By Ann Sullivan
Network World, 07/23/01
Is a chat at the water cooler your idea of a social event?
Do you know the tollbooth operator's schedule better than your partner's?
Have you logged more hours lately at the vending machines than the gym?
If so, it seems you need some balance in your life. Achieving
a comfortable balance between work and personal life is often an elusive goal.
Part of the difficulty is that balance is a moving target, as job responsibilities
shift and personal priorities change.
And don't expect to find any hard-and-fast
rules about what is an appropriate balance and what isn't, says
Marci Koblenz, president of MK Consultants. An employee can work
70 hours per week and have a better work/life balance than an
employee working 45 hours per week, she notes.
This makes it particularly tough for managers, who are responsible
not only for keeping their own lives balanced but also for helping their employees
maintain a healthy ratio of work and life.
Factor in the nature of IT work - unpredictable, prone to
crisis, reactive - and the task of balancing work and a personal life becomes
even thornier for enterprise managers and their staff.
To top
Overtime required
Online
recruitment sites are filled with job postings from companies
that make no bones about the availability expected of IT workers
- junior and senior alike.
"As a part of a self-directed work team supporting two facilities,
must be willing to work overtime and nonstandard hours as required, at times
with little notice, be on-call as required and wear and respond to a pager,"
states a Lockheed Martin posting on Monster.com for a computer systems analyst.
"The systems support engineer must be willing to work overtime,
weekends and holidays as requested by the systems manager in order to ensure
timely and comprehensive project implementation and completion," reads a
Sapphire Technologies listing.
While overtime is a fact of life for many IT workers, some
managers believe that being accountable for network operations shouldn't
mean constantly shortchanging your personal life. Cass Selden, director of
enterprise information systems at Born, a computer consulting firm in Minneapolis,
lives and manages by that principle.
Because of that, Selden says, Born has an enviously low turnover
rate in IT. Selden can think of only two employees who left the 19-person
department for another company during his three-year tenure. That works out
to a 3.5% turnover rate, compared with the national average of nearly 20%,
according to industry estimates.
Born IT staffers typically work 40- to 50-hour weeks. When
routine maintenance requires weekend appearances, duties are rotated among
the staff. And when Selden realizes that upcoming projects are going to require
significant man-hours, he recruits temporary help from Born's fleet of consultants.
Selden has witnessed only one major unplanned event requiring
significant overtime - a power outage - since he's been with
Born. Preparation is key, he says. He schedules monthly maintenance tasks
and has replaced a lot of older equipment with hot-swappable, fault-tolerant
gear. Equipment failures happen, but built-in redundancy can help make such
events "transparent to everybody in the organization, including me sometimes,"
Selden says.
Managers at Born try to keep an eye on employees and the hours
they log. Selden cites one example of a software developer whose manager noticed
she was putting in many hours on a specific project. The manager intervened,
letting the developer know he didn't expect her to work 60-hour weeks.
Born managers approve flextime at their discretion. Within
IT, one worker starts late so he can spend mornings with his family, Selden
says. Another works extra hours Monday through Thursday and takes a half-day
on Friday, while a third telecommutes in order to spend more time at home.
A 15-year IT veteran, Selden has worked at companies where a 70-hour workweek
is common. "I don't think you do good work when that happens," he says.
To top
In a word, "flexibility"
A picture frame is one of the props that MK Consultants'
Koblenz uses when she speaks to corporate clients about work/life balance.
The picture frame is rigid, representing business goals that should not be
compromised. The open space inside is where the opportunity for flexibility
exists. Yet, Koblenz says, most companies use only a minuscule piece of the
inside space for nontraditional work options.
Instead of being the exception, flextime should be allowed
"whenever it does not negatively impact the business requirements," Koblenz
says. And it isn't just for smaller IT shops like Born's. It's equally
important in large companies where corporate culture can eclipse individual
need.
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When human resources experts at MK Consultants are called
in to help a company establish balance for employees, the first thing they
do is look for unresolved work/life issues.
Click
here for more.
