Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work
Few topics are as important--and involve as much self-deception and dishonesty--as finding the proper balance between child-rearing and work
Lie #3: Inflexible companies are the key problem On paper, most companies are plenty flexible. Seventy-two percent offer flextime; 64 percent permit part-time employment; 36 percent provide job-sharing; and 20 percent allow employees to work from home, according to a survey of 1,000 major U.S. companies released last month by Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm.
And yet a recent study of one Fortune 500 company reveals how little these programs actually are used. In The Time Bind, which profiles one unnamed company, sociologist Hochschild found that among eligible employees with children 13 and under, only 3 percent worked part time, 1 percent shared a job with another employee, and 1 percent took advantage of a program called "flexplace" allowing employees to do their work at home. Almost no fathers at the company took parental leave. Earlier studies of companies have shown similar results.
One reason is that taking advantage of such programs is lousy for your career. In a study conducted by the Ford Foundation, employees who used such programs as flextime, job sharing, telecommuting, and part-time work suffered career consequences, even though they were typically more efficient and productive than their colleagues. In one instance, a Xerox manager who supervised a team of engineers came up with an innovative plan that allowed her to work at home one day a week while improving her productivity. But during her performance review, the manager was downgraded for showing less than 100 percent commitment to her job. "What she did was not seen as an innovation that could help the company but as something she did only to help herself, " says Lotte Bailyn, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a researcher on the study.
Even employees who work full time but put in slightly less "face time" because of outside obligations may suffer. One study found that men with kids and employed spouses got pay raises that were 20 percent smaller on average over five years than did men whose wives stayed home. On average, the men in dual-earner families worked two hours less per week. "Although they were putting in somewhat less face time at the office, the real problem seemed to be one of perceptions," says Linda Stroh, an associate professor of human resources at Loyola University in Chicago, who conducted the study of 348 male managers. "These men were perceived as having a dual allegiance and were penalized for it," she says.
Lack of support from management, however, may not be the entire reason people shy away from flexible and part-time work arrangements. There could also be a more subtle, less talked about factor at work: Some parents want to spend more time at the office than at home. That is Hochschild's provocative conclusion. As she sees it, home life has become more like an efficiently run but joyless workplace, while the actual workplace, with its new emphasis on empowerment and teamwork, is more like a family. Among employees she observed, home had become a place filled with incessant demands from noisy children, endless piles of laundry, few tangible rewards, and little time to relax. At work, by contrast, people felt in control. They knew what was expected of them, and their hard work was appreciated by colleagues and supervisors.
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