The New Mommy Track
More mothers win flextime at work, and hubbies' help (really!) at home
On the company front, 31 percent of organizations allow employees to work from home or off site on a regular basis, and 73 percent allow extended career breaks for family responsibilities, according to a survey by the Families and Work Institute. Best Buy allows some of its corporate employees to set their own hours and work entirely from home. Last year, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a public accounting firm, launched Full Circle, a program for parents that enables them to temporarily stop working for the company but stay in touch through networking and training events. Keeping connected makes it easier for moms to return to work when they're ready. "The thing we know for sure is that women need choices. Our careers are not as linear as men's," says Jennifer Allyn, managing director in the office of diversity.
The company did not start the program out of a spirit of generosity: In 2001, it faced a 24 percent turnover rate. Allyn estimates the cost of losing a client services' employee, which most are, to be around $80,000. So if Full Circle enables one person to return to the firm, she says, the program has paid for itself. Allyn says the turnover rate has already fallen to 15 percent.
Gina Thoma, 43, one of the 25 female participants in the Full Circle program, worked as a senior manager in PricewaterhouseCoopers's San Francisco office until she had three children, including twins, in less than two years. After a series of nannies didn't work out, she and her husband decided one of them needed to stay home, at least temporarily, to restore order to their home life. Despite her time out, Thoma is still on track to become partner after she returns in 2008 or 2009. "I'm determined to make it work," she says.
Thoma's promise of a job after years off is unusual, and even at a company like PricewaterhouseCoopers, participation in the Full Circle program is highly selective. That's what inspired Cathleen Benko, managing principal of talent for Deloitte & Touche, which provides consulting services, to develop a new model that views flexibility as the norm, instead of an exception.
Deloitte's new approach, laid out in Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce, coauthored by Benko, personalizes employees' careers to fit their lifestyles. For example, young 20-somethings might have few travel restrictions or work limitations and then add restrictions during childbearing years. Deloitte has already rolled out the program to about one fifth of its workforce; next year it will apply to the whole firm.
Many agencies within the federal government encourage employees to work from home and to have flexible hours. Daniel Green, deputy associate director in the Office of Personnel Management, says such arrangements increase loyalty and motivation among staff. By January 2005, over 140,000 federal employees, or 19 percent of the workforce, teleworked, almost double the number for 2001.
Opting out. Most women don't have access to such corporate and federal programs, and that leads some of them to decide combining motherhood and work is impossible. A recent survey of almost 2,500 high-achieving women by Sylvia Ann Hewlett found that 37 percent of women stop working for a period, or temporarily "opt out" of the workforce. Most of those women would have preferred to have taken a job with reduced or flexible hours if it had been available, says Hewlett, author of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success.
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