Aetna’s Raymond Arroyo, top, discusses a nation of “24/7
workers.” Below: Michelle Gadsden-Williams and Tommy
Shi. Opposite page: Julianne Malveaux
just employers—on-call flexibility where
schedules are changed all the time—they don’t
have the right to try and figure out childcare
and those sorts of things.
Malveaux: Work/life policies look great
but the implementation is poor. [At] one particular company, which will go nameless, on
the books you are supposed to take one day
out of 10 to either work at home or do something flexible. You can literally see that those
who do not take the flex time, they actually
move more quickly up the promotions ladder.
The others are implicitly penalized, although
on paper it looks like a wonderful policy.
Gadsden-Williams: We don’t always take
advantage of what we offer. So there is this perceived stigma that if you’re not present, you’re
not working. And what does that mean to me
in terms of my career and what kind of roadblocks am I going to face in terms of my
career? As leaders in the organization, we have
to model certain behaviors and we also have to
demonstrate that we’re
living what we’re saying.
We also have to communicate what that message
is internally.
Arroyo: We are not
modeling those behaviors
that you raised. We all
know the Blackberries
and the technologies that
we hold have absolutely
disappeared the line
between work and life
and have made the life of
many of us really hard to
manage. We have become
24/7 workers because we
want to show that we’re heroes. None of us are
heroes and the common denominator is that
we’re working ourselves to death.
The cutting-edge practice is for companies to
put the stake in the ground and say, “This will
not be tolerated.” I’m talking about specifically a
concrete example, such as saying, “Saturday e-mails will not go through our system.”
Galinsky: PricewaterhouseCoopers, for
example, has mandatory time off where they
close down between Christmas and New Year’s
and where they are closing down over the
Fourth of July holiday. And they did it because
people weren’t taking vacations because they
were so afraid that they would get behind for
those few days and they were losing people.
