At the BlogHer Conference in New York City this weekend, I co-hosted a panel to discuss how bloggers can use their powerful voices to rally for more effective family-friendly workplace policies. You can read a summary of the panel here.
The whole conference was imbued with discussions about work-life. I spoke with several women from large corporations who enjoyed flexibility and great policies, but spoke of a fear of stigma if they took full advantage. I spoke with a lot of small business owners who supported care policies but found it difficult to manage both financially and logistically when their employees took leaves. Of course, when you get 2,400 ambitious women together you’re going to discuss our struggles to achieve work life fit! But I had several a-ha moments during the two day event.
1) The most urgent point that emerged during my BlogHer session was something I had not thought much about- but once it was raised, it instantly hit a nerve. An audience member raised the issue of what she referred to as the “ghettoized female teleworker.” The audience instantly jumped on this topic- again, not surprising in a room full of information workers. How do you manage to both work remotely and stay in the game? Does working from home diminish an employers’ sense of your ambition?
Another audience member asked, “What ARE the steps to convincing the world/companies/men believe that being at home isn’t “sitting at home eating bonbons?”
I shared some of my own tips: the first is to charge what you’re worth, and not diminish your salary even though you work remotely. The second is to be professional: hold calls and meetings on a quality phone line, be available, and pretend like you’re in the office when you talk to colleagues. Never make jokes about being in your pajamas! Finally, make time for face-time, even if it’s periodic.
“We need to shift the perception that telecommuters are lazy, undressed, and off the grid.” Another audience member suggested remote workers are even more available than office workers, since homeworkers are usually online. This, however, brings challenges too. Which leads me to point two.
2) In my session, we opened with the question: how many of you work flexibly? Almost every single hand went up. Indeed, at a breakfast with several senior women PepsiCo executives at the BlogHer Conference, The Chief Communications Officer of all of PepsiCo, Chief Marketing Officer of Gatorade, and VP of Global Design and Development all agreed they could take the time they needed for family. That’s not the issue: the issue is the unrelenting lack of boundaries that means any time they take away from the office needs to be “made up” at odd hours.
Gatorade CMO Sarah Robb O’Hagan referred to this as her personal “watchout”: everyone works flexible schedules, but they also work through the weekends. For professionals and professional services workers, the issue is not flexibility. It’s managing our own and others’ expectations of the sheer amount of time we spending working, if not necessarily at work.
3) From a public policy perspective, we had an interesting discussion http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/07/gillibrand-attends-the-blogher-conference-stresses-organization/ with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Anita Jackson of MomsRising.org asked the Senator to share her thoughts on how to finally bring family friendly practices to every American business. Gillibrand started to reply with a rote answer on how businesses have to recognize that family friendly policies are good for business. I pushed the Senator: “you can’t just put the onus on companies and expect them to change everything.” She then shifted from platititudes to discussing her program to provide tax credits for employers to provide child care incentives.
Everyone knows that in an ideal world, on site childcare would be fabulous. But that will not happen anytime soon. Tax credits for large and small businesses who help provide free resource and referrals for childcare is different, and a more workable approach. For example, Senator Gillibrand supports a proposal to allow employers to deduct 20 percent of the costs for childcare resources and referral services. Currently employers can deduct only 10 percent of those costs. Senator Gillibrand also supports increasing the maximum deduction from $150,000 to $225,000.
For more on Gillibrand’s family friendly policies, click here. http://gillibrand.senate.gov/agenda/item/?id=ab22ec02-d288-4893-85c9-0bde9429a766
I shared some of my own tips: the first is to charge what you’re worth, and not diminish your salary even though you work remotely. The second is to be professional: hold calls and meetings on a quality phone line, be available, and pretend like you’re in the office when you talk to colleagues. Never make jokes about being in your pajamas! Finally, make time for face-time, even if it’s periodic.
“We need to shift the perception that telecommuters are lazy, undressed, and off the grid.” Another audience member suggested remote workers are even more available than office workers, since homeworkers are usually online. This, however, brings challenges too. Which leads me to point two.
2) In my session, we opened with the question: how many of you work flexibly? Almost every single hand went up. Indeed, at a breakfast with several senior women PepsiCo executives at the BlogHer Conference, The Chief Communications Officer of all of PepsiCo, Chief Marketing Officer of Gatorade, and VP of Global Design and Development all agreed they could take the time they needed for family. That’s not the issue: the issue is the unrelenting lack of boundaries that means any time they take away from the office needs to be “made up” at odd hours.
