While many wellness programs zero in on healthy eating and exercise programs, employers are beginning to recognize the importance of brain health and how it relates to employee engagement.
Aetna Health launched MyBrainSolutions this spring, a program that provides online assessments and interactive games employees can access to improve upon four key areas of brain performance: emotion, thinking, feeling and self-regulation.
“We’re intrigued with the notion of looking at the brain as any other muscle or organ in the body,” says Louise Murphy, head of Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna Behavioral Health. “The idea is to exercise the brain and improve it by using compelling games and tasks, and it aligns with our goal of helping members enhance their well-being and become the best they can from a health perspective.”
Murphy says the program is specifically designed for employers looking to improve productivity and the health and well being of their workforce. Developed by Brain Resources Inc. in San Francisco, MyBrainSolutions provides a Web-based brain assessment tool that identifies an individual’s brain profile and recommends training games, exercises and videos to help optimize brain health, reduce stress and increase productivity.
“The word that comes to mind is ‘engagement’—that notion that you can put wellness options in front of your employees, but if they are not emotionally engaged, it will be relatively ineffective,” she says. “We believe this is the frontier of an exciting future about understanding how the brain works and how it impacts wellness.”
There is “good science” behind the concept of focusing on particular brain functions, such as short-term memory or emotional recognition to improve function, says Dr. Harry Kerasidis, director of the Center for Neuroscience in Prince Frederick, Maryland. One example is children with attention deficit disorder who are unable to pick up on visual cues. With practice, they can learn to quickly recognize anger, happiness or other emotions and react appropriately.
“We start with a brain assessment that shows the individual’s strengths and weaknesses,” Kerasidis says. “Then we can develop a program of brain exercises to precisely target their needs, such as problem-solving skills, emotional problems, and memory.”
In one study, conducted by Brain Resource with a large insurer, participants who spent 30 days on the interactive site showed better productivity and less absenteeism, plus improvement in positive thinking, stress management and social skills. Changes tend to be permanent if people stay with the program for at least 60 days, Brain Resource CEO Gregory Bayer says.
The Total Rewards and Employee Well-Being survey from October 2011 by WorldatWork found that 54 percent of employers who responded have a well-being program in addition to a wellness program. Top reasons cited for implementing the well-being component include improved employee health (85 percent), perceived value to employees (79 percent), decreased medical premiums (77 percent), increased productivity (73 percent) and increased employee engagement (72 percent).
Respondents said their well-being programs focus on physical fitness, stress reduction, work-life balance and financial education.
“Wellness programs are traditionally offered through a medical plan, but are just one piece of the puzzle,” says Rose Stanley, work/life practice leader for the Scottsdale, Arizona-based organization. “You need to get employees to the stage of action. However, to get them there, you need to take a holistic approach. If they are not emotionally fit, they won’t be able to make changes.”
“Encouraging people to focus on the mind-body connection to achieve overall peak performance is cutting-edge science,” says Bayer of Brain Resource. “A lot of the focus is on prevention and early intervention.”
Bayer says that what is missing in many employee assistance programs is a component that encourages employees to think about caring for their brain and understanding the mind-body connection.
“People who train with our tools are more ready to engage in other activities related to health,” he says. “We see a 20 to 35 percent rate of engagement in wellness programs when brain training is added.”
Stanley believes organizations with strategic well-being programs that enhance emotional health have a better chance of affecting the types of employee medical issues that result in higher costs.
“However, everyone has to start somewhere, so if you just have a wellness program to begin with, that’s a good start,” she says.
Lisa Beyer is a writer based in Florida. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
Linda Tampa is a physician with a well-established practice in Milwaukee. She readily admits that medicine is her forte, not money.
She says she lacks financial savvy, and while it doesn’t affect her professionally, Tampa worries she is not properly preparing for life after work.
Tampa, 40, says she puts 4 percent of pay into her 401(k) which allows her to take advantage of the 100 percent match on that amount from her company, Columbia St. Mary’s hospitals. She doesn’t contribute more pretax dollars because she says there is no value in contributing if her company isn’t going to give her more of an incentive—or a higher match—to do it.
The married mother of two children says she hasn’t calculated how much she will need for retirement, but knows that her savings rate isn’t going to be enough.
“When you hear people tell you how much you should be saving, I feel like I am below that number,” Tampa says. “As a physician, I don’t know too much about finances. We have had [financial] seminars, but I’m not motivated to go because it’s inconvenient.”
