All Worked Up

n this election year, the Clinton Administration went out of its way to position itself as friendly to working parents, especially those in its own workforce.

"I continue to believe that honoring and supporting the concerns of family members in the workplace is vital to good government and to a productive workforce," President Clinton wrote in a memo to agency heads in June. He ordered agencies to review their personnel practices and come up with new, more flexible policies by the end of October.

In September, Vice President Gore reiterated the Administration's commitment to family-friendly policies in his latest report on the Administration's National Performance Review. "Government workers should have lives, too," Gore wrote. "Moms and Dads need time with their kids, with their own parents and with each other. So the Clinton-Gore Administration is encouraging job-sharing, part-time work, alternative work schedules, telecommuting from home and satellite locations, leave banks and child- and elder-care services."

So much for the rhetoric. The reality is a little different.

At the Defense Department's Army Research Laboratory, a technical support officer recently tried to adjust her work schedule to deal with the legal proceedings associated with adopting two infants from Russia. What she found was a stated policy against alternative schedules. "The only exception is if you are in a car pool with somebody on an alternative work schedule," the officer says. Luckily, she was, and she was able to put in longer days and take off every other Friday.

A federal lawyer who asked not to be identified is also disappointed with her agency's "family friendly" policy. Her boss told her she could take three months off for maternity leave and then come back part time. But she returned from leave to find everyone else at her level had been promoted. "They said they couldn't gauge my performance since I was out on maternity leave," she says. "I was really angry. I'd been with the agency for five years and I shouldn't be penalized for not working for three months."

Alternative work schedules, often called "flextime," and maternity leaves are among the simplest family-friendly policies to implement. The fact that many agencies are having difficulty with these options doesn't bode well for employees hoping to set up more complex arrangements to work from telecommuting centers or out of their homes.

"Any organization that doesn't even allow flextime is not going to be open to the concept of telecommuting," says the Army Research Lab employee. "And the option to work at home? Oh God, no!"

Demanding Flexibility

According to the Office of Personnel Management, about 40 percent of federal employees now work under arrangements that allow them some flexibility in determining their working hours. But only about 10,000 federal employees-one-half of 1 percent of the total workforce-are full-fledged telecommuters working either out of their homes or in designated telecommuting centers.

Many more employees should be able to take advantage of nontraditional arrangements, says Lisa Mallory, a National Performance Review staffer who specializes in family-friendly policies. Indeed, a Transportation Department study indicated that 40 percent of federal jobs could be handled by telecommuters. "We are trying to get supervisors to be more receptive to the needs of employees," says Mallory.

Employees say their top need is more time with their families.

The 1993 National Study of the Changing Workforce, conducted by the Families and Work Institute-a New York City-based organization that researches how employees balance job and family responsibilities-reveals that employees today work more hours, have more demanding jobs and experience more burnout than ever before. Nearly 80 percent of people surveyed said their jobs require hard work and 65 percent said they must work faster than ever.

About 87 percent of workers, the survey showed, live with family members and 47 percent care for dependents.

The study found that despite heightened job stress and increasing family responsibilities, employees will remain committed to their jobs if they have time to handle their personal affairs and gain more control over their work schedules.

In fact, employees are more likely to consider the work environment than the salary when deciding whether to accept a job offer. Sixty percent of those surveyed said they heavily considered how their jobs would affect personal and family life before accepting them, while just 35 percent said pay was the most important factor. Open communications, the nature of the work, management quality and supervisor characteristics were also important factors.

"What people want is greater control over when and where they do their work," says Faith Wohl, director of the Office of Workplace Initiatives at the General Services Administration, the agency that is spearheading flexible workplace initiatives across the government. Wohl works out of her home in Delaware one day a week. "The great cry from the American workforce is 'Flexibility!' Employees want the ability to do what they have to in order to take care of family."

But the biggest hurdle to creating a family-friendly workplace is supervisors wary of granting employees such flexibility.

"Managers don't want to give up control," says Diane Burrus, director of Management Training at Work/Family Directions, an Arizona-based consulting firm specializing in work and family issues. "They assume that if you give one person flexibility, everyone will want it. A lot of managers equate flexibility with absence. It gets back to the mentality, 'You can't trust them unless you see them.' "

Yet studies show employees who have more flexibility to take care of personal concerns are happier and more committed.

"Research shows that companies that support employees in helping them balance work and family get a return on their investment," says Barry Wanger of Wanger Associates, a public relations firm that represents Work/Family Directions. "They get increased productivity, loyalty, higher retention and less turnover. This is important at a time when federal agencies and corporate America are going through downsizing and reengineering."

Beyond Flextime

Most agencies already offer at least some of their employees the option to vary their working hours from the standard 9-to-5 routine to avoid rush-hour commuting hassles. Many also allow compressed work schedules, under which an employee might, for example, work nine-hour days and take every other Friday off.

Coming in a little early and leaving a little early doesn't cut it for many workers, says Wohl. "Now, 15 minutes is not the issue. The issue is flexibility about the whole day. Maybe people should go home a few hours early and finish up work in the evening."

Or maybe they shouldn't come into the office at all.

Roman Marciniak, a General Services Administration property manager in the Washington area, doesn't travel to his agency's headquarters. Instead, he reports to a GSA-designated telecommuting center just south of Fredericksburg, Va., a few miles from his home.