Gatorade CMO Sarah Robb O’Hagan referred to this as her personal “watchout”: everyone works flexible schedules, but they also work through the weekends. For professionals and professional services workers, the issue is not flexibility. It’s managing our own and others’ expectations of the sheer amount of time we spending working, if not necessarily at work.
3) From a public policy perspective, we had an interesting discussion (see CNN’s Eric Kuhn on the meeting here) with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Anita Jackson of MomsRising.org asked the Senator to share her thoughts on how to finally bring family friendly practices to every American business. Gillibrand started to reply with a rote answer on how businesses have to recognize that family friendly policies are good for business. I pushed the Senator: “you can’t just put the onus on companies and expect them to change everything.” She then shifted from platititudes to discussing her program to provide tax credits for employers to provide child care incentives, and to encourage employees to telecommute.
Everyone knows that in an ideal world, on site childcare would be fabulous. But that will not happen anytime soon. Tax credits for large and small businesses who help provide free resource and referrals for childcare is different, and a more workable approach. For example, Senator Gillibrand supports a proposal to allow employers to deduct 20 percent of the costs for childcare resources and referral services. Currently employers can deduct only 10 percent of those costs. Senator Gillibrand also supports increasing the maximum deduction from $150,000 to $225,000.
For more on Gillibrand’s family friendly policies, click here. Tax credits alone won’t do much. But this specific policy focus reminded me that we must consider what Chrysula Winegar calls the “trinity” of elements that will bring about change: “It’s the holy trinity of individual knowledge and responsibility, corporate culture and policy and careful base-line legislation.”
Today’s forum was an incredible and energizing event that focused on 2 areas: equal pay for women and men; and implementing the workplace flexibility that we all need to meet the demands of our home life while also meeting the demands of our work life. Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, said that she doesn’t ever, “turn down an opportunity to talk about the ‘Lilly Ledbetter’ story, because it is every woman’s story.”
Vice President Joe Biden spoke about the demands on middle class families today and how, “reality has a way of intruding on life.” He recognizes the need to redefine the structure of work and family life, not because it is a women’s issue, but because it is a family issue, an employer issue and a societal issue.
Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, announced that the Department of Labor will be conducting a new Family and Medical Leave Act survey in 2011. They will also be sponsoring a supplement to the American Time Use Survey to include questions on parental leave, child care responsibilities, family leave insurance program usage, and other work and family issues. In addition to the surveying they will be doing, the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau- headed by Sara Manzano-Diaz will be holding forums across the country called the “National Dialogue on Workplace Flexibility” where business and community leaders will come together and share ideas to make workplace flexibility a reality, and eventually, the standard in business practices.
The White House Council on Women and Girls launched their Work-Flex Event Starter Kit where anyone can download resources and videos to host their own educational event on workplace flexibility.
As I transitioned from my work to home life on the train from Washington DC to Connecticut, I gazed out the window at the many communities and cities you see along the way – and I wondered about the people living in the homes and their struggles. One of the most striking things about the speakers today, representing the Office of the Vice President, White House Council on Women and Girls, Department of Justice, Department of Labor and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was that they all understood how these are not just women’s issues, but issues that affect our families, our communities, and our economy.
Tell us what you are doing to continue this conversation in your communities and workplaces.
If there was a consistent theme reverberating through many of the sessions at the 2010 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, it’s that the educational system is out of sync with the realities and needs of today and tomorrow. Picture this: while photographs of scenes from the past would look quite old-fashioned, photographs of classrooms from the past and from today look unmistakably the same—desks all in rows, facing the teacher, or what Constance Yowell of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation calls “the sage on stage.” The educational system that emerged in the factory era, New York Times’ David Leonhardt says, does not work today.
The message that our educational system needs fixing is a time-honored one. I have only to think back to the publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983 to recall how this drumbeat has been sounding for years. But in the 27 intervening years since this report was issued, the urgency for change has greatly intensified. For example, whereas the United States was once first in the world in college graduation rates, we are now 14th. What was surprising to me is how many well-known speakers from very diverse fields at the Aspen Institute see the need for educational change as a societal, economic and moral imperative or as Kati Haycock of The Education Trust terms it, “the civil rights movement of our times.”
Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element outlines some of the reasons why the educational system needs altering. First, he argues, it is a lock-step, linear system. Second, the system values conformity—what Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University calls fill-in-the-bubble-on-the-test-thinking—whereas we need children with essential skills like critical thinking and creativity. Furthermore, as Yowell, points out, today’s schooling focuses on providing content to the individual whereas we need children to learn to work in teams.
Perhaps most troublesome are the views of young people themselves. Yowell reports that in focus groups her team conducted with young people, not a single young person listed a public institution as relevant to their future! Likewise, I found in talking with young people for my book, Mind in the Making, there was little, if any, fire in children’s eyes when they talked about school.
At Aspen, there was a consistent plea to prepare young people to thrive in a world where knowledge doubles every few years. But is the answer reform or transformation?
On the reform side, there are efforts underway to turn around the lowest performing schools, invest in teachers and principals, use data to drive change, and improve standards and assessment. These are the goals of the Obama administration and they certainly are leading to more change than we’ve seen for a long time.
But there are others, including Sir Ken Robinson who are calling for transformation. The Ideas Festival is a feast of good ideas, so here are some of my favorite “transformational” ideas for education:
The MC2STEM High School is a year-round, project-based high school in the Cleveland district that is physically embedded in the STEM community. For example, the 10th grade is housed at GE Lighting Nela Park. Students work on projects that they design in the STEM sciences in a real-world learning environment with the help and support of professionals. They can also obtain college credit for this work.
School of One in New York City has dropped the traditional classroom model, replacing it with an approach where each student learns in many different ways based on information about how that student learns best. Some of these learning experiences are teacher-led, while others involve tutoring, and independent learning.
YOUmedia is a project of the Chicago Public Library. It was created to connect teens, books, media, mentors and institutions throughout the city. Young people use the contents of the library to create media projects that enable them to stretch their imaginations and build critical thinking skills.
Maker Faire is beginning to spread around the country. It involves children (and adults) creating inventions that they share at Maker Faires.
And what about improving teaching practice? Much of the public discourse has been around enabling schools to remove the lowest performing teachers. Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation argues for using videos of teachers to help them learn from seeing themselves as well as from seeing tapes of excellent teaching.
These initiatives have a great deal in common. They are all focused on learning, not teaching. They all call for helping children find passion, purpose, and meaning in learning, for making their own plans and following through on these plans, for having first-hand experiences, for bringing together the worlds outside and inside the classroom through collaboration and co-location, and for using technology to foster learning.
Maybe we are on a new path toward creating learning opportunities that will help children gain the content and skills they need to thrive. We have marshaled the evidence for change. We have many transformational examples—those that I have written about and scores more. Will we heed them? Will we incorporate these examples into the system so we do more than create what Linda Darling-Hammond calls “popcorn innovation?” I certainly hope so.
Let’s assume that the people invited to present at the 2010 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival have important ideas to share. Then let’s also assume that there are important things we can learn from their own career paths: how did they become people with “bold ideas?” How did they emerge from the rough and tumble inner cities to the more affluent communities to become the people they are.
Although the sessions at the Ideas Festival are designed to focus on the ideas themselves and not on their originators, I find myself paying attention to the speakers’ personal stories. I have been listening to what helped them find their passions—their chosen paths, pursue them and become individuals with ideas worth listening to.
As Marc Tucker, the President of the National Center on Education and the Economy argued at the Festival, the ability to innovate is a critical skill that’s fundamental to the future health of the American Economy. His argument goes like this: If U.S. businesses can outsource to people in other countries with very high skills or even with moderate skills and pay them lower wages than we pay in the U.S, then they will outsource. So who will pay Americans the kind of wages that will maintain our standard of living? His solution: Americans need to create goods, services and experiences that everyone wants so much that they are willing to pay for them. Using Apple and its Macs, iPods, and iPads as examples, Tucker says that we need to create lots of companies like Apple. Thus, American education needs to foster creativity and innovation.
Here are some of the lessons I heard from the kind of people Marc Tucker hopes that American can do a better job at fostering.
They have a passion. Sometimes it was nurtured by their families and teachers and sometimes not, but their work is not a job. It defines them. It’s who they are. When they are working, they are, as Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element, puts it, “in the groove.”
