Presenter: James M. Childs,
Academic Dean,
Trinity Lutheran Seminary

Location: NOWS Services, Inc.
2765 Eastland Mall,
Columbus, Ohio

This month's conversation was hosted by Evelyn Walker, regional human resources manager, Eastland Operations Center of NOVUS Services, Inc. NOVUS Services is the credit portion of Dean Witter Discover that is in the process of merging with Morgan Stanley. NOVUS is the number-one credit card issuer with 39 million accounts and ranks second in charge volume at $54 billion. The Eastland Operations center has 1,200 employees.

With a young and predominately female workforce, balancing lvork and family life issues is very important to NOVUS Services. Employee opinion surveys are conducted every two years to stay abreast of concerns. Sick-time for family care was started in 1991. The company then moved to expand the flexibility of work hours. Work/Life training is currently provided to managers, while pilot sessions for telecommuters are now being conducted. The company adopted a corporate-casual dress code and, if you see some employees in jeans, the reason is that they have earned a "Dress-down Day" for achieving specific goals. Dress-down Day has become a popular form of recognition.

DR. CHILDS' REMARKS

Business ethics is not restricted to business. The issues of ethical significance with which business must deal are more than the narrow confines of business practices. It requires only a slight nudge of the mind to recognize how many socially generated concerns of an ethical sort have changed the way business operates. Environmental protection, equal opportunity, and the need to curb sexual harassment are only three examples of matters external to business that have profoundly affected the way business operates internally.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the changing face of U.S. family life, and related changes in the demographics of the workforce, would occasion a new set of ethical questions about the relationship of work and family life. These questions are not only for individuals to answer, they increasingly entangle corporations and businesses as well. The challenge of balancing work and family life is proving to be multidimensional, something that affects everybody. In light of that fact, I want to address the topic in terms of three dimensions: Social Context, Personal Choice, and Business Response.

Before we consider these dimensions, it may be helpful to ask why we view the balancing of work and family life as a matter of ethics. Ethics has to do with our values. Ethics has to do with our responsibilities to others. Ethics has to do with justice. I want to look at each of these aspects of ethics in connection with the three dimensions of the work-family challenge. In each case I want to ask the overarching question, "Is your idea of 'success' big enough?"

I. Social Context: A Question of Values

Earlier this week a friend from India was visiting our family. I had been a guest of his in India thirteen years ago. Recalling some bone-jarring rides in Indian-built cars and how the government was at that time making tentative moves to upgrade its highly protected state auto industry, I asked him how that industry was progressing. He told me it is now open to all kinds of foreign auto makers and other economic reforms that have vastly expanded the availability of consumer goods in India.

I then asked what the effect of these moves toward a market economy has had on the overall quality of life in his land of stark contrasts. He replied that the middle class has flourished and is fast becoming consumer-oriented, with growing credit card debt and a diminishing tolerance for supporting the public safety nets serving India's millions of poor. Furthermore, as agriculture becomes more efficient, the economy is shifting to technology and the service sectors where there are greater wealth and opportunity and a wholly different style and pace of life.

One can see the early symptoms of a developing consumer culture not unlike our own, in which the benchmark of success is most often a lucrative career producing material gain and the power and privilege that often go with it. This culture of success that pervades so much of our society is fertile soil for the growth of the "ideal worker" ethos. In the Civic Practices Network Study Part II (see Notes), an ideal worker is delineated as "career primary."

"This is a person who is able and willing to put work first, and for whom time at work is infinitely expandable. This translates into work practices that include early morning meetings, planning sessions that run after-hours, often ending with the suggestion to 'continue this discussion over dinner', and training and development programs that require long absences from home. Moreover, organizational commitment is measured not only by one's ability to meet these work norms, but also through repeated demonstration of a willingness to put work ahead of personal concerns."

Joanne Ciulla, a prominent business ethicist, has written about the pressure of the idol of success in the culture we are describing. She cautions against the widely held belief that job success brings meaning and happiness to life. Young people are willing to take stress tests, wear the right clothes, and belong to the right clubs-all in the name of attaining the position that will eventually give them the freedom to choose. They argue that they will work a 70-hour week, make their fortunes, and retire at age 40, but few ever do. This attitude has taken a social toll in terms of loneliness, divorce, child abuse. and white-collar crime.

