SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORK AND FAMILY : BREAKING WITH TRADITION : Workers Seek Some Flexibility in Workweeks

Every morning as he creeps along the Harbor Freeway from his home in Torrance to his job as a commercial artist in downtown Los Angeles, Sam seethes over the deal he couldn’t strike with his boss.

Hoping to get more time and energy for both his job and family, Sam, who asked to remain anonymous, offered to forgo his annual raise if he could work at home just one day a week.

But his boss turned him down flat, arguing that he needed to see his employees to believe they were really working. Still fuming, Sam is thinking of going into business on his own.

Even if he stays at his job, Sam’s situation illustrates what has arguably become the largest and most vexing issue facing personnel departments in American businesses today: the need of employees for greater flexibility in the hours, place and structure of their jobs.

Faced with ever-lengthening commutes and increasing “family-time” demands of single-parent and dual working spouse households, a growing number of American workers are seeking alternatives--including part-time work, compressed workweeks, job sharing, telecommuting and unpaid personal leaves of absence--to their traditional 9-to-5 jobs.

Many, like Sam, are finding it a tough sell as they run up against stubborn, time-honored American management practices and style.

“The traditional American corporation still manages by body count, just like it’s done in prison. Everyone’s got to be there at all the counts, or some heads are going to roll,” says Paul Rupert, associate director of New Ways to Work, a San Francisco research group. “We have to get past this before we can really talk about flexibility in the work force.”

Corporations are beginning to move past all that, but slowly.

Prodded by air-quality regulators, looming labor shortages and productivity-enhancing campaigns throughout American industry, more managers are accommodating workers’ requests for compressed workweeks, telecommuting and part-time work, making “flexibility” among the hottest buzzwords in personnel circles today.

Increasingly, managers are recognizing that making concessions for an employee’s family obligations is not a sign of permissiveness or unnecessary coddling, but rather a good way to help recruit and retain valuable workers. Some employers are also finding that policies that bring more flexibility into the company--voluntary unpaid leaves, for example--can reduce labor costs and expensive training of new workers.

Hay/Huggins Co., a benefits consultant, found that nearly half of the companies it surveyed in 1991 had paternity leaves and 14% offered telecommuting programs, up from about zero just four years before. In another national study by the Families and Work Institute in New York, 70% of companies surveyed offered personal leaves of absence, nearly 48% permitted job sharing, and about 22% offered both maternity and paternity leaves.

Arlene Johnson of the Conference Board in New York reports that employees today rank flexible job arrangements as the No. 1 employment issue they face, displacing child care, which had held that position during most of the 1980s.

“The huge increase in working parents and single parents has made companies realize that family issues are critical to worker productivity,” says Johnson, program director of the Conference Board’s work force program. “We’ve all had to recognize that work and family are more interrelated than in the past.”

Also fueling this trend is corporate America’s preoccupation with becoming leaner and more efficient to better compete in the global marketplace. Corporations are using part-time employees, job sharing and personal leaves as a way to slash labor costs. And employees, seeing widespread layoffs and early retirements among older workers, are re-examining their own commitments to their jobs and, in some cases, deciding to give their families a higher priority in their lives.

“Why should you give up your life for your job if the employer gives up on you when you’re 50?” asks Bonnie Michaels, president of Managing Work and Family, an Evanston, Ill., consulting group. “Employees are increasingly looking for a better balance between work and home.”

Despite the obvious benefits to both employer and worker offered by flexible job arrangements, many corporations admit that they introduced the programs because of demands from air-quality regulators, primarily in Southern California, that employers reduce commutes by their workers.

At Bechtel Corp., a San Francisco-based engineering and construction company, employees rave about the “9/80” program, which allows any worker to compress 80 hours of work into nine days instead of the usual 10. The program gives workers a three-day weekend every other week.

The program was initiated in Bechtel’s Los Angeles branch in 1990 in response to the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s requirement that companies restrict the number of single-occupant vehicle trips made by their workers. Only after it proved popular and effective was it expanded to Bechtel’s San Francisco and Houston offices.

Robert Silverforb, Bechtel’s manager of human relations, says management initially resisted the concept, fearing that customers would be shortchanged on days employees were off and that worker productivity would suffer. But the opposite occurred: Employee retention and productivity have risen under the program.

A Conference Board study six months ago found two main obstacles to employers setting up flexible work programs: managers’ fears of losing control over their employees and concerns that clients and customers would be shortchanged.

Overcoming these obstacles, researchers say, will require a fundamental shift in the way corporations evaluate workers from time served--the old punch-card mentality--to a “results-achieved” standard. “We need to manage by results, not by ‘face time,’ ” says the Conference Board’s Johnson. “Head-count issues can be the single largest hurdle to flexibility.”

A less obvious but equally critical requirement is that managers learn to trust their employees to do what is necessary to get the job done. “Employers have to empower their workers to make decisions, and they have to realize that there are many ways to get the job done,” Johnson says.

Arlene Falk Withers, senior vice president and human relations officer at Transamerica Life Cos. in Los Angeles, says the key to creating a corporate culture that will accept greater worker flexibility is training management to understand that these programs make good business sense if properly done. Though the initial push for such programs usually comes from workers, she stresses that they must have the full support of senior management to be successful.

As today’s corporate work force becomes increasingly diverse, Withers says, employers must understand that lock-step standards and cookie-cutter rules no longer work.

“Companies that get past the old notions of management and direct supervision and embrace flexibility and employee empowerment,” she says, “are going to have the competitive edge in the next century.”