Category: Workplace Culture

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Sexual Assaults in the Military and Mission Effectiveness

You’re a soldier. You’re flying a plane, operating a piece of war machinery, mapping a battle plan, supporting your squad, or in the middle of combat. You’re on guard for the enemy. The night before, you fought off a sexual assault. Or maybe you tried but couldn’t.

You’re sore, shocked, and suffering. Who did this—not an adversary, but someone wearing the same uniform you do. Now you have an extra concern on top of all your others. You not only have to look out for the foe you expected, but also one you didn’t whose acts can be as lethal to your safety, concentration and focus as a sniper.

That you must be on guard against a sexual attack in the midst of other risks is an obscene reality for many in our military. This is an unnecessary, outrageous hazard. It has gone on too long.

If what I’ve written sounds exaggerated, then watch The Invisible War, a searing, award-winning documentary about sexual assault in the military.

Or, pick up the news of the recent few weeks and you’ll read about reports of rising sexual assaults in the military, of counselors who attack those they are supposed to protect, and of sexual assaults at Annapolis that reference earlier incidents at the Air Force Academy. Research the early 1990s and you’ll learn about Tailhook, a ritual of sexual hazing and assault. And as The Invisible War explains, there’s a sordid history of such assaults and rapes that goes back even further. They affect males and females and leave permanent, devastating scars. The deepest wound is on the honor of our outstanding military, which has defended our freedoms for 200 years.

I did not serve in our armed forces. I have great regard and respect for those who have and do. What I have read and heard from friends and colleagues is that military units perform best when there is unit cohesion. This occurs when members of a unit work together to fulfill their mission. They build bonds of trust and the most basic form of mutual respect.

At least some of those who have been assaulted—or fear that they might—suffer just a bit less trust and concentration than if that wasn¹t one of their ongoing concerns. There must have been critical times when such distractions have affected their attention and judgment. Surely, there are hospital beds and graves filled by soldiers who relied upon comrades that lacked peak concentration or their very best judgment after suffering a brutal, criminal assault. These individuals, though not directly attacked, also paid the awful price for the sexual assault.

Some say that that part of the problem is that those who are currently victimized have to report up though their chain of command. Victims have reported that their attackers were the very people to whom they were required to report attacks. A related problem is that this system may cause complaints to be ignored or dismissed and the claimants ostracized or retaliated against.

No doubt this reporting and enforcement structure needs to be evaluated and likely changed to encourage complaints and provide for sure and just penalties and complainant protections. But solving this problem requires far more than rewriting processes or other procedures.

Most importantly, we have to change elements of military culture that condones sexual assault by minimizing it, ignoring it, protecting the offenders or treating it as a problem too trivial to address in the broader imperatives of warfare. Ultimately, sexual assault and rape and even less outrageous conduct leading up to it must be viewed as unprofessional, unethical, vile, and criminal. It has also got to be seen as a military hazard caused by purposeful behavior, in a sense, comparable to sabotage whose purpose is also often to undermine unit and mission effectiveness.

Our military leaders need to recognize sexual assaults as a threat to operational success and the safety of our troops, and not just as an attack to the individual who will, no doubt, suffer lasting damage. They then must to take the necessary steps to prevent this grotesque, outrageous, and damaging conduct from happening again.

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Some Companies Replace Cubicles With Flex Spaces

When Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer decreed that all telecommuting employees must immediately return to the office or risk termination, her argument was that people need to be together for innovation to happen. But it takes more than warm bodies in the same building to generate interactivity. You can make employees work in the office, but when you park them in isolated cubicles, days can go by before they engage with anyone beyond their adjoining cube mate.

If companies really want their people to be innovative, they have to create flexible workspaces that foster collaboration and give employees the technology—and permission—to work wherever in the space they will be most productive.

“Instead of forcing people to come to the office, you want to make them want to be there,” says Beth Moore, director of workplace strategy for CBRE, a global commercial real estate services firm based in Los Angeles.

In many companies that begins by replacing cramped cubicles with shared workstations, open collaboration spaces and lounges located to generate casual interactions. Such redesigns create a more productive work environment while simultaneously lowering real estate costs, says Diane Stegmeier, president of Stegmeier Consulting Group, a workplace change management consultancy in Cleveland. “A flexible work environment, in conjunction with flexible work policies, can accomplish both financial and performance benefits for the enterprise,” she says.

This trend toward creating a more mobile and flexible workplace is expected to grow in the coming years. A 2012 survey from Citrix suggests that, by 2020, the average workplace will provide just seven desks for every 10 office workers, and each person can access the corporate information technology network from an average of six different computing devices. The figure is expected to be as low as six desks for every 10 workers in the United States, Singapore, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

“Organizations are investing in the space they have to create enticing workplaces that foster collaboration, innovation and creativity,” said Mick Hollison, vice president, integrated marketing and strategy, at Citrix in a news release about the survey. “The result is a stronger organization with high-caliber people performing at their best.”

Global consulting firm Accenture has seen dramatic financial and productivity gains since adopting a flex-space environment. Twelve years ago the company replaced dedicated offices with shared work spaces, and implemented a telecommuting policy that encouraged employees to work wherever they were most productive.

Since then, the company has reduced its real estate portfolio by 50 percent while increasing head count and revenue. And workplace surveys show employees are more engaged and satisfied than ever before, says Dan Johnson, Accenture’s global director of workplace innovation. “Our flex-work arrangement is one of the reasons people stay at Accenture,” he says. “It’s a very valuable benefit.”

CBRE is seeing similar results as it rolls out flex-space redesigns in offices around the world, including its Los Angeles headquarters, which will open this summer. The new space will reduce the company’s real estate footprint by a third without cutting the number of employees, Moore says. It plans to use the savings to upgrade IT infrastructure, collaboration software and support services for employees, Moore says. “Giving people the right tools and easy connectivity will make them more effective,” she says.

However, the transformation to a flex-space environment isn’t always easy. Even if you offer employees comfy couches, coffee bars and wireless connectivity, they may not willingly give up their dedicated office space; and managers can struggle to figure out how to oversee a team that is suddenly scattered throughout the building.