Statistics from a May study by the ING Retirement Research Institute shows that Tampa is one of many women who are significantly unprepared for retirement. Consultants recommend that workers save 10 to 12 percent of pay annually, but a new study shows that 42 percent of women contribute the lowest amount—1 to 5 percent—of pay to their retirement accounts. By comparison, 34 percent of men contribute in that same range.
Although it’s clear women need to do more, employers can play an important role in helping them become better savers, says Delia deLisser, director of women’s marketing for ING in Windsor, Connecticut. “There isn’t enough education going on in the workforce, and we do see women looking for [financial] education from trusted sources,” deLisser says. “Employers can play a real role in this.”
The ING study, What About Women (and Retirement), looked at the attitudes and activities of 4,050 adults. It showed men had an average of $149,000 in retirement savings, compared with $108,000 for women. More than half, or 56 percent of women, said they didn’t feel financially prepared for retirement. Less than a third of women surveyed have calculated how much money they will need when they retire.
More than three-quarters, or 78 percent, of female survey respondents said they have some sort of barrier to saving, compared with 69 percent of men. That number is the same for divorced or widowed women, and increased by 1 percentage point for single women. Thirty-five percent of all women, 40 percent of divorced and 36 percent of single women said they don’t make enough money.
Plus, women said they have more immediate concerns, such as unexpected financial emergencies (23 percent of women versus 16 percent of men). More than half, or 54 percent, of women, were focused on reducing short-term debt.
The fear of making a mistake with their finances is what stops a lot of women from making decisions with their retirement accounts, says Marina Edwards, a senior consultant with Towers Watson & Co. in Chicago. ING’s survey showed 15 percent of women don’t know what options are available to help them save for retirement.
“We all get the notion that women need to save more–that’s not the challenge,” Edwards says. “It’s more the ‘how do I invest’ information that [plan sponsors] can help with.”
Edwards says data from 401(k) record keepers can help plan sponsors understand who needs help. Record keepers can show data such as account balances, loans, contribution amounts or percentages and group this behavior in many ways, including age, salary levels and gender.
“An employer can segment their 401(k) population and come up with different strategies and education campaigns for different pockets of workers,” Edwards says. “We know that the data is there, and we can use it to find out where the weak spots are.”
Jeanne Thompson, vice president of marketing insights for the nation’s largest record keeper, Boston-based Fidelity Investments, says more plan sponsors are using data to manage their workforce better.
“By doing this, we have shown that there are certain programs that help certain populations,” Thompson says. “For example, automatic enrollment really helps younger workers.”
Some plan sponsors are helping women become better savers, expert say, but the process is slow. Many successful programs start with basic money issues, then move into retirement needs, says Cindy Hounsell, president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement in Washington.
“So many people don’t even know what a target date fund is,” Hounsell says. “If you don’t know the basics, how are you going to do anything about retirement?”
Patty Kujawa is a writer based in Milwaukee. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
A U.S. district court in California handed Alliant Insurance Services Inc. a victory in its ongoing legal battle with Aon P.L.C. over the alleged poaching of employees and customers.
In a lawsuit filed last year, London-based Aon has alleged that several of its former executives conspired with Newport Beach, California-based Alliant to solicit at least 40 other employees of Aon’s construction services group to quit Aon and join Alliant.
In June 2011, Alliant and former Aon employees Peter Arkley, Ken Caldwell and Michael Parizino filed a lawsuit in California challenging the enforceability of the noncompete covenants included in the employment agreements the men signed while at Aon.
On June 13, Judge Dale Fischer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California struck down the noncompete provisions in Aon’s employment agreements.
“These important rulings reject Aon’s attempt to use illegal employee covenants to restrict Alliant’s brokers from working with their clients,” an attorney for Alliant, Jeffrey S. Klein, said in a statement. “Alliant will continue to vigorously defend its right to compete.”
David P. Prosperi, vice president, global public relations for Aon, said the company would continue to seek redress in court.
“The injunction prohibiting Alliant from soliciting Aon’s employees or specified clients remains in place, and the New York court has found it likely that Alliant engaged in misconduct,” Prosperi said. “We look forward to continuing to pursue our claims for damages from Alliant.”
When my great uncle died in 1997, my grandmother, mom and I went to his apartment to collect his things. My uncle had been a loner in his later years after his wife died. He was also somewhat of a hoarder with an apartment full of knickknacks and novelties.
Without any heirs—other than a half-dozen cats—or any other living immediate family members in the area besides his sister (my grandmother), there was no one else to go through his stuff before the landlord gutted the place.
