In an era of soaring health care costs, reducing work-life stress is a potential win-win proposition for employers, employees, and their families. Workplace policies that provide employees with more autonomy and flexibility in matters such as where and when they work, time off to deal with health and family concerns, and assistance with child care, offer opportunities for employers to support employees’ lives outside of work. Such policies may result in bottom-line pay-offs for the employer in terms of enhanced recruitment, retention, productivity, and lower health care costs. The state of research knowledge in this area is sparse, however. Researchers are just beginning to move beyond correlational, descriptive studies into exciting, rigorous intervention research that evaluates the consequences of changes in workplace policies. These new investigations pay attention not only to the effects of formal policies, but to the implications of changes in the informal culture of the workplace, for employers, employees, and employees’ families. As this new wave of research gets off the ground, it is timely to ask how the research community can inform workplace policy in this important area.
The contributions to this volume are based on papers presented at the 15th Annual National Symposium on Family Issues held at Penn State University in October 2007, "Work-Life Policies that Make a Real Difference for Individuals, Families, and Organizations." This edited volume is the culmination of two days of stimulating and provocative presentations and discussions.
This volume is organized into four sections, each of which addresses a distinct goal. Each section includes a chapter by lead authors, followed by shorter chapters by discussants. Care has been taken to bring together perspectives from diverse disciplines in each section. The volume concludes with an integrative commentary.
The volume begins with a comprehensive overview by industrial and organizational psychologists Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brian Distelberg (Michigan State University) of family-friendly workplace policies in the United States, including estimates of their prevalence and data about their effectiveness. These themes are elaborated in subsequent chapters by authors from other perspectives. Cynthia A. Thompson of the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York, and David Prottas of Adelphi University emphasize the role played by organizational culture in shaping employees’ perceived access to policies and actual use of them. The access to and relevance of many of these policies to hourly workers is questioned in Netsy Firestein’s chapter. Firestein, a labor organizer and director of the Berkeley-based Labor Project for Working Families, introduces important questions about the likelihood that corporations will be responsive to the needs of low-income workers and their families. Their chapters are complemented by a chapter from organizational sociologist Forrest Briscoe of Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, highlighting the need for research on such organizational dimensions as size.
The lead chapters anchoring the second and third sections of the volume each focus on a different workplace intervention study. The focal chapter of the second section is Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly, and Kelly Chermack’s distillation of insights from an ongoing evaluation of the impact of the Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters. This team of organizational and life-course sociologists have conducted a pathbreaking longitudinal study of participants in the intervention and provide empirical evidence that their primarily middle class, professional sample benefited from their newfound flexibility in when and where work takes place. Three chapters discuss the Moen, Kelly, and Chermack chapter and offer additional insights. Shelley MacDermid, Mary Ann Remnet, and Colleen Pagnan from Purdue’s Department of Child Development and Family Studies elaborate on some of the methodological challenges involved in evaluating field interventions like ROWE. From the field of management, Jeffrey Greenhaus of Drexel University brings insights from a career of research on corporate managers. In the final chapter of this set, Anisa Zvonkovic, a developmental scholar from the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University, adds additional nuances from her own research on the implications of work-related travel for employees and their families.
The focus of the third section of the volume moves from an examination of corporate work settings to a careful consideration of the workplace challenges faced by hourly employees and their families. The lead chapter by Susan Lambert, a sociologist in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, describes the early stages of a workplace policy-oriented intervention in the retail sector that involved providing more predictable work hours for sales associates. The chapter includes a rich array of insights about the ways in which a "just in time" work culture makes it difficult for employees to have any control over their schedules, wreaking havoc with life off the job. Complementing the lead chapter, sociologist Ruth Milkman of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles, contributes insights from her policy-oriented studies of initiatives such as the effort to enact paid family medical leave in California. Noemí Enchautegui-de-Jesús from the Department of Psychology at Syracuse University adds findings from her own qualitative study of hourly employees in a university context. In the final chapter of this group, Maureen Perry-Jenkins, a family scholar in the Department of Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, weaves in findings from her longitudinal study of the transition to parenthood and back to work for a sample of working-class couples. The experiences of these husbands and wives resonate with those in the Lambert study, but in this research, we see what this work is like from the perspective of married dual-earner couples dealing with the challenges of working-class hourly jobs, marriage dynamics, and childrearing.
In the fourth section of the volume, the focus turns to policymaking. The lead chapter by sociologist Jennifer Glass of the University of Iowa puts the United States in an international perspective and provides a sobering assessment of the social and economic forces working against the possibility of change. The three discussant chapters each take different tacks. Chai Feldblum, an attorney at the Georgetown University Law Center, brings insights from her role as director of Workplace Flexibility 2010, a campaign funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s National Initiative on Workplace Flexibility, to support the development of a comprehensive national policy on workplace flexibility. Ellen Galinsky’s chapter provides examples from the many innovative work-family projects she has conducted in her role as president of the Families and Work Institute, a think tank focused on the changing nature of the work-family interface. Finally, Michael A. Smyer and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, codirectors of the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, focus attention on the rapidly aging workforce in our society, one consequence of which may be a new emphasis on workplace flexibility as aging baby boomers flex their collective muscle and negotiate for more control over work in return for delaying retirement.
The final chapter is an integrative commentary by Kelly D. Davis and Katherine Stamps Mitchell, graduate students at Penn State University in Human Development and Family Studies and in Sociology, respectively. This interdisciplinary team deftly summarizes the themes woven throughout the volume and suggests next steps for research.