They seek and find like-minded people. The playwright John Guare tells of leaving the university with a degree that said he was a playwright, but then he didn’t know how to become one. He happened to be walking down a street in New York City and saw a sign on a storefront that said it was a theater. There he met a “burly” man who was a steam presser in New Jersey from early morning until mid-afternoon, when he returned to the storefront, where he was a play producer. Guare told this man that he was a playwright. The man said he was looking for an Aquarian playwright. As luck would have it, Guare is an Aquarian. So the man said, “then write a play and we will produce it in May.” From those connections with the like-minded people he found in that storefront, a true original, John Guare, emerged.
They find people who support their original ideas. Biz Stone tells of how he decided to partner with Evan Williams in a relationship that would ultimately produce Twitter. Stone reports: “if I said, ‘Imagine a world without gravity,’ Ev wouldn’t say ‘that’s ridiculous.’ He would say, ‘Okay, and what comes next?’”
They pursue their curiosity and see what happens, make mistakes, learn from them and continue their journeys. Evan Williams and Biz Stone said that they didn’t realize that Twitter had become a phenomenon until they were at a conference in Austin, Texas with some early adopters and could see the power of “crowd sourcing” in action. Now, one of their next challenges is to turn the power of the crowd into a vehicle to “do good.” Likewise Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, had many false turns until he recognized how to use the power of the village elders in creating schools for girls in remote Afghan villages.
There is not one person whom I have met at the Aspen Ideas Festival who hasn’t argued that we need to reinvent, or “reset” (to use Richard Florida’s term) or “transform,” as Sir Ken Robinson puts it, the way we raise and teach our children. The Industrial Age views of education won’t work in helping us nurture a new generation of children who can innovate and who can lead.
I didn’t know what to expect when I went to the Pentagon last week to interview Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yes, I had read the May 2010 Fast Company magazine cover story that describes him as “a case study in 21st-century leadership” and the 2010 Time magazine article where he was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. I certainly knew the facts about his leadership on work-life issues—his commitment to getting more women and people of color in top jobs and on creating more family supportive policies. That’s precisely why I was interviewing him: the organization I head, the Families and Work Institute was honoring him for this work. Despite knowing the facts, my interview with him was surprisingly inspirational. He is truly a unique leader.
The first surprise was that Admiral Mullen began our time together by describing the challenges that service men and women face. I am used to hearing leaders focus on their own or their organization’s successes, not their pressure points. Granted military jobs require the supreme sacrifice—a willingness to lay down one’s life, but Admiral Mullen’s honesty was still unexpected. He spoke of his deep distress over the toll that today’s wars are taking on the armed services, saying that things today are harder than anything he has experienced in his 42 years in the military: “We’ve never put more pressure on ourselves, the men and women in uniform…than we are right now.” After listing a litany of his concerns, he admitted that in the end it is impossible to truly assess the toll: “there are some longer-term issues that we have yet to deal with…that we don’t understand yet.”
But it isn’t just the service men and women who cause him concern. It is their families: “We see spouses at home very, very pressed—many of them, stressed out just as much as individuals in theater. We see families reflecting the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”
Admiral Mullen works hard at ensuring that he doesn’t become isolated in his job as Chairman, reaching out to those who will tell him the truth. On his travels, he typically arranges time to talk with spouses, accompanied by his wife Deborah. “There’s no group,” he told me, “that’s quicker to tell me what’s really going on than a group of spouses.” In this day and age, with our 24-hour news coverage and more routes around the gatekeepers who try to block the truth, it seems as if transparency should become more of a norm. Yet, one has just to look at the gulf oil spill and how those involved are trying to spin the story to see that transparency remains more of a slogan than a reality.
Another indication of Admiral Mullen’s unique leadership style is the value he puts on the work of caring for families. He even compares the strains of being in a combat zone to the strains of raising children—of “handling all of the challenges that occur in normal family life.” Again, we have always mouthed the rhetoric of caring for children as important, but when push comes to shove, organizational leaders generally put work first.
A third indication of his style is that he tries to remedy some of the toughest problems. He sees helping families as more than helping them with child care, education or careers, though these are very critical. He is well known for his February 2010 statement to the Senate Armed Service Committee on gays and lesbians: “It is my position that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” He has also worked to give women opportunities to serve on submarines and to increase the length of time between deployments.
The biggest surprise to me, however, was what he said about institutions versus people. He said:
Basically, we’ve grown up very focused on the institution. The institution tells me what to do. It tells me where to go. It tells me what my career path is, and then I, sort of, attach my own personal desires, my own personal interests. I think we’re living in a time where we’re going to have to change—to put people in the center.