“A big challenge is when the company embraces the idea of flexible-work environment, yet are unwilling to reduce the size of individual spaces or have people give up their dedicated private offices or cubicles altogether,” Stegmeier says. “The end result is often a requirement for more space, rather than less, which of course is less efficient and more costly.”

To avoid the drama that can come from such a dramatic culture change, facilities and HR teams should work together on a communication plan that sets expectations ahead of time about where employees will work in the new space, how the spaces will be used and why the redesign will enhance their work flow, she says. “A commitment between the facilities departments and human resources to work together is paramount to the success of flexible-work initiatives.”

Global office furniture company Steelcase Inc.’s corporate hub offers gourmet food, a range of seating options, and a state-of-the-art display wall where employees can catch up on the latest company news.

A few years ago, the cafeteria at Steelcase headquarters in Grand Rapids Michigan, looked like a typical corporate café. It was a vast, brightly lit room with a scattering of mostly empty tables and few other amenities to draw people in. When employees did go down there, they usually bought their lunch and returned to their office to eat it, says Sara Armbruster, Steelcase’s vice president of workspace futures and strategies.

Today, it’s the social hub of the corporate campus.

A major remodel in 2011 transformed the space into what is now known as the Steelcase Work Café, a collaborative space outfitted with the company’s state-of-the-art furnishings, a gourmet menu and a variety of seating areas to accommodate quiet work, casual networking, boisterous teams and formal meetings. Every seating area features outlets and IT connections for video and audio conferencing, and food service is available from early morning through late evening for employees doing international conference calls.

“It’s a phenomenal space,” says Steve Waugh, Steelcase’s director of global credit. In the past, he never spent more than a few minutes in the cafeteria, now he goes there all the time. “It’s a place I can hang out and run into people I need to connect with,” he says. “That connectivity makes it totally worth the investment.”

The naturally lit space is anchored by a giant media wall that sits beside the espresso bar, running a stream of Steelcase videos, news and project updates to keep local employees apprised of global corporate events. “Even though the café is in Grand Rapids, we want to create a sense of connection to the rest of the company,” Armbruster says.

And it is just one aspect of the company’s three-year campus reinvention project launched in 2010 to give its workforce a more collaborative office environment.

“Our old space was a Dilbert cube farm,” says Waugh, who was among the first employees to have their office redesigned. Now his team works in a ‘free-address’ space, where they can choose from shared workbenches, semi-enclosed spaces or a variety of conference rooms. They also share a café area with the procurement team, which was intentionally done to create opportunities for the two groups to come together throughout the day.

Waugh likes the new office, though he admits it was challenging for some of his team members to give up their dedicated spaces—and all the stuff they stored there. “It takes time to get used to having less material, and to choosing where to work every day,” he says. But eventually they adapted, and now most of them carry their office in their backpacks. “It’s important for employees to be open-minded, and to recognize that this is about giving them ‘best places’ to work.”

No one at Accenture has a dedicated office space—not even the company’s top executives. Instead, employees reserve space to suit their needs wherever they happen to be. That may be a shared workbench in a corporate office, a hotel conference room or their own kitchen table.

“We are a mobile workforce, and mobility and traditional offices don’t go together,” says Johnson, the global director of workplace innovation.

Accenture offices include a combination of shared bench tables and collaborative spaces. There are no desks and no cubicles. The proliferation of shared space is intentional. “We see the office is a place to be with people and to become part of the culture, so we prioritize collaboration over individual workspaces,” he says. Employees can reserve space for quiet tasks, but most people opt to do their “head-down work” at home or on the road.

Accenture embraced flex space more than a decade ago. It was a natural fit for the company’s road-warrior culture, Johnson says. It gave employees a better work-life balance, and enabled Accenture to cut its real estate footprint in half and achieve 85 percent usage of office space on any given day. That’s compared with the 50 percent average seen in most companies.

The company reinvests much of those real estate savings into leading-edge IT infrastructure and software. “Our overriding objective has been to minimize the cost of real estate and shift that investment to services and technology to support our people,” Johnson says.

All of the office workspaces feature shared monitors and wireless technology. Corporate phone lines are integrated into employees’ laptops so they ring wherever in the world that employee is working. Employees also have access to the latest collaborative software tools for chatting, video conferencing and desktop sharing from remote locations, so that teams can connect and collaborate virtually.

These collaboration tools are key to the success of Accenture’s distributed workplace culture, Johnson says. “Whether someone is in Chicago, Paris or another floor of the office, you can connect with them instantly.”

When Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey last year, CBRE had to close its Long Island office for weeks.

“If we had had a mobile workspace, continuity of the business would have been consistent,” says CBRE’s Moore. But all of the employees in that office had dedicated workspaces with desktop computers, so they were unable to operate until the office reopened.

It was bad timing for the company, which is currently in the process of redesigning all of its global offices to offer employees a more flexible, mobile, collaborative workplace environment.

The redesign began in 2011, after a workplace study showed that office space was often vacant or underutilized, and the siloed design of cubicles was preventing teams from working together.

“Instead of building out more space that wouldn’t get regularly used, we decided to break down the silos and create something that was more collaborative,” Moore says.

To be sure the new design met employees’ needs, Moore and her team launched a 360-degree assessment. They interviewed company leaders, conducted employee surveys, and did focus-group studies to see how employees used their space and what they thought was missing.

“The results helped us paint a picture,” she says. Using that data, they are slowly rolling out redesign projects around the world to coincide with their current lease arrangements.

One of the first transformations occurred in the Amsterdam office, where CBRE replaced individual cubicles with assigned “neighborhoods” where teams co-locate at comfortable activity-based work areas flanked by open collaboration rooms. Each neighborhood is strategically located so that teams who often work together have adjoining spaces to foster more interdisciplinary work.

“Having assigned neighborhoods gives people the comfort of home so it doesn’t feel like a free-for-all,” she says. It also enabled her to reduce the number of seats from 240 to 198, which cut real estate costs without cramping employee space.

“We’ve never reached peak capacity,” she says.

The company is now redesigning offices across the U.S., where 40 percent of its leases are up in the next 36 months. The downtown Los Angeles office, which is set to open this summer, will also feature the activity-based neighborhoods, lots of open collaboration spaces, and state-of-the-art wireless technology and collaboration software.

