Ideas@Work

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

When the going gets rough, smart employers help employees cope

The United States fields one of the most productive workforces on the planet. As New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse notes in his recent book, The Big Squeeze (Knopf), productivity in this country has increased a full 60 percent since 1979. But, he adds, this remarkable rise has come at a price. Logging an average of 1,804 hours on the job every year, Americans work harder than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.

According to one tally, Americans work 80 hours more per year than Canadians. We work 120 hours more per year than the British, and a staggering 340 hours more than the French. That’s six more hours per week, or more than an hour every day.

Those long hours put a lot of strain on wage earners and their families. The Families and Work Institute estimates that one-third of all U.S. employees are chronically overworked. Employers and managers can be forgiven, perhaps, if they don’t see this as a problem that immediately concerns them. The impressive gains in productivity over the years speak for themselves, don’t they? But the Families and Work Institute points out that 39 percent of employees who are experiencing high overwork levels feel very angry toward their employers. Almost a quarter of them, 21 percent, exhibit high levels of the symptoms commonly associated with clinical depression. And only 41 percent of employees who experience high overwork levels say they’re very successful in taking good care of themselves, versus 68 percent of those who report experiencing low overwork levels.

The conflicting demands of work and family are one of the major reasons so many American workers have come to feel angry and depressed. But in its 2008 National Study of Employers, the Families and Work Institute argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. Employees benefit from having higher-quality jobs and more supportive workplaces that are less likely to negatively affect their personal and family lives, the study asserts. Meanwhile, employers benefit from having a more engaged workforce, higher retention, and potentially lower health care costs.

There are, essentially, two approaches to reducing work/life conflict. In the first, the employer takes an active role in the lives of its employees, providing assistance in the form of on-site day care centers, concierge services, and referrals for professional resources. In the second approach, the employer emphasizes flexibility, offering employees such options as flex-time, job sharing, telecommuting, and other arrangements that allow them to tackle personal and family problems on their own time.

Both approaches involve trade-offs. The former can be expensive, but because they permit employees to deal with their problems on the job, during traditional work hours, employee assistance programs have the advantage of being minimally disruptive. Flexibility, on the other hand, involves little in the way of direct costs. But with more employees working increasingly erratic and unconventional schedules, the administrative challenge can be daunting.

The optimal solution, advises Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at Michigan State University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations in East Lansing, is the one that best matches your business goals with the unique needs of your employees.

“What I advise companies to do first is conduct a workforce analysis and see what different groups want,” she explains. “I don’t think one approach is better than the other. The trap some companies fall into is they adopt the copycat approach that somebody is trying to sell them so they can say, ‘Look, we have work/family policies.’ What they need to do is see how the policy fits with their values and workforce, and what management believes in.”

Faced with the challenge of conducting time-consuming needs assessments and implementing expensive or administratively challenging programs, many employers will surely balk at the notion of becoming de facto social workers. After all, only a generation ago, most of these worries would have been thought absolutely out of place on the job site. But the other factor is that employees who are stressed or unmotivated are ultimately a drag on profitability. After all, Kossek asks, “What are managers supposed to do? They’re supposed to motivate you. So the smart companies and the smart managers realize that helping employees is just part of managing the modern workplace.”

Don’t expect easy fixes for this yin-yang. For every company that offers free Pilates, espresso on demand, and complimentary sushi in the company cafeteria, there is another that is wrestling with simply trying to keep the books balanced in an era of spiraling energy costs. The one inevitable truth: every company needs to ask if it is doing what it can to keep its employees happy. Because without happy employees, sustained productivity just can’t be counted on.

Help Them, Help You

“Today, one of the biggest challenges employers face is making sure their talent is focused on the job at hand,” says Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz, chairman and CEO of ComPsych, a Chicago company that provides employee assistance programs. “The more services they can provide to help people navigate their personal lives, the higher the probability that those people won’t be impacted in their work.”

But can the benefits of these programs be quantified? In their book Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives (FT Press), Wayne F. Cascio and John W. Boudreau provide a robust analytical framework for measuring the impact of employee assistance services on the bottom line.

Effective employee assistance programs require an ongoing dialogue between employees and managers. In their new book, CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age (Wharton School Publishing), Ellen Ernst Kossek and Brenda A. Lautsch lay down a set of workable ground rules for conducting those conversations. — D.F.