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Concern for Workers' Family Issues May Boost Performance
CHICAGO -- Making a bottom line-only decision for investing in personal supports for workers makes employee support programs vulnerable for elimination during times of economic downturns, maintains Susan Lambert, associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. The business case for providing workers with supports for their personal lives is currently outdated, she asserts in a new book.The book, Work and Life Integration: Organizational, Cultural and Individual Perspectives, co-edited by Lambert and Ellen Ernst Kossek, examines this business case and proposes ways it might change. "The field's quest to make a business case may have come at a cost," Lambert said. "Many early, formal employee supports largely operate as employer supports. They were designed to help workers keep their personal responsibilities from interfering with their job involvement and performance. The more time you spend with your children, the less time you're likely to have for your work."That attitude is slowly changing, however, as a group of nonprofit organizations concerned with work and family issues has begun to argue that the business case should look at the bigger picture and move from "a narrow focus on short-term profitability to a longer-term strategy of investing in employee and community well-being."Programs such as onsite day care, for instance, have been offered and promoted by some companies as a means to improve profitability by reducing employee absenteeism and turnover, said Lambert, who, along with doctoral student Elaine Waxman, also reports on research conducted in Chicago-area corporations in the book.Still, a business case needs to be made for accommodating family interests when dealing with employees. Employers must group work-life policies with other human resource strategies that invest in workers, Lambert insists.The authors contend that firms should be reminded that they gain a competitive advantage when they pursue their profits through quality enhancement, rather than cost containment. In doing that, they need to discuss ways employees add value to service and production. "Part of making the case for the importance of workers' contributions to firm success would be to highlight how lower-level workers are on the front lines of customer service and technological innovation," Lambert says, noting that firms gain competitive advantages when they design jobs that allow employees to add value to firms through their work.Current research also shows that laws to improve situations for workers seeking to deal with family responsibilities have been ineffective. The Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers unpaid leave to care for newborn children or other family members with serious health problems, is available to workers at about 11% of the nation's work places and covers 55% of the work force. The researchers found that workers in lower-level jobs often do not receive sick or vacation time or employer-sponsored health insurance. "Thus, an important step in a new business case would be to focus on barriers to distributing supports that are available in many work places today, at least on the books," Lambert says.Employers who implement work-life policies and researchers should work together to develop a new understanding of the role of work-life issues. "It has been our experience that few employers systematically collect data to quantitatively or qualitatively evaluate the effectiveness of their work-life policies," Lambert points out.Longitudinal studies would help employers define the links between work and family life, and multi-method studies also could contribute to understanding the causes and outcomes of frictions between workers and the workplace, she adds. In general, research in the work-life field needs to become more rigorous so that, for instance, definitions of various terms have more consistent meanings and researchers will look beyond two-income, married couples and their problems to examine the issues that affect low-income, single heads-of-households.In addition, Lambert says researchers also have focused a great deal on individuals and their family needs and not enough on the nature of work itself -- something the authors address in their book. "The book chapters help direct attention to the ways in which conditions of employment are critical to worker and family well-being, revealing multifaceted and reciprocal relationships," Lambert notes.As part of her research, Lambert examined hospitality, transportation, retail and financial service jobs, and found a high degree of turnover and very limited opportunities for workers to organize their work life around family needs.She also found that in some workplaces, temporary workers fill lower-level jobs that offer low wages and few benefits. These temporary workers share the workload with regular employees who have job-related benefits. In general, employers often distinguish jobs by status rather than tasks, which is leading to increased stratification in the workplace."Given the widening gap in well-being between citizens lodged at the top and the bottom of America's income distribution, it seems important to develop insights into how workplaces might play a role in diminishing inequality in those opportunities essential to balancing work and family life, and ultimately, to improving the well-being of workers, their families and communities," she concludes.Lambert has been a faculty member at Chicago since 1987. Her current research is based on the Project on the Public Economy of Work, a multiyear investigation of public welfare offices, labor market intermediaries and employers designed to investigate the organizational realities facing low-income workers and families. The Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Open Society Institute have supported the project with grants.This report is new this week in The Business Journal's small business how-to section. To see what else is new, click here or click on the "how-to" tab at the top of The Daily Business Journal Online home page."