As an asthmatic, I learned quickly that this was not the place for me. The stench was horrific. While I was gasping for air and realizing I had to get out of there quickly, I noticed an old newspaper in a plastic cover: Midget City News. Whether my uncle bought it or acquired it firsthand, I’ll never know. Intrigued, I took it home and it has sat in my home office ever since. I hadn’t even taken it out of the bag until I began composing this blog for fear that the brittle pages would decompose. The newspaper was produced in 1934 as part of the Century of Progress World’s Fair that took place in Burnham Park on the Near South Side of Chicago.
Indeed, part of the World’s Fair had what was known as a “Midget Village” modeled after the “ancient Bavarian city of Dinkelspuhl” (perhaps a misspelling of Dinkelsbühl) populated by “Lilliputians” who were led by Mayor Major Doyle. The newspaper has stories about “the world’s tiniest filling station” and a $1,000 reward to “any normally proportioned midget of the adult age of 21 years for men and 18 years for women, who is found to be as tiny in stature as, respectively for sex, Capt. Werner Ritter or Miss Margaret Ann Robinson.”
While today this offensive exhibit would never take place, or at least we hope it wouldn’t, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for the 1930s. People with dwarfism have historically had a hard time finding work, so it has been common for them to entertain to make ends meet, whether it’s on the carnival circuit, the big screen as “Munchkins” or “Oompa Loompas,” or TV shows such as Half Pint Brawlers. So has progress really been made?
I emailed Gary Arnold, president of the Little People of America, or LPA, to get his take. “I think the most significant difference between this generation and previous generations is awareness,” Arnold told me.
Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, but the LPA, a not-for-profit that was formed in 1957 to support people of small stature, had been embroiled in somewhat of a controversy when the entertainment website TMZ ran a story that quoted the LPA under the headline ” ‘Snow White’ Screwed Us Out of Dwarf Roles!!!” The story was about how the movie Snow White & the Huntsman used, with the help of movie magic, average-sized actors instead of people with dwarfism as the dwarfs in the film. You can read Arnold’s response to that story here.
Today, thanks in part to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the estimated 30,000 people with dwarfism in the United States are protected against workplace discrimination. But, as we all know, discrimination hasn’t been eradicated. Arnold pointed to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission case from last year where a barista with dwarfism was fired from Starbucks, reportedly because she asked for a stool to do her job. Starbucks later settled with the woman for $75,000.
Arnold also explained how the late Paul Steven Miller, the former commissioner of the EEOC who had dwarfism, had experienced discrimination. In Miller’s 1994 Senate testimony at his EEOC confirmation hearing, he stated that in the 1980s, when he was starting his career, he was highly recruited out of law school until people saw or learned how tall he was. Miller even said that one law firm told him that it wouldn’t hire him because it didn’t want clients to think it was running “a circus freak show.”
The LPA is taking an employment survey of its members, and Arnold shared some early returns: Of the 151 respondents 48 percent said they had experienced pre-employment discrimination; 31 percent said that physical access had been a barrier in their careers; 18 percent said workplace accommodations were denied or inadequate; almost 8 percent said they are unemployed and looking for work; and only 27 percent reported that they had no employment barriers. Overall, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the unemployment rate for people with a disability was a staggering 15 percent, almost double the overall unemployment rate.
In 2012, we’ve come a long way from “Midget Villages” and “circus freak shows,” but barriers will still exist until hiring managers understand that being small in stature does not preclude someone from being big in ability.
James Tehrani is Workforce Management’s copy desk chief. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
I spent last week on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. If you’ve never been there, do yourself a favor a take a trip. It’s about as perfect of a vacation spot you can find in the continental 48 (see sunset below).
On the last day of our vacation, my family took a dolphin cruise through the Calibogue Sound. It was a hands-on trip for the kids. They got to cast a fishing net, pull up a crab pot, and fish for shark. The ship’s captain told us that they usually catch a lot of shark.
For example, the day earlier they had reeled in 19, including two baby hammerheads. So, it was with much excitement that my daughter cast her line into the sound. After about five minutes (an eternity for a 6-year-old) she started asking when she would catch her shark. My wife explained that fishing is more about patience and relaxation than actually catching fish.
As you would imagine, that did not go over so well with my newly minted first-grader, although she did stick with it and enjoyed the experience. We, however, were not the only ones having issues.
The captain moved the boat to what he hoped would be more fertile water. It wasn’t. She moved again, hoping the third time would be the charm. It wasn’t, and she had to call it a day. Indeed, on our cruise, only one shark was reeled in (by the boy next to us, much to my daughter’s chagrin).