The new office is 30 percent smaller than the old space, enabling Moore to double her IT spending without going over budget. She was also able to add a dedicated concierge to the office to book meeting rooms, help solve technical issues, and make sure all catering and event planning needs are addressed. “It’s our way of making sure clients and employees have the best customer service possible,” she says.

And while CBRE employees are also free to telecommute, Moore hopes the new office design will make them want to come to the office. “We give them great technology, and make it easy to connect and communicate with team members, so they can have a more meaningful experience at work.”

When Microsoft opened its corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, in the late ’80s, employees believed that software projects were better done behind doors, and the office design reflected that, says Martha Clarkson, global workplace strategist at Microsoft. “There were a lot of doors and hallways with a lot of medium gray walls and teal and purple carpet.”

But Microsoft is a very different company today. “We used to be a software company; now we are a products and services company,” she says. In the past several years, the company has acquired or launched a diverse range of products and businesses, including Bing, Hotmail, MSN and Xbox. The projects and teams that support these diverse product lines have changed, she says, and so, too, has the way people work.

Clarkson has spent the past 10 years redesigning the spaces in which Microsoft employees do their jobs, which is no small task. The Redmond campus alone has 100 buildings, all of which were originally designed for a less mobile, office-centric work environment.

Many of those buildings have been torn down, while others are in the process of being remodeled with shared workspaces, dedicated collaboration spaces and lounges on every floor. The standard-issue desks and chairs have been replaced with modern colorful furniture framed by giant display screens and interactive white boards that curve to the angle of the space. Shared spaces also feature the occasional climbing wall, game table or grown-up slide to get creative juices flowing.

Each remodeled office follows a few basic tenets: People need space to collaborate, access to technology and opportunities to showcase Microsoft products. But employees require different kinds of space for different types of activities, says Harald Becker, the company’s senior product planner. Game developers may want a single shared space, for example, while Windows programmers may need more private space. “Variety is important and you have to involve the employees in decisions about their space,” he says.

Becker’s office was redesigned 18 months ago, and now features lots of small collaboration spaces and shared offices with movable tables and dual-user monitors. It is adjacent to the design team’s space, which features larger collaboration spaces because they tend to work in bigger groups.

He likes the option to choose between quiet and collaboration spaces, and the open flow between office areas that lets him bump into people he’d otherwise have to actively seek out. “I have a lot more visibility with a broader spectrum of people,” he says. “That makes it much easier to get a sense of what’s going on with other teams.”

To ensure teams are comfortable in the new offices, Clarkson crafts a communication strategy to both educate them about the intent of the space and to offer tips on appropriate behavior when working in a shared environment. “You have to let people know why you are making that change,” she says. “Because otherwise they can forget.”

Clarkson worked with HR to craft a series of funny protocol videos that show employees eating stinky lunches, taking over collaboration spaces as their personal office and talking loudly on their cellphone in public workspaces. She emails the video ‘episodes’ periodically to employees as they become accustomed to their new office environment. “People need reminding, not instructing,” she says of the video series. “When you show them what not to do, they are more likely to remember.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Why Flex Work Is Not a Stretch

Despite blows to flexible work at Yahoo Inc. and Best Buy Co., the practice is alive and well at medical device-maker Medtronic Inc.

About 150 of the roughly 1,000 employees at Medtronic’s operations in Santa Rosa, California, have been designated home-office workers. Those employees generally come into the office just once or twice a week. Many telecommute from San Francisco, which is about an hour to the south. The 3-year-old program saves Medtronic some $1.2 million a year in leased office space, boosts productivity and improves the company’s ability to attract top job candidates, says Victor Assad, the company’s senior human resources director.

The company has no intention of rolling back its flex-work effort, even though earlier this year Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer curtailed telecommuting and Best Buy quit its pioneering program to let employees pick their hours and when they would come to the office. Assad says Medtronic has taken pains to prevent common problems associated with teleworking, such as bosses’ fears that they will lose control over their direct reports. If anything, the program has improved the way some supervisors manage their people, Assad says, because the company urged leaders to make home-office employees’ goals crystal clear.

“With flex work, you need to be more purposeful in setting objectives and milestones,” Assad says. “Some managers have come up to us and said, ‘This has helped me be more intentional.’ “

Medtronic isn’t alone in championing flexible work arrangements. Although such practices have come under scrutiny of late, there’s little evidence flexibility is faltering overall. If anything, a mend-don’t-end shift is underway.

During the past 15 years or so, some firms pushed virtual teams to an extreme, losing sight of the benefits of face-to-face collaboration. Companies also have paid scant attention to the training that may be needed for employees and managers to succeed with flex work, and firms are rethinking overly broad initiatives that ignored which job roles are right for telecommuting. But businesses generally realize that workplace flexibility is a key to attracting, retaining and engaging talent, that employee mobility is here to stay and that well-designed, dispersed teams can be highly productive.

“What Best Buy and Yahoo have shown is we aren’t doing this very well,” says author and workplace consultant Cali Williams Yost. But, she says, “The flexibility horse has left the barn.”

Flexible work generally refers to arrangements in which employees have options regarding when and where they do their jobs. The term includes reduced-hour schedules and telecommuting, where workers connect to their employers and the rest of the business world from home offices or cafés. Flexible work began to take off with the widespread adoption of the Internet in the late 1990s. The emergence of nearly ubiquitous wireless connectivity and a generation of smartphones and tablet computers bolstered the trend.

Organizations also began to ask more of employees outside of regular work hours, thanks in part to increasingly global operations and more competition. Heightened demands on workers’ time fueled workers’ interest in programs and policies that gave them a measure of control of their schedules—flex work became a primary means for people to achieve a “work-life balance.” Parents in particular have treasured flexible arrangements so that they can manage busy family schedules even as they pursue careers.

Overall, academic studies suggest that job flexibility helps companies and workers. But research also indicates companies haven’t bent over backward for all their workers: One 2011 report said that 78 percent of companies offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 1 percent of employees, but just 16 percent offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 51 percent of employees. Among the jobs most closely associated with telecommuting and other flexible options are technology occupations and other “knowledge work”—where employees might just need a computer and an Internet connection to do their jobs.

