

The post Diversity Web Seminar on Work/Life: How Workplace Diversity Benefits From Flexible Work Options appeared first on DiversityInc.

As a company that helps others with their HR, payrolls and benefits, ADP makes sure the benefits it offers its more than 30,000 U.S. employees are inclusive and valuable. The company gets a perfect score on work/life benefits on our survey, but its efforts go way beyond a checklist.

ADP was a pioneer in flexible benefits and in allowing employees, especially those with family commitments, to work from home. The company also was an early leader in calling its key employees “associates” to emphasize that they are part of the team. This concept has been picked up by many other companies, especially retailers. ADP continues its emphasis on employees and families with post-retirement benefits, including nine outside medical offices and national wellness programs.

 ADP offers its employees a solid work/life–benefits package, including flexible work arrangements, onsite childcare, tuition assistance, onsite passport renewal, a mobile beauty salon, shoe shiners, onsite DVD rentals, a mobile vision center, wellness/quiet rooms or new-mothers rooms, and free video conferencing to faraway family members during the holidays. The company also operates nine medical clinics that focus on prevention and cultivating a healthier lifestyle for its employees. Those clinics employed more than 30 doctors and nurses.

Award accepted by Edward M. Hurley-Wales, newly named vice president, diversity and inclusion:

“Change is always an opportunity. Our founder’s vision is still the cornerstone for our notions of diversity and inclusion. As our business grows, we also recognize that we must also grow in terms of our families and diversity. People at ADP are not employees but associates, and we offer them a variety of work assignments to balance their work and lives. We place great importance on our community support and philanthropy through the ADP Foundation. Our ability to serve our communities relies on our ability to attract, retain, and develop talent.”

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That’s the premise behind the bestselling book “Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce,” written by Cathleen Benko, the vice chairman and chief talent officer at Deloitte and her colleague Anne Weisberg.

“The end of ‘traditional’ career paths patterns is upon us,” says Benko. “Today a career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder but rather an undulating journey of climbs, lateral moves and planned descents. The proverbial corporate ladder is evolving, right before our eyes, into a corporate lattice.”

It was this belief that inspired her to create Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization program, a workplace version of the classic motto: Have it your way. The book provides a detailed analysis of what originally began as a pilot program at Deloitte five years ago to create a culture of flexibility and has since been rolled out to all employees, partners and principals of Deloitte’s U.S. and India-based personnel. In a time of high unemployment and widespread cost cutting, a large number of companies, both globally and domestically, are raising the bar in developing effective and flexible work/life benefits to attract, retain and promote talented employees.

Despite the recession, nearly 81 percent of U.S. employers are maintaining and 13 percent are increasing the flexibility they offer their employees, according to a Families and Work Institute study. And the most progressive companies, The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, offer more benefits with more sustainable results.

In the past, flexible schedules most often were granted to new mothers and those with serious family concerns, such as a terminally ill relative. Today, however, progressive companies have broadened the scope of what constitutes grounds for flexibility. And companies that allow employees flexibility in balancing their personal and professional lives are often rewarded by more loyal and motivated workers.

Another study conducted by the Families and Work Institute found that 54 percent of employers with more than 1,000 employees allow parents extra time to return after birth or adoption. Forty-seven percent allow time off for important family needs, 44 percent for extended care-giving, and 20 percent allow paid time off for volunteering and community service. Those numbers are even higher for The 2010 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, where 98 percent offer flexible hours, 96 percent offer telecommuting, 60 percent offer paternity leave, 62 percent offer alternative career tracks for employees with long-term family-care issues, and 82 percent offer paid time for volunteering and community service.

“It’s a fast-paced world,” says Theresa Torres, director of diversity and employee experience for Verizon Communications. “To help our employees maintain peak performance, we offer programs that help them balance the many demands of work and personal life.”

Companies that are flexible have a far greater ability to retain and promote employees, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups who might be more vulnerable to leaving the workplace or turning down opportunities for advancement.

Ninety-two percent of the DiversityInc Top 50 offer job sharing, 90 percent offer lactation rooms and 52 percent offer onsite childcare. The Families and Work Institute study showed 31 percent of companies offer job sharing and 21 percent offer onsite childcare.

Filling Most Urgent Needs

Verizon’s Torres says employees are definitely taking advantage of these programs.

In 2009, employees contacted VZ-LIFE, the company’s employee-assistance program—which provides resources on parenting and childcare, adult care, health and wellness, moving and relocation and more—more than 1,100 times a month by telephone and logged on to the website 35,000 times a month, the company said.

And Verizon Wireless, a business group within Verizon Communications, provided employees with more than 40,000 hours in emergency backup care for its employees’ children—time that employees would have otherwise had to use as vacation, personal or sick days.

