Thursday, November 20, 1997

Study: Part-time work is widespread but undervalued

By MAGGIE JACKSON / AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- While widely accepted and increasingly popular, part-time work often remains little valued and supported in corporate America, a research group concluded today.

Employees on non-traditional schedules still bump against systems where success is judged by the number of hours workers are in the office, and where 40-hour or more work weeks are deemed the norm, the Catalyst research group reported after a two-year study.

The study marks some of the most in-depth research yet conducted on part-time work arrangements among professionals in major corporations.

"Even though more than 60 percent of (major) organizations have such policies, people don't widely use them because there's a general sense that they don't work," said Marcia Brumit Kropf, a vice president of Catalyst, which is devoted to the advancement of women in business.

She cited a 1996 Hewitt & Associates study that found that 64 percent of 1,050 major organizations offered part-time work arrangements.

Nationwide, nearly 20 percent of American workers are employed part-time, according to the federal government. Of those, nearly 70 percent are women and nearly a fifth are older than 55.

In its study, Catalyst spent two years conducting more than 300 interviews with part-time workers, their colleagues and supervisors at four major corporations. It also surveyed 2,000 employees of the companies, which Catalyst allowed to remain anonymous to promote greater candor by participants. Nearly 82 percent of the part-timers studied were female.

Catalyst stressed that companies must pay more attention to part-time work and its impact on the company for several reasons.

While often considered peripheral to corporate norms, part-time work has a "ripple-effect" that affects many workers, Catalyst found.

Only 11 percent of women and 4 percent of men in the study worked part-time. Yet 60 percent of employees surveyed had exposure to such arrangements, and 35 percent of women managers and 11 percent of male managers will have worked part-time at some point in their careers.

Flexible work arrangements also help attract and retain valued employees. Nearly 40 percent of part-time professionals claimed that such an arrangement was essential for remaining with their employer.

Such arrangements don't attract slackers, Catalyst also found. Nearly half of part-timers and their bosses report that part-timers were more productive than before they reduced their hours.

Yet such arrangements are often hobbled by workplaces that treat part-timers as exceptions to the rule.

While reduced hours are allowed, workers are still often judged by standards meant for full-time workers, such as the number of hours in the office. This "can result in full-time employees' connecting part-time work with poor performance," said the report.

For instance, a part-timer may do superior work yet may be overlooked for advancement because he or she is working fewer hours.

Part-timers, in turn, must be wary of becoming so "flexible" to others' requests that they carry a full-time work load - without the added pay and recognition.

With more and more workers changing their schedules, companies must now change their ways, Catalyst concluded.

"It's now necessary for the work environment to change to catch up to this new reality," said the report.