That’s why it was a shock when Yahoo’s new CEO pulled the plug on working from home at the Internet giant. Mayer’s decision to do so earlier this year prompted much discussion, partly because she became a new mother at about the same time she was shutting down a program valued by advocates of women in the workplace. Commentary about Mayer’s move also suggested that Yahoo employees working at home were not working very hard, and that Mayer needed to shake things up amid stiff competition from the likes of Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told Workforce that the company doesn’t discuss internal matters, but she said the move was not meant to be a sweeping condemnation of flexible work. “This is about what is right for Yahoo, right now,” the spokeswoman said.

A similar story unfolded at Best Buy. For close to a decade, the electronics retailer conducted one of the most radical experiments in alternative work arrangements. Its Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, allowed employees at its Minneapolis-area headquarters to set their hours and place of work as long as they accomplished their job goals. But soon after Yahoo cut back on telecommuting, Best Buy’s CEO announced the end of ROWE.

Best Buy spokesman Jon Sandler says the program led to managers having a difficult time working with their direct reports. “It was a right, not a privilege,” he says.

In addition, Sandler says, “We didn’t end flexibility; you just have to ask your manager.”

These explanations rankle Jody Thompson, who co-developed the ROWE program at Best Buy and later co-founded CultureRx, a consulting firm that promotes the ROWE approach. Thompson hasn’t worked directly with Best Buy since 2007, and says turnover among the company’s executive ranks led to less support for the results-first philosophy. She says focusing on the term “flexibility” is misguided, because that means concentrating on workers’ schedules rather than their achievements.

“We’re talking about the wrong thing,” Thompson says. Demanding face time from employees is typically a sign that supervisors are unable to lead effectively, she argues. “They don’t know how to manage performance, so they manage people’s time.”

Ravin Jesuthasan, global practice leader at consulting firm Towers Watson & Co., makes a similar point. For telecommuting and other flexible work programs to work, managers must be prepared to have hard conversations with their direct reports. But companies often have simply written work-at-home rules without training their supervisors properly. “It’s much easier to push a policy than to enable and equip managers to make better decisions about talent,” he says.

Jesuthasan also says there are some jobs where telecommuting or virtual arrangements aren’t optimal. Innovation-related work tends to happen best with plenty of face-to-face encounters, he says. Yahoo’s Mayer said as much in an April speech. “People are more productive when they’re alone,” she said, according to Fortune. “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

It’s a point borne out by hotbeds of creativity such as animation studio Pixar, where Steve Jobs deliberately designed the headquarters to foster impromptu encounters among employees. Increasingly, companies are coming to see the limits of virtual teamwork. It’s one of the factors behind a nascent movement to “reshore” more jobs in America rather than send as much work as possible to lower-wage nations.

To Jesuthasan, the Yahoo and Best Buy moves are prompting healthy reflection on virtual work. “We went headlong into it in a one-size-fits-all way,” he says. “We’re learning that one size does not fit all.”

One problem with flexible work programs is that they’ve been framed as an employment benefit, meaning everyone should be covered, Yost says. The better approach, she says, is for flexibility to be woven together with business aims. These could be saving money on office space, making the business more resilient in the faces of natural disasters or attracting talent more effectively. Even then, flexibility efforts generally require education for both managers and employees, Yost says. And this means more than simple time management, she says. For flex work to work well, employees must continually reflect on professional and life priorities and communicate effectively with managers and peers, she says.

“It falls apart because the individual employees don’t necessarily know how to handle it themselves,” Yost says. “It’s the modern skill set we all need but no one has.”

Medtronic took much of this emerging wisdom into account when it set up its flexible work program at the Santa Rosa offices. Among the factors behind the initiative was a desire to cut real estate costs at the operations, which focus on products including stents and a technique for lowering high blood pressure called “renal denervation.” Another goal was to make the company more attractive to young professionals who may want to live in the more cosmopolitan city of San Francisco, Assad says.

Even so, Medtronic took pains to figure out which of its Santa Rosa-based jobs made sense for telecommuting. For example, it required its research-and-development staff to continue reporting to the office. Employees with a high degree of face-to-face interactions also were ruled out. “We allow people to work from home if most of their work is done through the computer,” Assad says.

The home-office program is voluntary, and the company also provided guidelines to smooth the transition to telecommuting. Among these was reiterating to managers the importance of setting explicit performance targets and supervising to those goals. Another was promoting a set of “operating norms,” Assad says. These included responding to instant messages within an hour and to emails by the end of the day.

Medtronic also suggested a daily greeting by home-office employees when they first log on to their computers. “Have that conversation like you’d have it in the office,” Assad says. “Particularly at the beginning; that sort of broke the ice.”

The flexibility program works well for Mercy Tolve. A senior marketing manager for Medtronic, Tolve works most days out of her San Francisco home. “If anything, I’m more productive at home,” she says. Tolve also appreciates the way the flexibility arrangement allows her to avoid two hours a day of commute time and to consistently be on time to pick up her 16-month-old daughter from day care.

Assad says the program involved investing about $800,000 in facility upgrades. Medtronic created “flex rooms” that can serve as conference rooms or spaces for home-office workers to touch down when in Santa Rosa. Still, by assigning 15 percent of employees to home offices, the company was able to cut the number of buildings it leased to six from seven. “This program paid for itself in six weeks,” he says.

Medtronic is one of many companies committed as ever to flexible work.

Another is accounting and professional services firm Ernst & Young, which depends on employees working hours that can be long and unusual. Travel is common, as are virtual, global teams requiring early morning or evening phone calls. Making it easy for employees to take an afternoon off to see a school play or handle a cable installation appointment shows that flexibility is a two-way street, says Maryella Gockel, flexibility strategy leader for the Americas at Ernst & Young.

Providing employees with options about their hours and their work location is part of an employment deal the company seeks to strike with employees to create positive, lifelong relationships—such that even if they leave the company they will feel good about doing business with Ernst & Young. “We want them to think fondly of Ernst & Young and think of Ernst & Young as a great place to work,” Gockel says.

