Human resources executives are in a difficult position these days. They have to balance the financial success and productivity of their companies with the need to maintain the health and well-being of employees and their families. Often employers have seen these two needs as a delicate balancing act – creating a tension where if one side gains, the other loses. However, over the last several years, some intriguing research has suggested that these two seemingly conflicting priorities may not really be at odds with each other after all.
Not Being “Family-Friendly” Is Costly.
Absenteeism has been a growing and poorly understood problem in the workplace for both employers and employees:
• Sickness-related absences, whether employee illnesses or employees missing work to care for ailing family members, are on the rise. Many men and women today face the tough dilemma of how to take care of children, partners and elderly parents yet maintain a deep commitment to work. In one study of U.S. hourly and salaried employees, 25 percent had provided elder care during the preceding year.
• Worker’s compensation claims are increasingly stress-related, covering both mental and physical problems. In addition to the need to balance work and family demands, other sources of work-induced stress include job strain related to high demands and low control; a gap between effort exerted on the job and rewards received; job insecurity; variable shift work; and benefit packages that are not adequate to cover essential needs.
Research on the connection between work and health is still evolving from a traditional occupational health approach in which we typically look at exposure to toxic substances in the workplace to one in which we look at these broader sets of social and organizational conditions. There is also very little research that studies the effects of workplace policies on health and productivity simultaneously.
Female Employees - and Their Employers - Are at the Highest Risk.
What we do know, though, is that while tensions between life at home and life in the office exist for virtually all men and women in the workforce, they are likely to be especially acute for women and for those with limited economic resources and unstable jobs. The United States ranks at the bottom of industrialized countries in the provision of work-family policies, while about a third of our workforce has school-aged children.
The scientific data on the stress of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has termed “second shift” work - the double duty that people with work and home responsibilities have -takes a toll in terms of health. For example, one study of female executives showed they had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol when they went home than did men. In fact, the stress levels of women didn’t decline or “turn off” when they got home as they did for men. In another study, women with at least one child had higher levels of the same hormone than did working women without children.
One of the earliest studies in this field finds that women who were in clerical positions and had several children had a higher risk of heart attacks than women in those positions without children or women in more senior positions, with or without children.
Why should women in lower-wage administrative positions with children be at particular risk? We suspect that it is because these women have little flexibility at work or control over their jobs - but at the same time they have to balance significant, shifting responsibilities with young children. The tension and stresses from such a tough balancing act increase the risks of heart attack.
Being Responsive Doesn’t Have to Cost a Lot.
While the data has been accumulating, corporate approaches to improving employee health through traditional health-promotion programs have had limited success. Yet relatively slight changes in workplace policies and more informal practices have tremendous potential to make a big improvement in the health and well-being of the workforce, thereby reducing absenteeism, shrinking turnover and increasing productivity.
For example, employees responsible for caring for family members or participating in family life (e.g. going to parent-teacher conferences, attending a child’s important events) need to maximize flexibility on the job. Employers can facilitate this by permitting occasional telephone calls to check in with children and frail family members; this allows workers the peace of mind of knowing how their relatives are doing. Knowing an aging parent is comfortable or that a young adolescent is home from school may permit employees to stay on the job and be mentally “present” and effective at work.
Other kinds of flexibility on the job are related to the ability to respond to unplanned events such as having to go to school to pick up a sick child or take an elderly parent to the doctor. Family-responsive work practices can include:
1. Flexible job time, such as the ability to make short-term changes to schedules
2. Limited use of mandatory overtime
3. Access to child care
4. Benefits related to parental leave, vacation and sick days, and health insurance
5. Assistance in identifying available government subsidies
6. Training supervisors to be responsive to family issues
Clearly, not all businesses can put all these policies and practices into place. In fact, other research shows that larger businesses, with more scale and therefore more flexibility, are able to put such policies into place more easily than small companies. But family-responsive workplace policies can help all workers at some point in their careers manage the delicate balancing act that’s required when people are committed both to work and to meaningful social relationships. Promoting policies that improve health may turn out to be good not only for workers but for the bottom line as well.
Source: Workforce Data Insights released by Veritude based on findings of a national survey of 138 senior executives representing both public and private companies throughout the U.S. Veritude provides strategic human resources-the talent, technology and tactics that growing firms need to anticipate and adapt to changes in the workplace. Headquartered in Boston, Veritude is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fidelity Investments. For more information about the Workforce Data Insights, please visit Veritude.com.
About Veritude
Veritude provides strategic human resources – the talent, technology and tactics that growing firms need in order to anticipate and adapt to changes in the workplace. Veritude is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fidelity Investments Company. Headquartered in Boston, the company serves clients throughout the United States and Canada and is part of Fidelity’s ongoing investment and leadership in outsourced HR services. For more information, call:1-800-597-5537. To review other articles, research and expert analysis relevant to HR professionals seeking to stay informed, please visit www.veritude.comFor more information, contact: inquiry[at]veritude.com.