Marciniak, who is at the center from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., communicates regularly with his agency's headquarters staff by e-mail and phone. His boss knows that Marciniak's not out playing golf and he knows that he has to take on more responsibilities to show he appreciates the flexibility.

Marciniak says the arrangement has made him a happier man and a more productive worker. "I think telecommuting helps my morale and performance at work because I get to spend more time at home."

Only about 500 government telecommuters work out of centers like Marciniak's. The rest of the 10,000 telecommuters work out of their homes. As of late September, GSA was operating nine telecommuting centers in the Washington area, and expected another nine to be open by the end of the year. GSA also operates centers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Valencia, Calif., and Santa Rosa, Calif.

The Administration hopes to have 60,000 telecommuters by 1998.

Overcoming Managers' Resistance

Many supervisors still don't feel comfortable having their employees work out of sight. "In some ways, you can't blame them," says a scientist at the Army Research Laboratory. Managers are the ones with all the responsibility and a minimum amount of power. When you mess with their ability to control their people, there is going to be a natural amount of resistance."

Resistance tends to break down as supervisors learn how to manage flexible work arrangements (sometimes known as "flexiplace" policies), especially if programs are designed with checks and balances. The Justice Department, for instance, began implementing its flexiplace policy piecemeal. Initially, employees with back problems, pregnant women ordered on bed rest or workers with other medical problems were allowed to work out of their homes.

"Flexiplace became a great way for women to transition from maternity leave to a full-time schedule," says Vivian Jarcho, an assistant director for policy in DOJ's Justice Management Division. "For those who wanted in-home care, this gave them a chance to oversee that process before returning to work. We had fathers who used flexiplace to help in the home without having to take parental leave."

Because support from managers is crucial to any flexible workplace program, Justice included in its 80-hour supervisory training a module on how to exercise discretion in deciding who should be allowed to work off site. Managers learned that they didn't have to say yes to everyone.

Supervisors, says Jarcho, were concerned that employees would view flexible work schedules as an entitlement rather than a business arrangement. As the flexiplace program evolved after its introduction in 1990, Jarcho says she urged employees seeking to participate in it to "move away from the personal accommodation issue."

Instead, she encourages employees to show how working at home or at a satellite location could help managers fulfill the department's mission. If, for example, working at home would make an employee more productive, that's what he or she should emphasize. "We don't ask people why they want flexibility," she says, "but rather how will it work for you and the organization so it's a win-win for everybody."

DOJ came up with a Flexible Work Option Request that employees must submit to their bosses, outlining what they want, how it will affect the organization, and how they believe their performance should be evaluated. Managers, in turn, examine how the flexible schedule will help them reach their goals, think about how it will affect co-workers and determine the best way to evaluate the effectiveness of the arrangement.

"It's important that managers be clear up front about certain requirements of the job and the overall business goals," says Burrus, who helped design the form. "Employees should propose a set of reasonable goals and objectives and together they should finalize them. If an employee doesn't buy into it, that's not the kind of management that will be effective."

After examining the options, both the employee and manager are required to sign a flexiplace agreement covering the terms and conditions of the arrangement. In addition to specifying working hours, employees must indicate their workplaces are safe and guarantee sensitive information won't be left out for others to see.

The President's Council on Management Improvement recommends in its "Guidelines for Pilot Flexible Workplace Arrangements" that both employees and managers undergo training to adjust to new flexible working arrangements. Employees, the guidelines say, must learn how to avoid isolation, to find the best mix of home and office hours and to communicate with supervisors. Supervisors need to learn to manage by results, to trust employees and to deal with workers who feel they aren't getting equitable treatment.

Driving Change

At first, managers may have a tough time supervising people who work off site, says Robin Hardman, marketing director for the Families and Work Institute. But what really matters is whether the employee achieves certain agreed upon performance standards. "You always run into people who say, 'How do I know that employees are getting anything done at home?'

"We say, how do you know whether they are getting anything done at the office? Do you sit outside their office? Are their phones tapped? If you look at the workplace and realize that you don't know how to assess whether an employee is getting his job done, you should change the way you do performance reviews."

Alan Christian, the director of the regulatory enforcement staff at the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, met with his employees before they went home and after they came back to help them stay on track. "I started out by seeing what the employee was taking home and asking them what they produced when they came back." Once trust was established, that step was no longer needed.

But not everybody is suited for flexiplace arrangements.

A receptionist whose job is to greet people who come into the office obviously can't work out of his or her home. And even people who could work at home sometimes need to be in the office. Christian always makes sure someone is covering the office from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

"We have a system in place where each type of position is represented in the office," he says. "A reviewer, for instance, will work out of his home only if the rest of the office is covered. Part of working in teams or groups is that everyone will cover for their counterparts." When two people want to work compressed schedules, Christian makes sure they don't take the same day off.

"We have to do some juggling," he says.

But the juggling to accommodate an employee's personal needs can actually help the manager and the organization. "Companies that institute flextime," says Hardman, "may realize that they could have fewer meetings on site and be more efficient. The work-family program becomes the driver for more efficient management."

Supervisors who insist on counting heads every morning and who resist any flexibility will be the losers in the changing government culture.

"Ultimately," says Wohl, "the most important thing is managerial attitudes. All the [family-friendly] programs in the world won't replace the importance of an empathetic boss who knows how to get the work done and let you live your life."