It’s a similar story at consulting firm Accenture. Employees don’t have to formally apply to telecommute or work reduced hours, says Ellyn Shook, senior managing director for human resources at the company. Instead, employees know they can make such arrangements informally with their managers. And despite the consulting industry’s reputation for demanding schedules, it is common for Accenture employees—both women and men—to set up reduced hours and workloads, Shook says.

As Shook sees it, the future of flexibility is about open-mindedness on the part of leaders. If they want to attract the best talent, executives must see that priorities around work and life will shift for people. “What people need to be successful and how they define success changes over time,” she says.

If Shook and others are right, the Yahoo and Best Buy moves of 2013 may go down as the death rattle of rigid work arrangements. Thompson of CultureRx says the flexibility news this year has served to put questions about work settings, schedules and productivity front and center. “It raised up the conversation,” she says. “I’m very hopeful.”

Ed Frauenheim is associate editorial director of Human Capital Media, the parent organization of Workforce. Comment below or email him at efrauenheim@workforce.com. Follow Frauenheim on Twitter at @edfrauenheim.

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Research Backs Benefits of Flex Work for Workers – and Companies

It doesn’t always filter into conversations about flexible work in the business world, but there’s a raft of academic research about flexible work arrangements. It generally supports those arrangements for workers and companies—with some intriguing twists such as the 15-hours-per-week telecommuting sweet spot.

The scholarly research on flexibility deserves attention these days, given that alternative work arrangements were curtailed this year at prominent companies Yahoo Inc. and Best Buy Inc. Those moves have triggered scrutiny of workplace flexibility throughout the business world. Some consultants have argued that flexibility programs aren’t always well-designed or effectively put into place, while companies by and large say they remain committed to some flavor of flexibility. But the public conversation around flexibility and work-life balance in recent months has taken place largely without consideration of academic investigations on the subject.

In fact, scholars of work-life balance issues have bemoaned the way their research findings tend to remain cooped up in the “ivory tower” of academia—meaning in academic journals rarely read by business practitioners. “Although work-family research has mushroomed over the past several decades, an implementation gap persists in putting work-family research into practice,” scholars Ellen Ernst Kossek, Boris Baltes and Russell Matthews wrote in a 2011 paper. “Because of this, work-family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted.”

That research as a whole speaks in favor of flexibility. A study several years ago by Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison of Pennsylvania State University, for example, concluded that telecommuting reduced work-family conflict and improved job satisfaction and performance. Those findings were echoed in an article earlier this year in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The study, conducted by University of Minnesota researchers Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly and Jack Lam, examined the impact of an alternative work arrangement known as “Results-Only Work Environment,” or ROWE, on employees’ health. Under ROWE, employees have significant power to set their work schedules and locations.

The study found that ROWE helped employees gain a sense of “time adequacy”—that is, workers’ sense of having enough time for themselves, for being with their families and for participating in their communities. Greater time adequacy, in turn, was associated with higher levels of energy and lower levels of emotional exhaustion and psychological distress.

ROWE was born at Best Buy. A pair of the retail giant’s employees conceived of the approach about a decade ago and first implemented the practice at Best Buy’s Minneapolis-area headquarters before spreading the work philosophy to other organizations. That’s why Best Buy’s decision to kill the program was so striking.

The company’s financial results have slipped in the past year—it posted a loss of $81 million for the quarter ended May 4—and CEO Hubert Joly ended ROWE amid a broader turnaround effort. Joly said the alternative work approach erred by delegating too much authority to employees. “Anyone who has led a team knows that delegation is not always the most effective leadership style,” Joly wrote in an opinion piece in the Minneapolis StarTribune newspaper. A similar story unfolded at Yahoo. Under pressure to rekindle Yahoo’s earlier success, new CEO Marissa Mayer turned heads by reversing work-at-home arrangements at the Internet pioneer. Published reports suggested telecommuting workers at Yahoo were slacking off. And Mayer later argued face-to-face encounters are important for collaboration and innovation.

Academic research supports the idea that flexibility can go awry. An intriguing study in 2005 by scholars Timothy Golden and John Veiga suggested that the ideal number of hours a week to telecommute is 15. Job satisfaction increased as workers approached this figure but began to decrease as workers spent more time each week telecommuting. “The limited interactivity of the electronic media coupled with increased social isolation may take a toll on the benefits of telecommuting,” they wrote.

It also seems that flexibility regarding work hours is more effective than flexibility around workplace when it comes to reducing the stress work can cause on family life. Researchers Kristen Shockley and Tammy Allen found as much in a 2007 paper, noting that telecommuting workers with children at home may experience “role conflict.”

Scholarly research also helps clarify the degree to which flexible work arrangements are offered to workers. A 2011 study by Stephen Sweet, Elyssa Besen and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes suggests that such programs are often hyped by companies, which in practice offer only limited options. Their research found that 78 percent of companies offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 1 percent of employees, but just 16 percent offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 51 percent of employees. “The types of flexibility that workers need most—cutting back on hours or going on leave—are least likely to be within their reach,” Sweet wrote in a blog post last year.

As companies wrestle with flexible work options, they may also want to consider the findings of a recent academic paper on the connection between virtual work and “social loafing”—when individuals on a team slack off. Much depends on the family demands of individual workers and whether they are on teams of similar workers, researchers Sara Jansen Perry, Natalia Lorinkova, Emily Hunter, Abigail Hubbard and J. Timothy McMahon found. For example, if a team is made up entirely of “busy” people with many family responsibilities, their individual performances suffer. It appears those workers may feel committed to their jobs but excuse each other out of sympathy. But teams composed of all “carefree” people with few family obligations generally work hard in virtual teams. And teams with a mix of “busy” and “carefree” individuals generally avoid loafing, perhaps because the “carefree” workers help show the “busy” how to be more efficient and refuse to excuse any slacking.

“Employees who have many family responsibilities may actually work best with dissimilar co-workers (in terms of family responsibilities) when virtuality is high,” the scholars write. “Perhaps this is a function of learning from co-workers’ working styles or maintaining accountabil­ity within the team.”

Ed Frauenheim is associate editorial director of Human Capital Media, the parent organization of Workforce. Comment below or email him at efrauenheim@workforce.com. Follow Frauenheim on Twitter at @edfrauenheim.