As I am wont to do when I am not blogging, I began to think about what this tale could teach you, my readers. Much like fishing, in dealing with marginally performing workers, employers must know when to fish and when to call it a day. And, much like our ship’s captain, you usually don’t quit at the first sign of failure.
Employees are investments—of time, training, salary and benefits. Unless an employee commits an egregious violation of the rules that cannot be tolerated, most deserve multiple chances to prove themselves worthy.
Performance problems are not terminable offenses; they are teaching opportunities. Use them to hone your employees, and only terminate when an employee proves himself or herself un-teachable. You will be surprised how many employees you can rehabilitate (and investments you can save) merely by resisting the urge to cut bait too early on your marginal performers.
I’ll miss experiencing the sunsets at Harbour Town, but I’m happy to be home, and, believe it or not, happy to be back at work.
To visit the Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, click here or email jth@kjk.com or call (216) 736-7226.
If you’re considering launching a social wellness program, get ready to sort through an ever-growing list of services and apps. “The list is endless, and new ones are popping up all of the time or migrating from B to C to B to B,” says Fran Melmed, a human resources industry consultant who’s getting ready to debut her own app.
Here’s a sample of what’s available:
Hotseat: Melmed’s app, called Hotseat, lets employees set alerts to get up and move during the workday. Workers can use the app alone, in groups or for team challenges. The network lets employees monitor and share their progress; employers keep track through a Web portal. Melmed’s company, Context Communication Consulting, is due to show Hotseat at a June wellness conference and is negotiating a partnership with wellness vendor Limeade, she says.
Keas: A startup online social game platform created by the former head of the now-shuttered Google Health groups employees in teams of six to meet health and fitness challenges, earn points and share updates through a Twitter-style news feed. By the end of the first quarter, the venture-backed, San Francisco-based company expected to have 50 clients representing approximately 150,000 covered lives (employees and dependents), including Bechtel Corp., Pfizer Co. and SuccessFactors Inc. In early May, Keas partnered with Brain Research Inc. to incorporate brain fitness games into its offerings.
Limeade: One of the first social wellness platforms, Limeade lets employees set health or fitness goals, monitor their progress and share how they’re doing in an online community. The 6-year-old company has approximately 50 customers, according to a Puget Sound Business Journal report, including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., Holland & Hart and Intuit Inc. As part of a recent executive team build-out, the Bellevue, Washington, company hired a former general manager at Johnson & Johnson’s Wellness & Prevention Inc. division as senior vice president of operations and “customer delight.”
ShapeUp: The 6-year-old, venture-backed Providence, Rhode island, company offers a virtual, private social network that employees can use to create profiles, share health goals and fitness interests, and participate in group challenges. The company has 250 company and health plan clients, including Aetna Inc., CVS Caremark, and Sprint Nextel Corp. For now, ShapeUp works on desktop computers and on mobile devices via a mobile-optimized website and text messages. A mobile app will be out “later this year,” says company co-founder and chief medical officer Rajiv Kumar.
Virgin HealthMiles: Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson’s 7-year-old health venture offers multiple social wellness options, including a 12-week activity program, pedometer and heart rate monitors that work with an online activity journal, biometrics tracking stations, an incentive program and an online portal that ties them all together. HealthMiles has more than 120 U.S. corporate clients representing 700,000 employees, including Coca-Cola Co., Georgia-Pacific and SunTrust Banks Inc..
WalkingSpree: The online corporate walking program platform is built around a USB pedometer that employees wear while they walk and then plug into a PC or MacOS device to connect to an online network. There they can join clubs, check in on friends, keep a journal or blog or win prizes. Clients include Chaney Industries Inc., Verisk Health and American Financial Group Inc., which WalkingSpree says saved $9.27 in employee health care costs for every $1 spent on the program.
Michelle V. Rafter is a Workforce Management contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
Physical attacks on employees are rare but when they happen, employers should be ready to provide psychiatric resources for victims as they work to cope with trauma.
Violent incidents involving customers, co-workers or outside aggressors can leave workers who have experienced or witnessed attacks with depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
As they seek to help traumatized employees, companies can turn to specialty insurance coverages to pay for counselling.
Whether they have coverage or not, experts advise employers to be ready to provide the resources employees need.
“If it does happen, it is so emotionally, financially and psychologically devastating to the employees and the organization that we do strongly counsel people to make sure that you’re prepared,” said Gregory Bangs, vice president and product manager for crime and kidnap and ransom insurance at Chubb Corp. in Warren, New Jersey.