With respect to the impact of this culture of success on family, regardless of your situation (whether a one-working parent in a two-parent home, a two-parent-worker family, or a single-parent worker), the Civic Practices Network Study found the following:

"In situations where 'ideal workers' are assumed to be those whose first allegiance is to work, people with career aspirations go to great lengths to hide their practical commitments to families. Some people give false reasons for leaving work in the middle of the day. They feel that attending a community board or other civic meetings is not likely to brand them as uncommitted, but taking a child for a physical exam might. Some secretly take children on business trips with them but make sure no one ever knows. Others leave their computers on in their offices while they pick up children from sports events so people walking by will think they are in a meeting. Still others send sick children to child care centers and hope they won't get calls to come get them, or on the night-shift will lock sleeping children in their cars and use coffee breaks to go check on them. Both men and women with career aspirations strive to present this image of a 'career primary' worker who can keep family under control and not let personal issues interfere with work."

Is this idea of success, so prevalent in our society and still so influential in work life, a big enough idea?

Lawrence Shames in his recent book, The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed, writes about how U.S. culture has developed what he calls the "habit of more," the expectation that we can always have "more" and the way in which we stake our self-esteem on this hope.

But in terms of values, wealth is only one measure of success. "More" is not big enough. A big enough idea of success means the integration of a variety of values in which career and economic success serve the larger purposes of caring and community. This immediately raises the connection between the values of our society and our responsibility to others. This is the second dimension of this presentation.

II. Personal Choice: Our Responsibilities to Others

Regardless of your family situation, co-operating with conventional expectations for success on the job-playing the ideal worker game-is an alluring and seemingly defensible choice. A lot of values related to our responsibility to family hitchhikes on the typical road to success:

• I work long hours to provide a quality life for the family.
• We both need to work if we are to keep the house and have the benefits our family needs we almost have no choice.
• I'm building our family resources so the kids can go to college.
• Our children are struggling in their new marriage and we want to help them out.
• We are preparing for retirement so that we won't be a burden on our children or society.
• I can use my wealth and position of influence to make changes at work and through charity in our community.

These along with others are very good values that hitchhike on the road to success.

This is not a one-size-fits-all matter. I do not have a single ethically sound pattern for balancing work and family to commend to you. But we do have a compass by which to navigate as we try to balance work and family life. How does one follow this compass in a society that often defines success in terms that are incompatible and in a business environment that often seems not to care? This brings us to our third dimension.

III. Business Response: The Ethical Issue of Justice

A recent Wall Street Journal special section (Focus, 3 1 March 1997, vol. CCXXIX, no. 62A) cited the following research results on Work and Family:

"According to research by Juliet Schor, an economics professor at Harvard University and author of a book on the subject, the average American is working 163 more hours each year-or a month more of full-time work-than in 1970. At the same time, some 42% of employees nationwide have children under 18 and 75% of married employees have spouses who also work. Yet businesses remain decidedly non-family-friendly: Only a handful of U.S. companies have on-site or near-site child care, and most limit flexible scheduling and part-time work to a handful of workers."

". . . Underlying some of the increased stress is the rapid pace of technological change, which has created a constant crisis mentality, a feeling that everything has to be done now . . . Moreover, in the reengineered workplace, slowing down seems an impossible fantasy, Downsizings have saddled survivors with more work-and workplace paranoia. 'There's such gratitude to have a white-collar job that people develop a masochistic adherence to superhuman demands,' says Steven Berglas, a clinical psychologist and director of the Executive Stress Clinic in Chestnut Hill, Mass."

Is it fair to expect businesses to be family-friendly and, if so, on what basis does one make that claim? This is the justice question. Perhaps if we look at the efforts and the rationale of one major company, Eli Lilly, we can get a handle on the question. Here are some excerpts from the speech given by Randall Tobias, CEO of Eli Lilly, at a Work and Family Conference held in April 1996.

"When we took a look at our workforce, things were not the way they used to be. For instance, only 1 8 percent of our 14,500 employees in the U.S. are part of the nuclear family of a married couple in which the father goes to work in the morning and the mother works at home and raises the children.

"Eighty-two percent of our employees' families are in some other model with large numbers of single parents and dual wage-earners, as well as singles, childless couples, and so on. And therefore, 82 percent of our people have needs that were not a n t i c i p a t e d . For many of these people, accomplishing the daily chores needed to keep a household running can be a logistical challenge. Dealing with a 'snow day' in the school system can be ti crisis. Coping with the sudden illness of an elderly parent can be a catastrophe.

" . . . Over the past several years, we've initiated a wide array of work-family programs to try to help our people cope with these new needs. Among other things, we've created:

• Personal leaves up to three years for dependent care. Flexible work arrangements including flextime, part-time, job sharing and work-at-home arrangements.
• Nursing mother stations for new moms.
• A child development center at our corporate headquarters. This center will provide day cart for 220 children of our employees. We also have programs to help parents with back-up care when their regular care falls through.
• School vacation programs, including a summer science camp.
• On-site shops and facilities to help employees with daily needs-a full service credit union, of course, but also a dry cleaning outlet, a shoe repair, a convenience store . . and a company cafeteria that prepares ready-to-serve take-home dinners four nights a week.
• We're a health care company so it's natural for us to have really excellent on-site medical care. And by the same logic, we also offer a broad range of exercise and wellness services.