 

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Reality Bites: Fox Debuts New Workplace Reality Show

Last night, May 24, Fox debuted its new reality show, Does Someone Have To Go?, which Entertainment Weekly bills as Survivor meets The Office. Here’s the premise.

Needless to say, the New York Times is not impressed, unflatteringly calling the show “a victory” for companies and horrible for employees:

The squabbles are petty, ill-informed and sometimes personal, and seemingly dredge up unacknowledged tensions around race and age…. The stakes, as they are presented, are dramatic. For signing up to be on this show, employees … run the risk of conflict, humiliation and, possibly, unemployment. (Presumably, these workplaces are not unionized.)

As for me, I was glued to the TV, and will be through this show’s run. Yet, I couldn’t help but think about the scope of the release agreement these employees had to sign before appearing on the show.

Did you watch? Share your opinion in the comments below, or on Twitter with the hashtag #WorkplaceReality

Written by Jon Hyman, a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. For more information, contact Jon at
(216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

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Happy Talk? Keep Talkin’ but Start Doin’

Ed Frauenheim is on assignment.

A recent New York Times article on corporate culture seems to have hit a nerve with some HR pros.

The May 7 piece by entrepreneur Cliff Oxford titled “Where the Happy Talk About Corporate Culture Is Wrong” asserts that there are two types of happiness in a work culture: “HR Happy” and “High Performance Happy.” The former is a place with superficially nice bosses feigning interest in their workers and the latter is a workplace where employees are treated like grownups and take their lumps like Gen. Patton’s men, no crybabies or slackers allowed.

I’d like to give HR a graceful exit here because I don’t believe that the responsibility for creating a happy or a dysfunctional culture rests with HR. Company dismissed.

Workplace culture is shaped by the folks in charge. They determine whether the workplace has “a second-rate corporate culture where people resign themselves to the fact that they will get more if they accept being treated like children,” or a place that allows them to make decisions and trusts them “to handle their vacation schedule, their paid time off, and the tools they need to get the job done,” as Oxford writes.

If leaders rule by fear they get bullies and brown-nosers. If they rule by micromanaging, they create disengaged employees. The core of a high-performance culture is respect, Oxford argues. And the absence of it is certainly the mark of a dysfunctional one.

 “High Performance Happy means you give employees tremendous responsibility, and they are happy to show that they are the best,” Oxford writes. “You don’t have to con them into doing things with a flavor-of-the-month methodology that suggests they will perform if you make them happy first. HR Happy says, I want you to think that I like you. High Performance Happy says, I believe in you.”

Leaders who truly respect their workers and their talents get people who take work calls at 4 a.m. or finish projects after the kids go to bed. Nothing kills that kind of passion faster than measuring performance by tallying the hours an employee spends in the office rather than the quality and timeliness of their work. Or by the number of times a customer service agent says a customer’s name rather than by the quality of their service.  Those kinds of measures don’t say, “I believe in you.” They scream, “I don’t trust you.”

When trust is at the core of any employer-employee relationship, great things can be accomplished. Motivation comes from an inner drive to do your best and work toward a common purpose, whether it’s helping a customer solve a problem or tackling a global issue. Birthday cupcakes or a shout out in the company newsletter can’t inspire that, but an employer who trusts and values you can.

Rita Pyrillis is Workforce’s senior writer. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Pyrillis on Twitter at @RitaPyrillis.

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How Do We Repair Engagement Following Layoffs?

Dear On Edge:

General workforce engagement is mostly a function of how well you create the conditions that support it. Of course, layoffs are a tremendous drain on emotional energy and engagement. What is even more demoralizing for employees is watching co-workers get the proverbial axe month after month while being completely in the dark about why, when, or what they can do about it. Such a workplace teems with rumors and speculations. Employees who feel like powerless victims will disengage even further.

However, despite the challenges, there are practical ways to re-engage the workforce that could result in remarkable business turnarounds. You can start by simply telling employees the truth about the layoffs and giving them opportunities to gain some control over their future. To do that, they will need information you may not have shared before. You will need to make employees part of the business by helping them understand the big picture and the impact they have on its success (beyond the daily tasks for which they are responsible).

Involve your employees by bringing them together for some “straight talk,” sharing the harsh realities of the marketplace and your business situation. Information you share will have to be credible. That means no spin, no hidden agendas, no manipulative language, no sugarcoating your message. Lay out the business conditions in layman’s terms, enabling employees to understand factors that contribute to the layoffs as well as the business achievement needed to prevent them in the future. Provide key metrics that illustrate both the level of achievement needed and the gap between current levels.

Your employees hold part of the solution to your problem. Ask them to suggest ways to improve costs, boost customer service, obtain new customers, or in creating breakthroughs to help the company survive the difficult period ahead. Empower them with time, resources, decision latitude, and support that will enable them to take an active part in turning things around. Provide abundant feedback and celebrate accomplishments. It’s important to create a proactive environment for employees, even if doing so does not prevent layoffs from occurring in the future. That way, employees will see the positive impact they make and stay committed to your organization’s success, knowing they have some influence over their destiny.

SOURCE: Kevin Herring, Ascent Management Consulting, Oro Valley, Arizona, February 5, 2013

LEARN MORE: Strong engagement also plays a role in retention of top performers: Do We Really Need to Still Care About Retention?

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

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Building a Philanthropic Culture Builds a Better Brand, Too

Rather than leaving it to government and social service agencies to address concerns such as hunger, health and education, corporations are taking an active role in such efforts while encouraging employees to give of their time and money.

Since the recession, companies are “moving to be more strategic with their philanthropy,” says Lorrie Foster, vice president of foundation relations for The Conference Board, a business research association. “Corporations are really looking at where their money goes and aligning it with their brand and business objectives.”

That could come in such forms as supporting educational initiatives to enhance workforce readiness, encouraging employees to volunteer with organizations to expand their skills or using volunteering as a means to foster employee engagement.

And corporations aren’t the only ones doing the giving. A report by Giving USA found almost $300 billion was donated to nonprofit organizations in 2011, with nearly 75 percent coming from individuals.

While plenty of giving is done outside of the workplace, many corporations also encourage their employees to make financial donations.

Foster supports that, “as long as it’s truly voluntary.” She recalls working for a company many years ago that pressured all employees to donate in the annual United Way campaign. “I didn’t think that was necessarily a good idea.”