Michael Mantell, a clinical psychologist and corporate workplace violence consultant based in San Diego, said people tend to experience a range of emotions after being victimized or witnessing an attack.
Healthy individuals often feel shock, disbelief or denial in the days or weeks after an attack, followed by a “cataclysm of emotion” that stems from traumatic anxiety and can involve a “roller-coaster” of reactions related to the office violence, Mantell said.
A third stage of coping occurs weeks or months after a violent incident, Mantell said, when people start to confront and deal with their reactions.
While most people reach emotional equilibrium in the third stage, some individuals go on to develop PTSD or other long-term mental effects that could hinder them from moving forward, Mantell said.
Larry Poague, senior loss control and prevention specialist with Lockton Cos. L.L.C. in Kansas City, Missouri, said the range of reactions can be based on how an employee learned to cope with traumatic events as a child, or whether that person has positive relationships at work and home that can serve as a support system.
Employees who experience difficult reactions to workplace violence often can become less productive or experience absenteeism compared with coworkers who are more effective at processing such traumatic events, Poague said.
“Some people are going to be back (to work), and work is what’s going to carry them through,” he said. “But there will also be a six-month or eight-month lag for some folks before they start to experience what happened.”
While rare, workplace violence can be costly when it occurs, according to NCCI Holdings Inc. Sources agree that companies that have had an incident of workplace violence need to make sure they provide mental health resources to help employees move forward in a healthy fashion.
Jay Supnick, a clinical psychologist and owner of Law Enforcement Psychological Associates in Rochester, New York, said it can be necessary for companies to offer multiple group counseling sessions or “debriefings” for employees that allow them to discuss trauma and process their emotions.
“One person may need a number of sessions, another person may not need anything,” Supnick said.
Experts say employers that hold debriefings should make sure that such discussions are helping employees rather than harming them. For instance, Mantell said, a counseling session may be ineffective if it talks only generally about the stages of grief but doesn’t give employees a chance to discuss their own feelings about recent violence.
“If debriefing sessions turn into complaints about the company, it really fosters a lot of negativity, and that attaches itself to anxiety,” he said.
Supnick said companies should try to schedule debriefing sessions when employees seem ready to discuss the situation, rather than forcing workers to talk immediately after workplace violence. He encourages companies to seek professional help in striking the right balance.
“I think you need to have some skilled clinicians that do this kind of work, and it probably should not just be one session that happens,” Supnick said. “It should be tailored to people’s needs.”
Chubb’s Bangs said most individuals can benefit from intensive counseling for a 10-day period after workplace violence. But he said some workers could need additional counseling to process traumatic events.
Insurance coverage can help pay for the cost of such assistance. For instance, Chubb offers workplace violence insurance that will pay for such benefits as crisis mental health counseling and a consultant to help ensure that a facility is “hardened” to prevent future attacks, Bangs said.
Chartis Inc. also offers a product as part of its employment practices liability coverage that helps pay for costs that result from workplace violence. That includes employee counseling, security counseling or public relations consulting that can help companies allay reputational damage, said Joni Mason, senior vice president and employment practices liability product manager for Chartis in New York.
Companies that experience workplace violence should evaluate whether they missed signs or did not provide effective procedures to help prevent attacks in the first place, experts say. Such introspection can lead companies to make security improvements that allow employees to feel safe at work again after violence occurs, said Kim Brown, senior workers’ compensation consultant for Lockton.
Employers also should work to make sure employees are trained in techniques that can help them prevent or escape violent scenarios, Chubb’s Bangs said. That information can help employees feel empowered if they face an unlikely event of workplace violence, he said.
“If you do that up front, you’re going to help things down the road,” Bangs said.
It was only a matter of time before Ohio joined the list of states to introduce legislation that would prohibit employers from asking for social media passwords.
Senate Bill 351, introduced late last week, would amend Ohio’s employment discrimination statue to make it an “unlawful discriminatory practice” for employers to do any of the following:
Ask or require an applicant or employee to disclose usernames or passwords associated with, or otherwise provide access to, a private electronic account of the applicant or employee.
Fail or refuse to hire an applicant for employment, or discharge, discipline, threaten to discharge, discipline, or otherwise penalize an employee, if the applicant or employee refuses.
