Thursday, May 29, 1997

Issues go way beyond missed ball games

By SUE SHELLENBARGER / The Wall Street Journal

Conflicts between work and personal life aren't just a family matter any more.

A New York attorney was working late after her boss, insisting she finish an urgent project, had gone home. As the offices around her emptied, she grew increasingly resentful. She had been planning for weeks to attend an event that evening.

Near midnight, she finished work, but missed most of the event. Eventually, the incident and others like it drove her to quit.

What did she miss? A party thrown by her closest friends, an occasion her boss deemed unimportant, but that to her was essential to sustaining a life off the job.

"I'm a single woman and I'd like to meet someone. But when you work long hours, it's difficult." Her boss had "absolutely no respect for that," says the attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of tainting her relationship with her new employer. "I want a more balanced life."

Work-life conflict is hitting employees of all kinds, and it's having a deeper impact on the workplace than most employers think.

One of the most extensive corporate studies so far, an 18-month effort at Baxter Healthcare, shows work-life conflict is a sweeping concern, afflicting men and women, single and married people, and low-income and high-income workers alike.

The study, set for release next month, shows 30 percent of employees at Baxter, known for its family-friendly programs, struggled with work-life conflict at least weekly; 42 percent had looked for another job because of it. Contrary to the common belief that women with families are most pressed by demands from home, men, singles and dual earners without kids were among the groups most likely to have considered changing jobs because of work-life conflicts.

By probing the nature of work-life conflict in 125 focus groups and interviews and surveys with hundreds of employees, researchers found the most painful experience for employees, especially hourly workers, was not being treated with respect or afforded dignity as "whole people" with lives off the job - being ordered to work overtime on short notice or to change schedules abruptly, or being arbitrarily denied time off.

Salaried employees said their efforts to find balance in life were frustrated by expectations for weekend and evening work and nonstop voice-mail availability.

Such conflicts in some units affected employees' behavior on the job, making them unwilling to put in extra effort, volunteer for overtime or talk positively with customers.

"Why should you bend over backward if they're not committing to you?" one employee in the study said. The opposite was also true, with employees who felt supported saying they would go the extra mile on the job, says Marci Koblenz of MK Consultants, an Evanston, Ill., human-resource firm that conducted the study with Alice Campbell, director of work and life at Baxter, Deerfield, Ill.

A separate study at two other employers highlights one reason life balance is such a broad concern.

Mary Young of Boston University's Human Resources Policy Institute found long hours and a lack of clear work-time standards fed dissatisfaction among all workers, parents and nonparents alike.

Post-layoffs, "the old idea of 'a day's work' has little meaning," Young says.

I see similar signals in my mail; the CFO of a marketing concern writes, "Just because I'm single and childless doesn't mean I have the will or the desire to work a 12-hour day, six days a week."

Many companies are recognizing employees' frustrations in a nominal way, giving work-family programs a broader "work-life" label and rolling out perks like at-your-desk massages and pet-care subsidies.

But frothy perks do little to erase the unease of workers who feel their lives are fundamentally out of balance.

At a past employer, says Tarrytown, N.Y., writer Caitlin Kelly, a policy of feting employees on their birthdays didn't ease their frustration over their huge workloads.

Kelly especially resented the expectation that she work through lunch. Five days after her birthday party, she quit.

"I'm not five years old," she says. "I need a lunch hour, not a birthday cake."

To foster commitment, the Baxter study identifies a hierarchy of work-life needs, similar to Maslow's, that must be met.

Denial of the most basic needs cause the most pain (stress, low morale, marital conflict); these must be satisfied before higher needs come into play. The most basic work-life need, the study says, is respect; second is balance between time on and off the job; third is flexibility, and last are work-life programs, like seminars and referrals.

"If a work-life program isn't grounded in basic respect for employees, it's built on sand," says Brad Googins of Boston College, an authority on work-life issues.

Baxter executives are making balance a more mainstream concern, including it in standards for evaluating managers and adding work-life questions to its employee surveys.

The study helps fill a gap in work-life research. Management theoreticians have insisted an effective company can't be built on a foundation of strained personal relationships.

We know now, from listening to employees of all kinds, that workers whose drive for balance is frustrated will respond in ways that undercut management goals. That's a finding worth thinking about.