Verizon Wireless also offers a world-class initiative to promote healthy babies, affectionately known as the “$15 baby program.” Under this program, employees have a one-time co-pay of $15 at their first OBGYN visit, and the rest of the tab—everything—is on the company, Torres says. Expectant mothers get the $15 co-pay refunded if they enroll in their first trimester.

“From transitioning employees back to work gradually after childbirth to providing valuable resources to keep them healthy or find care for a child or loved one, Verizon knows the importance of striking the right balance,” Torres says. “In today’s competitive environment, we need our employees focused on delivering the best customer experience possible.”

Flexibility Is Key

A number of studies have highlighted the value of work/life benefits and flexible workplaces. Although these benefits have often focused on women, they increasingly are inclusive of men and consider other factors, especially age, race and ethnicity.

A survey on the Bookends Generations by Dr. Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Work-Life Policy found 87 percent of baby boomers and 89 percent of Gen Y said flex time was important to them and is a key motivating factor.

Deloitte’s MCC, as it is called for short, enables employees at Deloitte to “dial up or dial down” their careers to fit various stages of their lives and, essentially, redefine what it means to build a successful career, Benko says.

Just like mass-product customization increases brand loyalty by creating a strong connection between the consumer and the producer, mass career customization results in greater employee loyalty, Benko says.

It also reduces the costs of turnover and enables a company’s most valuable assets—its people—to accomplish the company’s important work and purpose as well as their own.

“The corporate lattice replaces the one-size-fits-all corporate-ladder model of career progression with a customized approach, allowing people to move in different directions to find interesting and satisfying roles, while integrating their work and life priorities over time,” she says.

Ultimately, MCC’s greatest benefit is the option value it creates, she says, “the psychic comfort of customizing one’s career as priorities change over time.”

Business Advantage for ALL Employees

Traditionally, work/life benefits were aimed at women. And since white women were the first beneficiaries of corporate affirmative-action policies, they also were the prime beneficiaries of corporate work/life policies.

But in recent years, companies have broadened their work/life benefits so they have cultural nuances that recognize familial and other challenges of Black, Latino, Asian and American Indian employees—and also the specific work/life needs of employees with disabilities and LGBT employees.

Indeed, the original reason Deloitte decided to tackle the issue of flexibility was to accelerate the retention and advancement of women in the firm, Benko says— lack of flexibility was the No. 1 reason women were leaving the workforce. But once the company began exploring the issue in depth, Deloitte discovered it was not just a women’s issue at all.

“There is a fundamental shift in the workforce and its composition,” she says. “There was a misalignment between expected norms of the workplace relative to the needs of the workforce.”

In fact, more men have reached a point where preserving or increasing their time is more appealing than bigger jobs and more money. According to a study by the Association of Executive Search Consultants, more than half of senior executives surveyed would strongly consider refusing a promotion if it meant fewer hours available for their personal lives.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, 59 percent of Fortune 500 companies now offer domestic-partner healthcare benefits in the United States. Since offering same-sex domestic-partner benefits is a requirement to be considered for the DiversityInc Top 50, all of the companies on the list offer these benefits.

When it comes to other benefits that help LGBT people and their families, the DiversityInc Top 50 remains strong. All of the DiversityInc Top 50 have employee-resource groups for LGBT employees; 94 percent include gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies, and 84 percent offer adoption assistance, defined as both financial and supportive (educational/counseling) help for families adopting children.

The Families and Work Institute has compiled hundreds of examples of innovative work/life–balance benefits being offered by companies across the country in its Guide to Bold New Ideas for Making Work Work.

One of the featured companies is IBM, which was cited for its flexibility. Describing itself as “the world’s most forward-looking company,” IBM offers a number of work/life benefits, including part-time and compressed work weeks, job sharing, leaves of absence and the ability to work from home.

“On any given day, more than one-third of IBM’s employees worldwide are either telecommuting or working in a customer’s offices,” the report states.

“Providing employees with leading work/life programs and services—such as flexibility, time off and access to a broad array of resources—demonstrates our commitment to a diverse, multi-generational workforce, and an inclusive and supportive workplace,” says Wendy Breiterman, the director of Global Work/Life Strategies in Johnson & Johnson‘s Office of Global Diversity & Inclusion.

Johnson & Johnson also offers an exhaustive list of work/life benefits for its employees including onsite childcare, the ability to work at home and/or telecommute, adoption assistance, flexible hours and job sharing, and paternity leave. The company offers alternative career tracks for parents or other employees with long-term family-care issues as well as access to eldercare services, childcare discount programs and resources for parents raising special-needs children, access to teen driving resources and college counseling and educational services.

Employees may also request paid work, personal and family time off for planned and unplanned events including marriage, personal emergencies, eldercare, adoption, custody matters, childcare and even pet care.

“There’s compelling evidence that work/life programs and services drive recruitment, retention and engagement of diverse talent,” Breiterman says. “To me, it’s not only the right thing to do but it reflects a commitment to the pursuit of being an employer of choice.”

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