Admiral Mullen feels that this shift is necessary because it people thrive, then institutions will thrive: “we will have a very healthy, very successful military in the future.” But he admits, that this shift will not happen easily because it is a fundamental shift in how institutions operate—“it isn’t going to happen overnight—certainly not in the military.”
Admiral Mullen told me that he often speaks to business leaders because he feels that he has so much to learn from them. I left my interview at the Pentagon feeling just the reverse—that business leaders have so much to learn from this man in uniform who think that we have to put families at the center of the universe because it will benefit all concerned, including institutions. This is a truly a case study in a style of 21st century leadership we can all believe in.
The children in the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal study of child care are now teenagers! Today, May 14th, a report on how these children are doing was released.
When these children were born in 1991, more than 1000 of their parents agreed to participate in a National Institutes of Health study that would attempt to address the burning question that so many other families and policy makers had: how does child care affect children’s development over time?
As Deborah Lowe Vandell of the University of California, Irvine, who is the lead author of today’s study, said to me, the surprising finding is that there are findings for such a large and economically diverse group of children! Child care does affect children’s development into their teens. There is good and bad news in the results.
The era in which this study–the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development–was conceived and funded was an era of intense turmoil. It’s an era I now think of as the Mommy Wars. Women were seen making a choice–to work or not to work, as if these were two separate camps and as if choice was real or possible for many of them. A debate swirled in the media, in workplaces and around kitchen tables: should women work, shouldn’t they, and would they be harming their children if they used child care?
At that time, there were a few small-scale studies but almost nothing big, almost nothing that looked at child care quality, and almost nothing that followed children over time. And there were some riveting cautionary tales in the media, such as a toddler who fell into an uncovered well at the home of her unlicensed child care provider in Texas in 1987 and a special report by Diane Sawyer on Prime Time Live, who took hidden cameras behind closed doors in child care programs and showed families that they didn’t really know what was going on after they said goodbye.
Finally, the debate got so intense that a professor at Yale, Ed Zigler, called a meeting in Washington, DC that brought together a group of academics to see if we could find any common ground in the existing studies. I was a participant in the meeting because of the extensive work I have done on the impact of child care on children. The meeting ended with a call for a new study, and the NICHD study was launched.
Today is a very different world from 1991. Our studies at the Families and Work Institute show that women are in the workforce in equal numbers to men, bring in 44% of family income, and 26% of women earn at least 10% or more than their husbands. Working among mothers is much less likely to be seen as a choice, and more as a way of caring for families, especially in this time of recession. Although our data also show that far fewer people think that working mothers are bad for children than they did in the past, parents worry today like they did 20 years ago.
The findings of this study provide good news, bad news, and a call to action. The good news is that children who were in child care (defined as any kind of non-maternal care) that was of moderate to high quality up until they were 4 1/2 are more likely to have higher cognitive academic achievement at age 15. Higher quality care is also linked to less misbehavior or what the researchers call “externalizing behavior.” This study confirms what early childhood educators have been saying for ages: quality child care matters.
But the bad news is that only two in five of the children in the study were found to be in settings that were of moderately high to high quality. Specifically, 17% received care that was high quality, 24% that was moderately high quality, 24% that was moderately low quality, and 35% that was low quality. And there is more potentially bad news–longer hours in care are predictive of more risk-taking and impulsivity in the 15 year olds.
Given these findings, parents are asking, “What should we look for in child care?”
The most important aspect of child care is the relationship between the child and the child care provider. When researchers (the NICHD researchers and others) conduct studies of quality, first and foremost, we look at relationships, asking:
Does the provider really know this child? Does the provider get down to greet him or her in the morning, and know something about what the child might have done at home? Is the provider warm and caring? The measure researchers use is even called “sensitivity.” As a parent, look at the children in the child care setting to see if they seem to like the provider and enjoy being with her or him.
Is the provider “responsive?” Does the provider listen to the child and build upon what the child does to help the child learn? For example, if the child is interested in bugs or trucks, does the provider talk with the child about these interests, show the child books about these interests, and ask the child “wh”–(what, where, why) questions to extend the child’s thinking? As a parent, you can simply watch children to see if they are being actively engaged in learning. And one hint: if the pictures on the wall are all exactly the same, then you know that it is the provider’s work–and the children aren’t having their own interests promoted.
