Perking Up Pooped-Out Workers
Workers have always looked to their employers for their bread and butter.
Now they’re turning to them for their chipotle-grilled salmon, their Parmesan chicken breast, their breakfast quiches and even their “homemade” fudge.
Chef-prepared take-home meals, such as those J.C. Penney offers workers at its Plano, Texas, headquarters, are the newest kind of perk being offered in corporate America. They are part of a proliferation of free or subsidized employer-proffered services designed to help ease the lives of time-strapped, stressed-out workers.
And they are being offered to more and more employees, and not just the elite. Now, at banks and tech firms, retailers and insurance companies, for mail-room clerks and VIPs alike, their employers will arrange to pay the bills, walk the dog, clean clothes, plan honeymoons, sue the neighbors, protect teens from online predators, send Mom flowers on her birthday, pick a nursing home for Dad, and even offer advice on what kind of birth control to use.
Companies across the country--America Online, Calvert Group, Marriott International, Cigna, Deloitte & Touche, Texas Instruments, Charles Schwab and many others--have developed a bevy of programs to deal with worker overload.
In general, the companies pay for the concierge and referral services and employees pay for the products, often at discounted prices. Some firms are pooling resources so they can offer perks they can’t afford on their own.
The goal of these programs--partly benevolent and partly pragmatic--is to get people on the job and keep them there. It’s not surprising in a hyper-competitive, global, 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week economy, where getting a product to market days before an industry rival can mean life or liquidation for a company.
“We need to make them come and make it feasible to stay without working themselves into the ground,” said Betty Purkey, manager of work-life programs at Dallas-based Texas Instruments. Lifestyle-friendly programs there include an online parents network where workers can get child-rearing advice, flexible scheduling, breast-feeding rooms, summer camps for children, a concierge to run errands and an elder-care referral service.
“We’re realizing it’s not smart to burn people out,” Purkey said. “It doesn’t get you anything long term--even if it gets you something short term.”
Broad economic forces form the backdrop here. With unemployment at a 30-year low and labor-participation rates at record highs, there are fewer people left to tend to matters of the hearth. And Americans now work the longest hours--and have the highest productivity--of any industrialized nation in the world, according to a recent study by the International Labour Organization.
In such times, personnel executives are working hard to add to their rosters of creative job perks.
The accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, for example, offers its 800 Washington-area employees an opportunity to buy computer products online at discount prices. It also provides them with a loan assistance program that frees them from lenders’ red tape and even coaches them how to better parent a poorly motivated teenager.
Three months ago, rival accounting firm Ernst & Young, which had employed 30 concierges around the country, expanded that service to its 7,500 consultants nationwide.
The consultants and their spouses have access to a toll-free number where workers are on call 12 hours a day to buy tickets for them, arrange for housecleaning or pet care, or plan and book a family reunion. Ernst & Young’s Denise Hoffman said the program has been so popular that the company is considering expanding it to the entire work force.
This surge of cradle-to-grave services is garnering praise as a sanity-saver for legions of workers. At the same time, some experts say it raises troubling questions about the dark side of the American work ethic.
“The way people work has made them end up with more pressured lives,” said Ellen Galinsky, director of the Families and Work Institute, which researches work patterns. “Work creates the problem. Then work creates the solution, rather than dealing with the problem.”
Robert Drago, a professor of labor studies at Pennsylvania State University, takes a similar view. “Employees are being asked to handle work-family conflict by having their families fade into the background,” he said. “Firms are providing services that allow workers to work harder and longer so their productivity will continue to rise. The downside is that people are spending less time dealing with family problems. They are giving up control over their family life and letting other people make their decisions.”
It’s a Faustian bargain that workers seem eager to accept. Faye Rainey, 39, a software engineer at Texas Instruments and the mother of a 5-year-old son, Jelani, and a 3-year-old daughter, Shani, said the fast pace of the semiconductor industry sometimes stretches her nine-hour workdays to 14 hours, particularly when new products are being tested.
So last year, as her wedding anniversary approached, she turned to the company concierge for help planning the evening. The concierge booked a hotel room, reserved a table at a posh seafood house, arranged for a limousine, even ordered up a special anniversary dessert--a cheesecake inscribed with the couple’s names--to be presented personally by the restaurant’s chef.
“My husband was so proud of me, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t plan it,” Rainey said.
When she has had family problems, such as questions about schools or day care, breast feeding or birth control, she has taken them to Texas Instruments’ online parenting network, where co-workers share their insights.
“You can barely stay in touch with your own immediate family, not to mention your friends,” she said. “But it’s easy to send an e-mail out. And the parents network is very responsive.”
Companies that already offer such programs are expanding them, partly because the labor shortage is forcing them to make themselves more attractive to job applicants. Concierge services, for example, are now offered at 26 of the firms that made Fortune magazine’s list of the “100 Best Places to Work,” up from 15 firms two years ago.
At AOL, even low-level workers at their far-flung call centers in Jacksonville, Fla., and Ogden, Utah, can call on a personal concierge to make a restaurant reservation, book a hotel room or send birthday flowers.
Last September, an information systems technical manager in his early 30s at AOL’s Dulles, Va., headquarters, matter-of-factly called the concierge desk. “The guy said, ‘I’m getting married in two weeks and I haven’t planned the honeymoon yet,’ ” recalled concierge Candiece (her legal name), who works on-site.
She quickly reserved a flight to Miami for the couple, selected luxurious accommodations and booked a Caribbean cruise, much to the groom’s relief. “They’re so focused on work,” she said. “Too many details from work and personal life. We’re here to help them with their lives, and every month the requests are increasing.”
These services and programs are cropping up even in areas where unemployment is high and workers are a dime a dozen. In Fresno, where unemployment is 12.7%, three times the national average, more than 45 employers have rushed to join a new work-life association launched by the Fresno Surgery Center, which has linked reports of fatigue, headaches and gastrointestinal distress to job-related stress.
Laura Glenn, business health manager at the center, said she was startled by the quick response from employers. “They’re hungry for it,” Glenn said. Some of the employers offered to pool resources when they couldn’t afford their own service providers.
Employer-provided take-home meals are clearly becoming more popular, although on occasion they are taken back to the office rather than home. According to the Fortune survey, 46 of the companies the magazine designated among the 100 best places in America to work now offer take-home meals.
“We have a lot of clients interested in [that perk], and we’re getting more requests for it,” said Bill Wagner, director of marketing and culinary support at Sodexho Marriott’s corporate services division, which offers take-home meals as a special feature for corporate clients with on-site cafeterias. “They see other companies doing it and they feel a bit left out if they are not doing it themselves.”
At J.C. Penney, many workers at the headquarters building pick up their children at the lavishly appointed child-care center and then, kids in tow, stop by the cafeteria to select chef-prepared meals made to order for each member of the family. Then they head home to eat together. A take-home meal for a family of four, complete with entree, side dishes, beverages and dessert, costs less than $20.
At Enron, a Houston-based energy firm, the take-home meals are typically just carted upstairs while workers labor late into the evening. Only about 5% to 7% of the take-home meals actually go home, Wagner said.