". . . These are neither 'perks' nor 'giveaways.' These tools will help us attract, motivate, and retain people who are more likely to be more dedicated, more focused, more innovative, and more productive."

Lilly has decided it is good practice of justice to provide family-friendly benefits for its people; not justice on the performance-oriented basis of merit which governs promotion, salary and other rewards, but on the additional principles of justice that we would call contribution. It values the contribution of employees as loyal and effective members of the corporate community. Therefore, it wants to provide the conditions necessary to sustain that kind of workforce by helping with the manifold needs of people in balancing time and family. If you look at the contribution that loyal, well-integrated employees with healthy, balanced lives of work and family can mean to the quality of the corporate reality . . . for that, you have to have an idea of success that is big enough for business-a business response that has more of a stakeholder view than a stockholder view. No one denies the necessity for a strong bottom line-no one denies the fact that if you don't serve your shareholders, you will be out of business. But there are larger and bigger ideas of success-the bigger ideas of success are to see that there is an array of stakeholders. There are certain things that finally require almost a conversion-a conversion to a new way of seeing the reality. This is what I think is going to have to happen before a great deal of change in the challenges of balancing work and family will take place. I hope that the three areas of social context, personal choice, and business response will at least give you some kind of fix or way of thinking about the multi-dimensional character of this issue.

THE CONVERSATION

QUESTION: What about the young people who want to be president yesterday and they started last week? And what about the others who don't care if they get ahead?

Comment: You can't have it both ways. You can't have all the perks and fun and still be president. Most of us attained that position the hard way with hard work.

Answer: There is a generational range that we are dealing with. Perhaps the workers you mention are a non-motivational generation. The research I mentioned about the ideal worker, or career primary person, is contemporary.

Comment: In a book by Roslyn Barnett, she found in her statistics a change in attitude in the younger generation that showed family values are as important as work values, and showed greater balance between the two in choosing where they would work-more so than in the past. It wasn't lack of motivation but more a higher value placed on the family. She also found that workers are hiding their family personal concerns a great deal. They don't trust the family-friendly policies. They are afraid to use them because of how they will be perceived.

QUESTION: Do workers have reason to distrust family-friendly policies? Is the old guard still at the top? Are they going to lower the boom on the people who use them?

Answer: Perhaps. The time element has brought about changes:

• Innovations have downsized jobs.
• Loyalty of employee to employer is greatly diminished.
• The individual has to look out for himself because the employers no longer do this the way they used to do.

Workers now feel insecure.

Comment: Recently there was a story on public radio about the new legitimacy of college graduates going to work for temporary agencies. What is the covenant of the agency? You can go to work for one like Manpower, and you can go to their workshops to gain experience with PowerPoint or Pagemaker software or a lot of technical skills that make you more marketable. One of the situations where people feel powerless is the covenant with the employer which is one that the employer can maneuver but they can't. With a temporary service you can walk out anytime. Maybe I'll stay with this job and maybe I won't. If I don't like it, I can move on to another job. There is still a confidence that their skills will be needed somewhere. But it is a very different notion than the aspiration of finding a good job and going to work for a company. These are not just clerical but supervisory and human resources people-some for high-level positions.

Comment: This looks fine when you are young and do not think anything will happen to you, but will it look the same way when you get down the road? Will society provide the sick-leave and retirement benefits that are necessary?

QUESTION: How far do you go with family allowances?

Answer: This will always be a process of adjustment and discovery. One thing you will find: exceptions don't work for special needs. They make others feel that the company is not being fair-especially when others have to pick up the slack. Comment: We have a company of 13 persons and find that by being flexible there is more loyalty. Our people know that if they help when someone has a problem, they will be given help when they need it. In answer to the question-What if someone takes advantage?-they are counseled and if they continue, they are let go. We have had this happen.

NOTES

Internet address of citation:

http://www.cpn.org/sections/topics/work/stories-studies/work-family2.html#PartIIInt

Scroll to the second paragraph of the section on Linking Work, Family, and Gender Equity.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

James M. Childs, Jr., is Academic Dean of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Bexley, Ohio. Among his many publications is Ethics in Business: Faith at Work (Augsburg Fortress 1995) in which he describes his involvement with the Council for Ethics in Economics.

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