The bill defines “private electronic account” as “a collection of electronically stored private information regarding an individual, including such collections stored on social media internet websites, in electronic mail, and on electronic devices.” It then broadly defines “social media internet website” as “an Internet website that allows individuals to do all of the following”:
Construct a public or semipublic profile within a bounded system created by the service.
Create a list of other users with whom the individual shares a connection within the system.
View and navigate the list of users with whom the individual shares a connection and those lists of users made by others within the system.
The bill does not prohibit an employer from monitoring the electronic accounts of employees or applicants on the employer’s own Email or Internet system.
As far an enforcement, the bill would permit aggrieved individuals to file a charge of discrimination with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, or a private cause of action in court. It also allows the commission to levy fines of up to $1,000 for the first violation and up to $2,000 for each subsequent violation.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is not a problem that needs fixing. Companies simply aren’t engaging in the type of conduct this bill seeks to legislate.
I am troubled that the path this legislature chose is to seek to make this an unlawful discriminatory practice, on the same plane as race, sex, age and disability discrimination. Moreover, there are no exceptions for industries that might have a legitimate reason to know what applicants or employees are doing on social sites (schools, police departments, financial services).
The lack of any exceptions is a glaring omission from this legislation.
This bill is in its infancy. I will continue to monitor its status and update you.
To visit the Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, click here or email jth@kjk.com or call (216) 736-7226.
A new social movement took center stage in the 1970s. It followed the lead of the civil rights movement, as well as the mounting protests against the Vietnam War. In this volatile era, the women of the nation were determined that their voices be heard above the din of discontent.
“I am woman; hear me roar,” went the lyrics of a popular Helen Reddy song from 1972.
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” went another popular slogan frequently used by activist Gloria Steinem. The phrase suggests an independence and stature for women that still, four decades later, is not fully realized. Even with a string of laws and legal wins that have advanced women’s positions in the workplace, advocates say there is still a long way to go.
“We take five steps forward and 10 steps back, but we try to keep moving forward and not get too discouraged,” says Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, which supports social and economic justice for all women. “We really try to be advocates, and that’s what the women’s movement has been all about. I feel we really need to stand up for the gains that we’ve made over the last century or so and not let them slip.”
Outspoken leaders of the women’s liberation movement, like Steinem and Betty Friedan, aimed to raise women up from home and work situations that they considered subjugation. And both forward-thinking college students and working women organized marches and protests for equal rights in the workforce. One of the more noteworthy rallies was the Women’s Strike for Equality where an estimated 50,000 women marched in New York and another 100,000 women across the country in August 1970 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave U.S. women the right to vote.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” was another popular saying of that era, which originated on cigarette advertisements meant to acknowledge the giant strides of the women’s movement.
But judging from a January 1975 article in Personnel Journal, the forebear of Workforce Management, some of the concepts embraced by the women’s movement, including equality in the workplace and the C-suite, were not going over well in tradition-bound workplaces.
In “What Does It Take for a Woman to Make It in Management?” by Marion M. Wood, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, a list of 10 attributes was offered as requisites for women’s success: 1) competence; 2) education; 3) realism; 4) aggressiveness; 5) self-confidence; 6) career-mindedness; 7) femininity; 8) strategy; 9) support of an influential male; and 10) uniqueness.
Additionally, Wood quoted an unnamed male Equal Employment Opportunity director as saying, “For a woman to succeed, there must be a man in her life who believed it’s the right thing to do.”
The women’s movement of the ’70s was in part a reaction against the type of happy homemaker that was often portrayed in television sitcoms of previous decades. Like it or not, girls growing up in the ’50s would have been exposed to role models such as the housewives in Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best, women whose career goals were getting the kids off to school and serving dinner on time. A working woman as role model didn’t come along until the late 1960s and early 1970s when shows such as Julia—where Diahann Carroll starred in the first nonstereotypical network TV role for an African-American woman as Julia Baker, a single mom who worked full time as a nurse—and The Mary Tyler Moore Show in which Moore portrayed Mary Richards, a career-oriented single woman who is a news producer for a TV station in Minneapolis.
Today, women comprise nearly half of the U.S. labor force. While 70 percent of families in 1960 had a stay-at-home parent, now 70 percent of families have either both parents working or a single parent who works. In two-thirds of all households, women are either the main breadwinner or the co-breadwinners, according to the Center for American Progress. In 40 percent of all households, women are the only wage earners. Yet on average, women in the workplace earn 20 percent less than men doing comparable jobs.