Although the finding that longer hours in care are predictive of more risk-taking and impulsivity in children is worrisome, I think this can be seen as a call to action rather than bad news. Today, we know so much more about how to help children manage stress and take on challenges than we did in the 1990s when the children in this study were in child care. I know this because I have spent the past eight years looking at child development research for my book Mind in the Making. For example:
We can help children learn to calm down when they are upset and stressed. With younger children, this can be the age-old techniques of cuddling and holding, but there is a great deal of research on older preschool children that says that helping them learn to resist the temptation to go on automatic affects their impulsivity. Even simple games, like Simon Says Do the Opposite can promote this skill.
We can also help children learn to take the perspectives of others. Studies have found that aggression and conflict are linked to an inability to understand why others behave as they do. So asking children to talk about other people’s feelings, thoughts, likes, and dislikes (“what were they thinking?”) in the stories they listen to or in everyday conversations can help reduce aggression.
These simple everyday activities promote essential life skills that are all based, in one way or another, in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and all involve “executive functions” of the brain. Studies are increasingly finding that executive functions are as important as IQ because they enable children to use what they know. These skills can help children in the early years (and in the teen years too). So that’s the call to action. We know how to and should improve the quality of child care!
For additional guidelines on how to find high quality care, visit www.childcareaware.org. For additional information on executive functions of the brain and life skills, visit www.mindinthemaking.org.
As Mother and Father’s Day approach I have had my gift-giving prayers answered, right here at the office! What shall I give my sister-in-law, my pregnant colleague, my friends who are about to become grandparents? A book about the life skills that many of us have tried to engender in our children- but almost by instinct and with some vague whisperings from our forebearers.
With the publication last week of Ellen Galinsky’s new book and “Vook,” we now have the science behind the essential life skills every child needs and suggestions on how to make it easier to teach them to our children. Please read Lisa Belkin’s “Motherlode” blog posting below to get a sense of how important the skills are that Ellen discusses in Mind in the Making.
All of us at the Institute, who think day in and day out about children, families, workplaces, globally competitive workforces, life long learning and community, would like to direct you to the book and the “Vook” (particularly if you love footage of children being their marvelous selves)
We hope that you share these with all the mothers and fathers you know as our “parenting holidays” approach.
You may have heard about Ellen Galinsky’s latest book, “Mind In The Making.” It may well be the next iconic parenting manual, up there with Spock and Leach and Brazelton, one that parents turn to for reassurance that all is more or less okay, reminders of how to make it better and glimpses of what’s to come.
Galinsky, a child-education expert and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, has subtitled her book “The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.” She breaks those skills down into chapters — “Focus and Self Control,” “Perspective Taking,” “Communicating,” “Making Connections,” “Critical Thinking,” “Taking on Challenges,” “Self-Directed Engaged Learning” — and lays out the activities of everyday life that foster those goals.
Self-control, for instance, can be taught through games likes Simon Says. To encourage perspective, which Galinsky defines as “figuring out what others think and feel”, you can read to your children then talk about what the characters were thinking and feeling. communication means asking “who, what, where and why” questions. Making connections can be strengthened through sorting games. Critical thinking results from such things as watching TV with older children and asking them to evaluate the truth of the ads. Taking on challenges means praising their efforts or strategies (“you worked hard to find the right piece of the puzzle”) rather than their talents (“you are so smart.”) And learning from decisions and experiences means allowing children to make plans — what toys they want to play with next, what activity they want to do next weekend, how they will allot their study time — then look back and evaluate those plans, with an eye toward what worked and what they would do differently next time.
It was pure happenstance that the 2010 Work Life Conference was sandwiched between health care and workplace flexibility, which seem – at least superficially – to be unrelated concerns. But as attendees learned at the two-day conference, not only are the two matters related, but a critical reciprocity exists between them.
In 2002 and again in 2008, Families and Work Institute asked employees across the U.S. a series of questions about their physical and mental health as part of our nationally representative, comprehensive ongoing study of the U.S. workforce, the National Study of the Changing Workforce. And, as it turns out, The State of Health of the American Workforce is deteriorating – and it just so happens that this decline has as much to do with work(-life) as it does with health care.
On the second day of the conference, three work-life experts shared the latest research of relevance to work life leaders with a focus on employee health and well-being. And even though each of them shared different research from different perspectives, they all came to the same conclusion: an effective and flexible workplace is pivotal to the preservation of employee health – and the promotion of employee engagement and productivity.
