makes a lot of sense. I run a tiny company.
When one of my employees says, “I’m out of
here for the next six months,” I believe it in
principle, but in practice, if one of three people
is gone for six months, then that’s a major problem. So you understand the logic of it, but then
again, my job seems to beat the drum of bifurcation; some people just don’t have access to the
same level of benefits that other people do. Even
wage and hours law—smaller companies, they
are exempt from wage and hours law. Although,
one would think if you care about keeping people, you will tend to deal with the prevailing
law, but the number of people who are work-desperate may suggest otherwise.
some work on your laptop, and you don’t have
to go back in.
Gadsden-Williams: Everyone wants to
strike a balance between work and life. The
question has now become: How do you
achieve that? How do you achieve your own
personal aspirations with regards to your
career, and more importantly, how do you just
get past the perceptions of what work/life is,
within a large corporate setting like in my
company? What do we do as leaders get to the
point where we will demonstrate and model
those behaviors that others will follow? How
do you find the right mix? How are you going
Galinsky: Here’s a funny finding: All companies are cutting back
on how much of the employee’s
health insurance that they provide,
40 percent of companies have asked
employees to pay a greater share of
health insurance. I was really surprised to find that in larger companies with 1,000 or more employees,
51 percent had cut back, and smaller companies were less likely to do
that. [Small companies are defined
as under 100 employees.] But only
37 percent are asking employees to
pay more. Maybe it’s because people know each other, you know the
small-schools idea. You’re not going
to like it if one of those three
employees goes away, but you’re
going to figure it out because you
know that person.
WHAT’S THE GREATEST
WORK/LIFE CHALLENGE IN
THE NEXT DECADE?
Shi: Absolutely technology. When
I started, we didn’t have word
processors, we didn’t have laptops.
Now everything is scanned, everything is instantaneous, and the
work volume hasn’t changed. In
fact, it has increased. At night you
can go home, have dinner, spend
time with the kids, and then do