Over the past several decades, a variety of laws and rulings have paved the way for more Mary Richards to succeed at work. Among the first was the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
And, truth be told, the wage gap was even wider in the early ’60s. When President John F. Kennedy signed the bill banning wage discrimination, women were making only 58 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
Other landmark legislation followed that was intended to improve worklife for women, while making it easier to meet the dual demands of work and family. In 1978 the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed as an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.) In 1993 the Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, was passed. It entitles eligible employees to take unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons. In 2009, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law, giving workers more leeway to sue for paycheck discrimination.
Conservative commentators take issue with this act, as well as the validity of the gender wage gap. In a recent article in the online libertarian magazine Doublethink, the Ledbetter Act is said to force businesses “to constantly look over their shoulders” for claims rising up from the past. “This is a trial lawyer/class action lawsuit boondoggle,” writes columnist Nicole Kurokawa Neily, “and that’s bad for the American economy.”
But other observers defend the Ledbetter act as vital to fairer pay for women. And advocates say there is more to do to make the workplace a level playing field for both sexes.
“I think the current laws are important and a great start,” says Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel for the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., “but I don’t think they’re the end of the conversation by any means. They’re a good baseline structure that establishes the crucial principle that women are entitled to equal treatment on the job.”
For example, Martin recently testified at an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hearing on pregnancy discrimination, which was ostensibly outlawed in 1978. Yet the EEOC reports that complaints from pregnant workers are on the rise, with 5,797 complaints in fiscal year 2011 alone. Most complaints stem from wrongful firing, while about 10 percent are from unlawful failure to hire.
At the Feb. 15 hearing, EEOC general counsel P. David Lopez stated, “At the core, all of these cases involve employers who held stereotypical assumptions about pregnant women.”
Adriana Kugler, chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department, tells Workforce Management that lingering stereotypes and biases play a large role in keeping women from achieving equality in the workplace. “There are expectations from employers that women want to have a family and won’t be as committed, and so they’re not even offered an opportunity,” she says.
Women tend to outperform men academically, while they are held behind in the workplace. According to the 2010 census, 36 percent of women age 25 to 29 had college degrees compared with 28 percent of men in that age group. A December 2011 report by the Harvard Independent states that since 1980 not only are more women than men enrolled in higher education, but also more women graduate with honors.
Yet, in Fortune 500 companies women account for just 7.5 percent of top earners, and only 3.6 percent of those companies’ CEOs are women.
Kugler says that, among employers, there’s a widespread but unexpressed belief that women cannot fully commit to job responsibilities, work-related travel and time away from home. She points to a 1997 study by two women economists from Harvard and Princeton universities of major orchestra auditions that showed that when the auditions were blind, women were as likely as men to be hired as musicians who would be expected to go on the road and to make considerable time commitments to the job. But when interviewed in person, men were hired more often than women.
“You know,” Kugler says, “the sound of a beautiful instrument should be the same whether it’s played by a man or a woman. But the employer has stereotypes about what kind of a commitment a woman is willing to make.”
To make it easier for a woman to commit to her job, especially when trying to juggle work and family, existing laws need to be updated, some observers say. Dina Bakst, co-president of A Better Balance, a legal team in New York City specializing in work-family issues, says, “Our laws and policies are really out of date. The FMLA was a monumental piece of legislation, but it doesn’t go far enough. We need paid leave and workplace flexibility.”
Bakst says 178 countries have paid family leave for new mothers, and 50 countries give paid leave to new fathers. Meanwhile, some states have passed their own legislation. Laws requiring paid family leave are on the books in California, New Jersey and Washington. A similar law has been introduced in New York’s Legislature.
“Paid family leave is a seriously important policy that many companies recognize as being good for the bottom line and have for their own employees,” Bakst says. “You’ll see many fantastic companies that do provide some form of paid leave because they know it’s good for business.”
As for the disparity between wages earned by men and women, there was slow but steady improvement in closing that gap after the 1963 Equal Pay Act became law. But once the female equivalent of a man-earned dollar passed 70 cents in 1990, progress began to sputter. “The pay gap really narrowed for about 30 years, and it has stalled for the past decade or so,” Kugler says.
The issue has not lacked attention. Indeed, it has its own unofficial holiday, April 17, which is meant to show how long a woman must keep working into the next year to earn the equivalent salary earned by a man in the previous year. And this year on Equal Pay Day, the U.S. Labor Department announced seven winners of its Equal Pay App Challenge. Teams of software developers devised their own free mobile phone applications to apprise job hunters of pay disparities and to offer tools, such as negotiation skills, for improving one’s chances for landing a better-paid job. (Links to the Equal Pay Apps can be found at tinyurl.com/78ycsgu.)