Dr. Joseph G. Grzywacz Ph.D, Associate Professor and Associate Director of Research at the Department of Family & Community Medicine at Wake Forest University, kicked off the research round-up by presenting work life as a key to effective health and productivity management (HPM). “A leverage point is something that has undue influence,” Grzywacz explained. “Work life is a leverage point that has an effect on the health of the population.”
To prove his point, Dr. Grzywacz began with an outline of historical trends that suggest work life issues contribute to health – for example, in the midst of an Obesity Epidemic, one out of every five meals is eaten in a car. Some of these trends may truly be a function of our busy lives, but, as The State of Health of the American Workforce report reveals with a closer look at the (un)healthy lifestyles of American employees, there is most definitely room for improvement.
Dr. Grzywacz makes mention of how our efforts have had little impact on the prevalent health problems and suggests that health behavior trends’ resistance to change is due to the fact that many of these health trends are supported by the complex lives we live. “Employees aren’t following health recommendations because their plates are full and their priorities are elsewhere,” Grzywacz suggests. “Work and family responsibilities frequently take priority over personal care.” – and FWI research supports this hypothesis. Many employees are experiencing what FWI calls a “time famine.” Data from our 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce shows that:
61% of employees report not having enough time to spend with their partner or spouse
75% of employees report not having enough time to spend with their children
59% of employees say they don’t have enough time for themselves
Every additional hour an employee spends doing things for his/herself decreases the probability of work life conflict
Employees who report some or a lot of work-life conflict are less likely to experience positive health (and work) outcomes
Grzywacz maintains that there is good evidence that different aspects of work life are connected to various health-related issues. According to Grzywacz’s research, difficulties combining work and family have been linked with:
Physical morbidity, such as incident hypertension, elevated cholesterol, and obesity
Psychiatric morbidity, such as depression and anxiety
Health behavior, such as physical activity and compromised sleep
Dr. Grzywacz’s findings are analogous to those of the State of Health report, which reveal:
The percentage of employees rating their overall health as excellent has dropped significantly by six percentage points from 34% in 2002, down to 28% in 2008
One third of the workforce shows signs of clinical depression
Nearly half of U.S. employees (49%) have not engaged in regular physical exercise in the last 30 days
All while work-life conflict has been rising significantly (from 34% in 1977 to 44% in 2008).
“Work life underlies employees’ health and health habits,” Grzywacz asserted. “So we need to promote synergies that go along with employees’ personal lives.” In other words, we need to make work “work” for both the employer and the employee if we are to improve the health of the American workforce, and helping employees attain their work-life fit is one very good way to do it.
Ellen Galinsky’s latest book, Mind in the Making: The seven essential life skills every child needs, has just been released. In the past week alone, it has been getting some great attention, including a piece on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric:
a one-on-one interview with Katie Couric for her web series, @katiecouric
By Kathleen Finato, senior vice president, InterCall
The recent economic downturn has American workers stressed, overworked and anxious, but many are turning to technology to help them cope. According to a survey released today by InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, workers are using technology to stay connected (sometimes even secretly), work harder and maintain job security to survive the economic recovery.
InterCall today announced the results of a study looking at workforce productivity and collaboration issues. What they found was that technology has a direct tie to employee morale and with the upcoming summer travel season, workers don’t feel like they can unplug from work. InterCall’s study found that one third of the U.S. workforce feels they need to stay connected 24/7 and about one in four employees (24 percent) fear that if they don’t stay connected during their time off, they may be seen as less committed to their jobs.
Take note parents: Nearly one in two Americans (48 percent) who use technology in their everyday jobs say that they are now required to do more work with fewer resources due to the current economic climate. As an example, nearly one third (30 percent) feel that they need to stay connected to work 24/7, even during weekends, breaks or holidays. However, 72 percent say that advanced technology, such as conferencing and collaboration tools, enables them to work faster, better and improves their morale – because they see the company providing them with the right resources and tools to ‘do more with less.’ Here are some more detailed results of the survey:
The economic downturn is putting pressure on American workers: One in two American workers report being constantly required to do more with less, while one in three report that they’ve been doing the job of two people because of the impact of the economic recession on their company. These sentiments are even more pronounced among workers with children under 18 in their household.
Work is increasingly affecting American workers’ ability to enjoy their time away from work: One in two workers say that taking time off of work is increasingly challenging, while one in three workers say that they feel like they need to stay connected to their work 24/7. Gen Y and workers with children in their household are especially feeling the current tough conditions of the workplace.