These days, employees generally have more options as to where to donate their time and efforts, she says, and in many cases volunteering isn’t just confined to after-hours or on weekends, as employees’ work and personal time blend together.

Many companies organize companywide days of service or grant paid time off for volunteering. Companies also may have Dollars for Doers programs, providing a company donation based on the number of hours an employee volunteered at a particular nonprofit.

A survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found nearly 30 percent of those who were employed volunteered during the fiscal year ending September 2012.

“Employees like to see their company doing good in the community and in the world—particularly young employees,” Foster says. “They also want to be pretty hands-on in being involved in making the world a better place.”

That hands-on effort can come in the form of projects, such as painting a school or passing out food at a food bank, or tap into an employee’s skill set, such as helping a nonprofit improve its finances.

Organizations often offer multiple opportunities for employees to give back to the community. At Darden Restaurants Inc., philanthropy runs the gamut, including donating surplus food to those in need, providing grants to local nonprofits, and helping disadvantaged students gain access to college.

“Philanthropy is a fundamental part of our culture. We want to make a difference in people’s lives and nourish and delight everyone we serve,” says Samir Gupte, senior vice president of culture for the Orlando, Florida-based company, which is the parent company of restaurants such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

One of the company’s key projects is Darden Harvest, in which each of its 2,200 restaurants donates surplus food weekly to local organizations that combat hunger. In fiscal year 2012, Darden gave away more than 10 million pounds of food, Gupte says. Employees prepare the food, gather it up and deliver it, preventing it from being thrown away. “It’s very much a source of pride and engagement for employees.”

Last year the company launched a community grants program, allowing each restaurant to award a $1,000 grant to a local community organization. Altogether they gave more than $1.7 million to almost 900 nonprofits.

In the company’s biannual engagement surveys, nearly three-quarters of Darden’s 180,000 employees agreed that they “feel good about the ways the company contributes to the community.”

Susan Ladika is a writer based in Tampa, Florida. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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High-Deductible Health Plans Gaining Employer Support

When high-deductible health plans first appeared on employers’ radar around 2006, they were met with skepticism by employees and employers alike. What a difference time and a health care reform law makes.

Today, not only are employers embracing these less-expensive plans, but also many are considering dropping their traditional health benefits for these consumer-driven health plans, or CDHPs. There are number of reasons for this, experts say, including the need to manage spiraling health care costs and to offset fees associated with health care reform, like the 2018 excise tax on high-cost plans, also known as the “Cadillac Tax.”

And employees seem to be onboard, too, with 30 percent enrolled in a CDHP, up from 8 percent in 2006, according to a just-released employer survey by Towers Watson & Co. and the National Business Group on Health.

Among large employers 66 percent offer a CDHP with another 13 percent expecting to add one in 2014, the survey shows. And the number of employers offering these plans as their only option has doubled since 2010 from 7.6 percent to 15 percent in 2013.

That is a “significant number,” according to Brenna Haviland Shebel, director of the Institute on Health Care Costs and Solutions at the National Business Group on Health.

“A lot of employers are looking aggressively at full replacement, even those who were not considering it before. What I’ve heard from some employers is that employees know that benefits are changing so the thinking is, ‘Let’s strike while the iron is hot.’ “

Indeed, the proof is in the statistics, says Maureen Fay, Aon Hewitt senior vice president and head of the CDHP working group. The Lincolnshire, Illinois-based consultancy released its own survey last year showing that these plans have surpassed HMOs as the second-most-common plan design offered by U.S. employers.

“The statistics show growing employer interest,” Fay says. “And that’s driven by reform, which is driving additional costs and fees being imposed on employers and insurers. And that’s leading employers to look for new solutions. Most employers in the past would tweak their plans from year to year, shifting contributions here and there, but they were finding that they couldn’t keep pace with health care trends. A different model is required.”

At Cigna Corp., the number of companies offering CDHPs surged after passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, according to Joseph Mondy, a spokesman for the Bloomfield, Connecticut-based insurer. Employer participation grew by 26 percent during 2013, he says.

“As people become more familiar with CDHPs you’ll see migration,” Mondy says. “Why? Because they work. CDHPs will cost you less as an employee and as an employer, but you’ll see improvements in health outcomes. We have seven years of data to support that.”

Mondy is referring to the seventh annual Cigna Choice Fund Experience Study, which compares claims data of Cigna customers who are enrolled in a CDHP, a traditional Preferred Provider Organization or an HMO.

Whether employees are embracing the plans is unclear. CDHPs are complex and often confusing for many employees, experts say. In addition to higher out-of-pocket costs, these plans also require more employee involvement in health care spending decisions.

“If employees are coming from a PPO where there’s not a lot to think about, it’s a big change,” Fay says. “Now they’re responsible for paying bills, keeping proper documentation for reimbursement, and dealing with additional tax-filing requirements. It becomes more onerous for the employee.”

Typically, employees contribute to a health savings account, or HSA, to pay for their medical costs, which is a tax-advantaged savings account similar to a health reimbursement accounts. Unlike HRAs, health savings accounts must be paired with a consumer-driven health plan.

Despite their complexity, enrollment is steadily increasing, surveys show. But Shebel of the National Business Group on Health points out that those numbers are growing in part because more employers are replacing their traditional health benefits with account-based plans. Others are designating CDHPs as the default option for workers who fail to choose a health plan during open enrollment, she says.

But enrollment in account-based health plans will continue to grow as employers get better at helping employees understand how these plans work, she says.

“At first employers weren’t sure how to communicate these plans, but the more employees use them, the more they are telling their co-workers that these plans aren’t so bad. Word is really getting out that these plans aren’t as scary as they seemed at first.”

Rita Pyrillis is Workforce’s senior writer. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Pyrillis on Twitter at @RitaPyrillis.

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Why Companies Are Embracing the Employee Value Proposition

As a college student scouting out potential employers, Greg Bostrom was immediately drawn to Chicago-based Red Frog Events.

In a sea of suits and ties at one career fair, Red Frog’s co-owners wore T-shirts and jeans. He discovered the events company holds races with competitors crawling through mud, jumping over fire and downing beers at the finish line, so it seemed like a fun place to work.

