Like many professional women, Elaine Miller reached a point when working full time and raising three children became too difficult. In 2001, after 16 years at Sun Microsystems, she left her 50-hour-a-week job as director of software strategy to spend more time with her kids and pick up occasional consulting work.
“It felt like an all-or-nothing proposition,” said Miller, 50. “If I wanted a senior-level, challenging, strategic job, I had to be there all the time or not at all.”
But in 2005 she received a call from Laurie Cremona, vice president of strategy and marketing operations at San Jose tech company BEA Systems Inc., about the possibility of a job share. The arrangement – which included a joint phone line and e-mail address and management of all job-related responsibilities over a split 30-hour week – was so successful that within a year the two were recruited into a new role at BEA, as vice president of worldwide services marketing, managing 100 relationships weekly inside and outside the company.
Miller and Cremona’s flexible work arrangement is not the first of its kind, but it is becoming more common at large American corporations, which have watched the pool of talented women in their 30s to their 50s shrink after years of costly training. To reduce “female brain drain,” global companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and dozens of others are increasingly offering a variety of flexible work options.
Those include reduced-hour jobs, flexible workdays, job shares and telecommuting. Another popular option is the flexible career arc, in which women “off-ramp” in the years after the birth of a child or in the months needed to care for a sick relative and then “on-ramp” when they are ready to take on more hours.
Such programs are not just for women. They are attracting 20-somethings who want more work-life balance, men who want to spend more time with their children, and those ramping down their work schedules as they make the transition to retirement.
Talent retention
Business analysts and executives say talent retention and the forces of demography are the chief reasons large, traditional companies accommodate the needs of female employees.
Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are women, and nearly half of all professional and graduate degrees are earned by women, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The department projects that the number of women with graduate and professional degrees will grow by 16 percent over the next decade compared with an increase of only 1.3 percent among men.
Yet, according to the 2007 book “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Work-Life Policy Center at Columbia University, 37 percent of highly qualified women report they left work voluntarily at some point in their careers. Among women who have children, that statistic rises to 43 percent.
“Most professional jobs are still designed for white guys with Stepford wives,” said Hewlett.
Still, she and other analysts say American corporate culture – though far behind its European counterparts – is at last responding to a workforce that is now 46 percent female. In 2004, Hewlett created the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, gathering senior executives from top companies and surveying 2,443 women to explore why more talented women were not ascending the corporate ladder. The primary reason: the inability to balance job responsibilities and child care.
The task force also found that getting back on track is difficult. Although the women in Hewlett’s study off-ramped an average of 2.2 years, when they did return to work, they often took less-challenging positions with less pay.
“I feel a personal responsibility to ensure that women advance at the same rates as men do, and that it’s completely equitable,” said DeAnne Aguirre, a San Francisco-based senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and a member of the task force who helped create its 35 flexible work options.
Aguirre, 47, a mother of four and the most senior woman at her management consulting firm, said it’s “crucial that culture change be led from the top.” At Booz Allen, she has asked male executives to visualize the hourly life of a working professional mother. “I’d tell them these little stories, and they’d sense that – wow – this is different, and it’s hard, so that allows them to better understand the importance of flexibility.”
‘Free Agent Nation’
But in the midst of these changes many women – and men and young people – have created their own companies or morphed themselves into consultants to improve their lifestyles and sometimes their incomes.
Daniel Pink, author of the book “Free Agent Nation,” was among the first to spot the independent worker trend, documenting in 2001 that 22 percent of the workforce was self-employed and fewer than 1 in 10 workers was employed by a Fortune 500 company. The number has since grown, due to shorter job cycles, more project work and advances in communication technologies.
Sally Thornton is part of that statistic. Two years ago, she and two women from her mothers’ group – who opted out of full-time corporate jobs – started Flexperience Consulting, an employment firm for professionals in marketing, human resources, law and finance seeking flextime contract jobs in the Bay Area.
“I was surrounded by the most amazingly intelligent, qualified women – people with Harvard MBAs and great law degrees – who were aching to get back,” said Michelle Fowler, principal and co-founder of Flexperience. “So when Sally came to me, I thought, ‘What a great idea!’ The people I knew on the peninsula wanted flexible work, but they had no avenues through which to find companies that could provide such opportunities.”
In the past year, Flexperience has worked with 20 local companies, including Genentech, Levi Strauss and Pixar. Eighty percent of their placements are women.
Jennifer Heyman, for example, is in the midst of her first position managed by Flexperience. The University of Chicago MBA worked for Charles Schwab in San Francisco for 15 years, 10 of those as a marketing director. But after having her daughter, she left Schwab for work that would allow her more time to parent.
“My friends with full-time jobs and children can’t turn off the valve at 5 p.m., or they must be on call for meetings at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. the same day,” said Heyman. “With contracting work, I don’t get involved in office politics, all-company meetings, and I’m building my resume, especially in the technology sector.”
But Heyman allows that health insurance and the other benefits that go with salaried jobs are a drawback to contract work. “At certain point you need dental benefits for your kids,” said Heyman, a single mother.
Flexperience is not the only company that sees a strong market in flexible contract workers. Axiom Legal, founded in San Francisco in 2000, bills itself as an entirely new kind of law firm that selects promising young attorneys and offers them an alternative to 80-hour weeks and partner-track hell by matching them with individual projects. Axiom’s clients include American Express and nine of the 10 top investment banks.
D’Arcambal Levine & Ousley, a women-owned law firm in New York City, also was created to allow attorneys in commercial litigation to see their families and perhaps have a hobby.
“I always assumed part-time work would be impossible in the legal profession,” said partner Jodie Ousley. “But the legal field is very results-oriented and therefore very set up for flexibility. Plus, we have e-mail, phones, BlackBerrys – I can set up a home office easier than a Manhattan office.”
Communication challenges
Still, some warn of significant downsides to the flexible work and telecommuting trend.
“The more we are not present, the harder it is to realize the synergy that exists between individuals and teams,” said Margaret Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “It’s harder to problem-solve when we’re geographically dispersed. The amount of conflict increases, and the level of commitment decreases.”
Cremona and Miller, the BEA job sharers, know this well. Cremona, a 37-year-old single mother of two, works from her home office in Portland, Ore., on Mondays and Tuesdays and flies to San Jose on Wednesdays. Miller works in the San Jose office Wednesday through Friday. The two marketing directors overlap in BEA’s headquarters in San Jose only on Wednesdays, which Cremona said has presented communication challenges.
In the beginning of the share, she said, their supervisees often repeated information, “so we learned pretty early to tell people: ‘You don’t need to debrief me.’ ”
Is Cremona and Miller’s ability to “work as one,” as they call it, an anomaly? Not, they say, if more companies witness the success of such flexible arrangements.
“We feel like we’ve cracked the nut,” said Miller. “We’ve figured out how to keep capable, experienced, highly educated women in the workforce at senior-level positions. We think that as people learn about it and more people do it, job sharing will not only benefit women who are struggling to find a balance but companies who want to retain talent.”
Flexperience Consulting and Foresight Management are hosting a “Future of Work” conference on how to implement a flexible work environment, June 24, San Francisco Hilton. flexperienceforum.com
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