employee population, people’s jobs are
more insecure, there is more of an
expectation of an instant response, the
boundaries between when you are
working and when you are not are
blurred. It’s initiative we’re going to
have to see as mainstream to business,
and in that context, we’re going to have
to deal with the dichotomies. There are
people who are overworked but there
are people who are underworked. If
we’re going to look at this as a whole
issue of the U.S. competitiveness within
the global economy, we’re going to have
begun to resolve some of those
dichotomies. Finally, I think work is
going to require, in the future, life-long
learning. The flexibility is just one component of an effective workplace, and
that includes opportunities to learn and
to grow, to advance, to be challenged …
to have autonomy. So as we move into
this new era where we are reinventing
the rules, we need to be thinking about
how to make work work for all the generations, all of the divergent populations
and employers rather than just a one-way street.
things, and there is going to be a huge gap on
who is doing the work that remains. And until
we figure out how to do that and close the
gap, that’s going to be a huge problem.
Galinsky: Work/life is a talent-management
issue throughout the life cycle. The biggest
challenge is to reframe it, to rethink it, because
it’s still seen as a perk, it’s still seen as a takeaway from work. And yet it relates to health, it
relates to talent management, it relates to
engagement in all the studies.
Every time we do a national study in the
United States, we find that work has gotten
more demanding, work has gotten more hectic. Hours are creeping up for the whole
Malveaux: My concern is, when I
look at work/life, to what extent do
folks in these good companies who have
some benefits, and maybe not enough
benefits or the right mix of benefits, end
up transforming the rest of our society?
Large companies have tended, when
they institute a certain kind of benefit, to
influence the rest of society. Those benefits
that become things—healthcare, for example,
although everybody doesn’t have it and it is
being cut back, the fact that most large corporations provide healthcare—it put health benefits into our lexicon. And the extent that we
use the large employer to deliver a series of
social benefits, where we are already leaving a
set of people out and then it becomes more
costly and then the medium-sized employers
and others won’t deal with it at all. So when I
think about flexibility, this whole notion of
modeling, who’s leading and who’s following
and if anyone is following, that’s important. DI