But Bostrom quickly learned that Red Frog had a lot more to offer than a laid-back vibe. An array of benefits and perks spoke to his passions, goals and lifestyle. He’d have to travel around the world to help run the events and put in long hours, but the company offered free health insurance and unlimited vacation days, allowing employees to truly self-direct their time.

Beyond that, there was a clear path for advancement within the company, one-on-one coaching and competitive pay. Even the office space was cool, with a giant treehouse for staff meetings and free beer on tap for after work. Then there was this unusual perk: After five years, any employee could earn a four-week, all-expense-paid sabbatical for travel outside the United States, an incentive for rejuvenating employees and sparking creativity.

Human resources leaders are giving Red Frog’s thoughtful approach to traditional compensation packages another term today: the “employment deal” or the “employee value proposition.” In the proposition, employers spell out the overall deal they offer employees beyond basic salary and benefits, and often include a company vision for what employees can get and give back in return. At a time when many industries are still struggling to attract and retain top talent, many human resources experts say the employment deal is clearly gaining importance.

Bostrom, 24, now Red Frog’s chief innovation officer, says he believes Red Frog’s success lies largely in the co-founders’ employment deal, essentially a vision for a culture built on meeting the goals and expectations of its customers and employees. That special culture also matched the company’s vision for its events: fun, extraordinary affairs that stand out among competitors.

“Every day I come into work at Red Frog, the people here are motivating me. There’s a real team mentality,” Bostrom says. “And there’s always a focus at every meeting on goal setting and accountability for our goals, and where Red Frog envisions people being and where Red Frog envisions the company going.”

Laura Sejen, global practice leader, rewards for HR consultancy Towers Watson & Co., says the employment deal has been a focus of much of Towers Watson’s recent research because there’s mounting evidence of its importance.

“It’s the broadest possible definition of the relationship, or the deal, between the employer and the employee,” she says in describing the ideal employee value proposition. “It encompasses every aspect of the employee experience, and it’s not just about the portfolio of total rewards programs, but it extends to the mission, purpose and values of the company as well as the way they define jobs and the culture of the organization. It really is about that full experience of being an employee in an organization.”

David Insler, senior vice president and West region leader in Sibson Consulting’s Los Angeles office, says his firm has also seen clients place a greater emphasis on the employee value proposition in recent years. Sibson’s clients vary considerably from less than $100 million to Fortune 100 companies and across industry segments, including higher education institutions.

“I have seen more and more companies become more concerned about the clarity of their vision and their visibility and their transparency with employees,” Insler says. “I can’t tell you it’s always because they fully understand the EVP concept, but with the kind of challenging times they’ve experienced over the last three to five years, they know they’ve really got to engage with their employees and develop that level of communication. When things are tough, they know the employees are the ones who will make the difference.”

According to several recent studies, salaries in North America are expected to rise only modestly in 2013, and that’s on top of several stagnant years through the recession. That salary scene also plays into the importance of an employee value proposition, Sejen says.

The recession “put a lot of pressure on the normal financial forms of rewards and caused employers to think more broadly about what it really means to work at an organization,” Sejen says. They’re looking at: “What are the compelling reasons for someone to work in an organization beyond pay and benefits?”

Many HR leaders advise firms to pay close attention to base pay. It’s a rising concern among longtime employees, and a growing number of top talent might leave if base pay doesn’t rise above the modest increases of the past several years. However, once base pay is competitive, all the other factors take on added significance, says Murat Philippe, director of workforce consulting services for Avatar HR Solutions in Chicago.

“We find that salaries and bonuses are definitely part of the equation, and you need to be in the ballpark as far as compensation goes,” Philippe says. “But you don’t have to be the highest payer. You don’t have to be better than 95 percent of the others out there. Then, when you’re in the fair-salary area, you need to look at higher-level ideas, such as your career and development options.”

Many HR consultancies also argue that a stronger employee deal can lead to better company performance and an enhanced bottom line. For its 2012-2013 Global Talent Management and Rewards Study, Towers Watson surveyed 1,605 employers. The study found that organizations that had done the most work developing and executing their employee value proposition achieved superior financial performance over businesses with less-developed ones.

Take Red Frog Events for example. The company has seen wide success after developing a comprehensive vision for its culture. Since its founding in 2007, the company grew from a handful of employees to 80 full-timers, 41 interns and

$50 million in revenue in 2012. The company has roughly 2,000 job applicants per month, Bostrom says, and has been at the top of several “Best Places to Work” lists in Chicago.

When American Express Co., a frequent Fortune magazine “Best Places to Work” winner, recently looked to strengthen its employment deal, it turned to a survey of employees that identified key factors employees felt made the company a top place to work. “The two things we found that were most important were challenging work and advancement opportunities, and they were looking to work in a manner where they could use their creativity,” says Cameron Batten, the company’s global director of recruitment, marketing and branding.

With that in mind, the company rolled out a series of videos, all available on YouTube, which featured American Express employees. The clear message: American Express is looking for creative leaders focused on meeting the company’s mission, “to serve people and inspire extraordinary lives.”

Today, the company has 98 employee videos. Two years ago there were none. As a result, the company doubled its traffic from recruits over various online channels, Batten says. At the same time, the company offers an array of robust benefit options and work-life balance options. “The way we look at it is: The war for talent is fierce and that talent helps you bring in the bottom line,” he says.

Like American Express, many companies looking to shore up their employment deal first turn to a frank survey of employees. While shoring up an employee value proposition can seem relatively straightforward on paper, the results from employee surveys are often where vision meets a hard reality.

Philippe strongly advised the firm to loosen up its shift policies, and pointed to the high cost of replacing burned-out employees. The client didn’t budge. “It was just like pulling teeth to get the senior manager and leader there to see that this wasn’t an effective way of running your business,” Philippe says.

Still, Towers Watson’s Sejen says companies that want to do a better job with their employment deal need not be intimidated.

“To get the returns we’re talking about, meaning better financial performance and fewer attraction and retention issues, you don’t have to do it all,” she says. “What we’ve found is that even just starting down the path … helps you start realizing better outcomes.”

Meg McSherry Breslin is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.