Working to Keep Careers on Track : Lifestyles: Some people call consultants when they need advice on education, child care, even adoption. And their employers pay for it.

Kay Croy’s 11-year-old son was having a terrible time with math. And he wasn’t the only one. Croy’s concern over her child’s plummeting self-esteem and calls from his teachers--”Pick up your child at school, he’s in tears over his math problems”--were distracting her at work.

Relying on a benefits package offered by her employer, National Bank of North Carolina, Croy dialed a toll-free number that led her to a counselor at a Boston-based consulting firm called Work/Family Directions. The counselor, trained in math education, made on-the-spot suggestions that helped ease the pressures affecting Croy at home and in her job as a teller.

“I was beginning to think I couldn’t do either one as well as I wanted: family or my job,” said Croy, of High Point, N.C.

For Fran Sussner Rodgers, president and founder of Work/Family Directions, Croy’s dilemma was all too familiar. Even in this supposedly enlightened final decade of the 20th Century, “people in growing numbers are finding themselves stretching to be both productive at work and happy in their family lives,” Rodgers said.

“Remember the old game show ‘Beat the Clock’? Just imagine playing ‘Beat the Clock’ every hour, every day, day after day. That’s literally what the lives of many working families are like.”

This pull between work and home “is a jugular issue,” said Rodgers, 44, the mother of two young daughters. So she started a consulting firm “to help people deal with it.”

In the last eight years, Work/Family Directions has emerged as the front-runner in its field and has grown from employing one--Rodgers--to 160. Clients include about 75 national companies, ranging from IBM to Hewlett Packard to Kay Croy’s bank. As part of its services tailored to each corporate client, Work/Family provides employee benefit packages that may offer free educational counseling, advice on child care or elder care, parenting seminars or, most recently, a toll-free hot line that helps people navigate the vast network of regulations surrounding adoption. The firm charges $10 to $25 per employee per year, depending on the package.

Clients have included an about-to-retire couple from Texas who sought guidance in finding residential care for their adult autistic child. “They had been caring for the child their entire lives. Now they were approaching the end of their lives, and for the first time they had to think about who would care for their child,” Rodgers said.

Or there might be questions about “someone whose son just came home with AIDS.” Or, as Rodgers recalled discussing with a Work/Family counselor, “a child in his 20s who was in a car accident and is now brain-damaged.”

“We don’t think of these as ideological issues so much as common-sense issues,” said Rodgers, who added that the firm’s work is “so pragmatic that we don’t have to discuss ideology or politics. I’m not here to convince people. The issue is how to meet your business objectives.”

Felice Schwartz, the president of Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit research organization that studies women in the work force, said Rodgers’ success shows that programs that encompass work and family “are becoming commercially viable. That’s great.”

Schwartz praises what she called “a greater awareness in the corporate community of family issues,” but acknowledges that awareness is limited.

This “greater awareness” is “part of the natural evolution of benefits,” Rodgers said, “recognizing that everyone is not the same, and trying to fill in some of the blanks that health care alone can’t take care of.”

Ted Childs, director of affirmative action and work force diversification issues at IBM’s U.S. headquarters in Purchase, N.Y., said his company discovered “it is in our enlightened self-interest” to pursue and develop packages that involve child and elder care. (The work force at IBM has gone from 13% female in 1965 to 70% female in 1991.)

“It’s not altruistic. It’s necessary,” said Childs, who called Rodgers’ firm a “critical adviser” in helping IBM to prepare family benefits packages. “These are no longer just women’s issues,” Childs said. “These are family issues.”

Fran Rodgers first observed the often conflicting needs of families and employers in 1967, when, as an undergraduate at Barnard College, she helped set up the federal Head Start child-care program in New York City.

“I was interested in the whole women’s labor force issue, and I was interested in children,” Rodgers said. “I think I knew intuitively that they were going to be connected.”

But for the first 10 years of her career, working with city and community governments on family issues, “motherhood and children were on different planets” than working women, Rodgers said. “Motherhood was sort of frowned upon, if anything,” she said.

Those planets began to converge about 10 years ago, not long after Rodgers’ first child was born. As she watched herself and other women juggle the demands of child-rearing and career-building, “I realized that if we were going to take advantage of all this female ambition, we had to reduce the antagonism between families and the workplace.”

Working parents “want to be more productive and they want to raise families,” Rodgers said. When one part of life suffers at the expense of the other, “I say to myself, ‘What a waste.’ ”

Problems develop because working parents “are not getting enough support in (child) care,” Rodgers said. Also, work environments are inflexible. “People are living by the rules of another era. These rules were written for a work force composed of white men without children.” More often than she would like to mention, Rodgers said, “we’ve seen companies that don’t let people work part time because their payroll systems won’t accommodate it.”

Employers’ antiquated expectations mean that “the system, the rules, are really working against a meritocracy” where employees advance solely on the basis of their job performance, Rodgers said.

For example, she said, 10 women may be performing at the same level as their male counterparts, possibly even better than the men. “The minute they get pregnant they are seen as less serious. Some will ask for flexibility when they return to work, which even makes them seem less serious. Or, they leave the job entirely.”

These changing needs of women have nothing to do with merit, Rodgers said. “They are the same person, their skills are the same.”

What is heartening to Rodgers is that corporations seem increasingly less likely to lump work-and-family questions under the heading of “soft” issues. “It’s probably not up there with global competition, not yet anyway. But companies are thinking of these areas in terms of the long term, what it takes to do business in America at this time.”

Rodgers occasionally steps back and marvels at her small empire. “This is one of those rare opportunities where you can do well and do good at the same time,” Rodgers said.