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That's why The Hartford Financial Services Group, with its
3,500 IT employees, relies on structured and unstructured work/life policies.
With an IT department of that size, not every policy is going to be appropriate
in every situation, says John Madigan, vice president of human resources for
IT at the Hartford, Conn., company.
The Hartford trains managers on dealing with work/life issues,
and employees on how to achieve work/life balance and write flextime proposals.
Alternatives to traditional full-time schedules are flextime, an 85% workweek,
telecommuting and compressed or extended workweeks.
Madigan says requests for alternative schedules have balanced
out. Not every job is suited to flextime, but employees understand the limitations
and Madigan finds little resentment among employees. In a recent study of
current and former IT staff, The Hartford even found its work/life policy
to be one of the four main reasons IT folks stayed at the company. In a climate
where attracting and retaining IT talent is a constant challenge, it pays
to be proactive about employee satisfaction.
To top
Balance is a relative term
Minus a corporate commitment to healthy workloads and reasonable
hours, it's a challenge for IT managers to maintain balance. But it can
be achieved - intermittently, at least.
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False. An employee can work 70 hours per week and
have a better work/life balance than an employee working
45 hours per week.
Not true. In a study conducted at an 8,000-person
global technology firm, MK Consultants found that
39% of employees experienced work/life conflicts;
there was no statistical difference between women
and men, says Marci Koblenz, president of the Evanston,
Ill., human resources consulting firm.
False. Work/life initiatives don't have to break the
bank. Sometimes something as simple as an afternoon
off can make a difference. Conversely, a gigantic
salary can't make up for missing every one of a child's
soccer games.
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That's what Margie Milone, manager of telecommunications
at Kent State University in Ohio, has found. Her team consists of assistant
manager Barbara Fugo and six full-time and two part-time workers who do everything
from manning university switchboards to negotiating telecom contracts to pulling
cable. The team handles voice services for the eight-campus university, with
its 110 buildings, 4,500 campus phones and 7,000 student lines.
For Milone and Fugo, who are salaried employees, overtime
is unavoidable. The two often work 80 hours per week and on weekends. During
a six-month period last year when the department was implementing a converged
voice-and-data network - a project that won Kent State Network
World's 2000 User Excellence
Award
- they often worked well into the night, grabbed a few hours sleep and were
back at the university by 5 a.m.
It's simply what you do when you have a project of this
size, Milone says. "Telecom is always of an urgent nature," she emphasizes.
For the staff, which is paid hourly, overtime is optional.
Staffers do decline to work extra hours, but rarely when they're really
needed, Milone says.
Flextime is not an option, officially. But Milone lets workers
occasionally exercise flexibility - such as combining breaks with a lunch
hour or making up lost time over lunch hours. And she grabs afternoons off,
time permitting. "A free afternoon is golden," Milone says - having
accumulated 13 weeks of unused vacation over the years.
For the voice crew at Kent State, balance doesn't come easily,
but team members work to make it possible for themselves and their co-workers.
To top
Finding opportunity
Employers are required by the federal Family and Medical Leave
Act to let employees take unpaid leave for family and medical emergencies
under certain circumstances. The 1993 act is a starting point for work/life
balance. Beyond that, companies need to find appropriate tools to promote
balance among their employees.
Some companies take work/life perks to the extreme. Born,
for example, offers lake cabins in Minnesota and Wisconsin, a mountainside
retreat in Colorado, and a seaside condo in Florida that employees can use
with their families.
But simple perks work, too. The Hartford takes the sting out
of overtime with what it calls "beeper pay." In departments where after-hours
emergencies are likely - such as in enterprise technologies -
staffers are regularly on call. They get paid additional money whether they
are called in or not, showing The Hartford doesn't take its IT staff's
flexibility for granted.
For IT managers with little fiscal flexibility, a little sensitivity
can go a long way. Milone, for example, encourages staff to leave work when
personal issues crop up, and she never requires an explanation.
That kind of behavior can make a big difference to employees,
Koblenz says. "You could work for a company that does nothing [to encourage
balance], but if your supervisor is supportive, that's all you need."