American workers are feeling the anxieties associated with a lack of job security: A full quarter of respondents report feeling that their job security is partially dependent on their supervisor seeing them connected to work even after hours.
Technology is a great ally in tough economic times: The majority of American workers say that technology helps them be efficient and productive at work and that job morale/job satisfaction improves when their employers provide them with technology to help them do their job better and faster.
Men Are Sneakier – Men are twice as likely than women to conduct business from locations they choose not to disclose to their bosses, colleagues and customers.
Opinions expressed in guest posts or interviews are those of the guests, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Families and Work Institute or its staff.
WorkLife in the Digital Age: Notes from the BlogHer Conference
At the BlogHer Conference in New York City this weekend, I co-hosted a panel to discuss how bloggers can use their powerful voices to rally for more effective family-friendly workplace policies. You can read a summary of the panel here.
The whole conference was imbued with discussions about work-life. I spoke with several women from large corporations who enjoyed flexibility and great policies, but spoke of a fear of stigma if they took full advantage. I spoke with a lot of small business owners who supported care policies but found it difficult to manage both financially and logistically when their employees took leaves. Of course, when you get 2,400 ambitious women together you’re going to discuss our struggles to achieve work life fit! But I had several a-ha moments during the two day event.
1) The most urgent point that emerged during my BlogHer session was something I had not thought much about- but once it was raised, it instantly hit a nerve. An audience member raised the issue of what she referred to as the “ghettoized female teleworker.” The audience instantly jumped on this topic- again, not surprising in a room full of information workers. How do you manage to both work remotely and stay in the game? Does working from home diminish an employers’ sense of your ambition?
Another audience member asked, “What ARE the steps to convincing the world/companies/men believe that being at home isn’t “sitting at home eating bonbons?”
I shared some of my own tips: the first is to charge what you’re worth, and not diminish your salary even though you work remotely. The second is to be professional: hold calls and meetings on a quality phone line, be available, and pretend like you’re in the office when you talk to colleagues. Never make jokes about being in your pajamas! Finally, make time for face-time, even if it’s periodic.
“We need to shift the perception that telecommuters are lazy, undressed, and off the grid.” Another audience member suggested remote workers are even more available than office workers, since homeworkers are usually online. This, however, brings challenges too. Which leads me to point two.
2) In my session, we opened with the question: how many of you work flexibly? Almost every single hand went up. Indeed, at a breakfast with several senior women PepsiCo executives at the BlogHer Conference, The Chief Communications Officer of all of PepsiCo, Chief Marketing Officer of Gatorade, and VP of Global Design and Development all agreed they could take the time they needed for family. That’s not the issue: the issue is the unrelenting lack of boundaries that means any time they take away from the office needs to be “made up” at odd hours.
Gatorade CMO Sarah Robb O’Hagan referred to this as her personal “watchout”: everyone works flexible schedules, but they also work through the weekends. For professionals and professional services workers, the issue is not flexibility. It’s managing our own and others’ expectations of the sheer amount of time we spending working, if not necessarily at work.
3) From a public policy perspective, we had an interesting discussion (see CNN’s Eric Kuhn on the meeting here) with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Anita Jackson of MomsRising.org asked the Senator to share her thoughts on how to finally bring family friendly practices to every American business. Gillibrand started to reply with a rote answer on how businesses have to recognize that family friendly policies are good for business. I pushed the Senator: “you can’t just put the onus on companies and expect them to change everything.” She then shifted from platititudes to discussing her program to provide tax credits for employers to provide child care incentives, and to encourage employees to telecommute.
Everyone knows that in an ideal world, on site childcare would be fabulous. But that will not happen anytime soon. Tax credits for large and small businesses who help provide free resource and referrals for childcare is different, and a more workable approach. For example, Senator Gillibrand supports a proposal to allow employers to deduct 20 percent of the costs for childcare resources and referral services. Currently employers can deduct only 10 percent of those costs. Senator Gillibrand also supports increasing the maximum deduction from $150,000 to $225,000.
For more on Gillibrand’s family friendly policies, click here. Tax credits alone won’t do much. But this specific policy focus reminded me that we must consider what Chrysula Winegar calls the “trinity” of elements that will bring about change: “It’s the holy trinity of individual knowledge and responsibility, corporate culture and policy and careful base-line legislation.”