Incidentally, encouraging female workers to learn salary negotiation skills is not a new idea. In Wood’s Personnel Journal article from 37 years ago, lack of such skills was cited as a reason women were often held back from management positions. “Traditionally, women have not been trained to bargain,” she wrote. “Most have not learned that a salary offered is not a constant, but a starting point for discussion. Men … will continue considering women ‘cheap help’ as long as women continue to accept lower offers than they are worth.”
Disparities in men’s and women’s paychecks still exist in most professions. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2009, the gap was greatest in the financial services industry, with women making about 70 cents to a man’s dollar. Even in teaching, which has traditionally been a woman’s profession and today is 80 percent female, women’s wages are lower. “In 2010, women in teaching professions were earning only 80.9 percent of their male counterparts’ wages,” says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.5 million people.
Making its way through Congress now is the Paycheck Fairness Act. It would require disclosure of compensation while outlawing retaliation against employees who seek information about other workers’ salaries. According to Martin of the National Women’s Law Center, it would “tighten some of the loopholes” in the Equal Pay Act, namely loose interpretations that have allowed some employers to justify wage discrimination.
The case of Sheila Davidson of Philadelphia illustrates what the Paycheck Fairness Act is all about. Last November Davidson won her wage discrimination claim against her employer, Amtrak. Davidson had just been promoted when she learned that a man, doing the same job she had previously performed, was being paid a higher salary, higher even than what Davidson was earning after her promotion.
What gave Davidson an advantage is that she works in human resources for Amtrak and thus has access to compensation information. If the Paycheck Fairness Act gets passed, average employees would have access to similar data.
Philip Kovnat, the EEOC lawyer who represented Davidson in her lawsuit against Amtrak, remarked that it was not uncommon for HR people to file their own EEOC complaints. In fact, Davidson had been filing EEOC complaints on behalf of other employees for the previous eight years and had worked as an HR professional for 25 years. In the end, a federal court in Philadelphia directed Amtrak to pay her $171,483 in back pay, along with damages and attorney fees, and raised her pay by $16,505.
Susan G. Hauser is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
Yesterday, in Seeger v. Cincinnati Bell Telephone Co. [pdf], the 6th Circuit used that same defense to affirm the termination of an employee who claimed retaliation under the FMLA. This case, though, has wider implications for employer who use surveillance to monitor the legitimacy of their employees’ medical leaves.
Tom Seeger took an approved leave of absence under the FMLA for a herniated lumbar disc. Four days after Seeger’s doctor certified him as completely unable to work—including any light duty, which entitled him to receive paid disability leave under the employer’s policy—two of Seeger’s co-workers saw him walking, seemingly unimpaired, at the Cincinnati Oktoberfest. One of the employees, who knew Seeger was collecting paid disability leave, reported his sighting to CBT’s human resources manager.
CBT conducted an investigation, which consisted of obtaining sworn statements from the two employees who saw Seeger, reviewing Seeger’s medical records, disability file, and employment history, and consulting with CBT’s internal medical manager.
Based on the inconsistency between Seeger’s reported medical condition and his reported behavior at Oktoberfest, CBT terminated Seeger for “disability fraud” (over-reporting his symptoms to avoid light-duty and continue collecting disability payments).
Relying on the “honest belief rule,” the 6th Circuit concluded that CBT’s termination decision did not violate the FMLA:
“CBT made a “reasonably informed and considered decision” before it terminated him, and Seeger has failed to show that CBT’s decisionmaking process was “unworthy of credence.” … The determinative question is not whether Seeger actually committed fraud, but whether CBT reasonably and honestly believed that he did. …
“CBT never disputed that Seeger suffered from a herniated disc. … Seeger’s ability to walk unaided for ten blocks and remain at the crowded festival for ninety minutes understandably raised a red flag for CBT, giving it reason to suspect that Seeger was misrepresenting his medical condition in an attempt to defraud CBT’s paid-leave policy.”
This case has wide implications. There are many laws that entitle employees to take time off from work: FMLA, ADA (disability), PDA (pregnancy), Title VII (religious accommodation), and state workers’ compensation laws, to name a few. Many companies use surveillance to curb leave of absence abuses.
If, however, you have a good faith reason to test the legitimacy of an employee’s leave via surveillance or other monitoring, Seeger‘s invocation of the honest belief rule will offer you some protection if you misinterpret the results of your investigation.
To visit the Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, click here or email jth@kjk.com or call (216) 736-7226.
