November 18, 2005
Articles
Work & Family: Companies Try New Policies for Alternative Schedules
"For the millions of U.S. workers who want more control over their time, companies have a new message: Flexible scheduling is getting an overhaul. A few innovative employers are starting to hand out nontraditional work arrangements, including flextime, part-time hours and shorter workweeks, in a fairer, more systematic way. Some are opening up the option to all employees, rather than limiting flexibility to a privileged few, as has often been the case in the past. But they're also raising the bar for employees on nontraditional schedules by asking for more teamwork and accountability in return.” Mentions Families and Work Institute and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes.
Flexible Working Plea to Employers
"Employers have been urged to introduce different ways of working after new research showed that almost one in 10 people wanted to work fewer hours, even if it meant earning less. A study by the TUC showed that half a million workers had their requests for a shorter working week turned down by their managers. The survey of 100,000 workers revealed that three out of four had no element of flexibility in their contracts. And employees in the public sector were more likely to have a better work/life balance than those in private firms.”
More Employees Say Employers Encourage Older Workers to Stay
"Nearly 40 percent of workers say their company encourages older workers to stay on the job compared with 15 percent who believe their organization encourages older workers to retire, according to a new survey. Hudson's aging workforce survey, conducted nationally among 1,075 U.S. workers, found that 38 percent of workers say their organizations keep older workers because they are difficult to replace. Just 15 percent of respondents said their employers want to make way for younger workers.”
Get a Life!
"Gregg Slager saw the clock nearing midnight, sighed, and reached for the next file. All along the 25th floor of Ernst & Young's headquarters at 5 Times Square, lights were ablaze. It was another 80-hour week for the M&A department, where Slager, a senior partner, had been in the trenches for a decade. Slager doesn't do garden-variety accounting; his unit handles due diligence on major deals in which billions of dollars (and thousands of jobs) hang in the balance. On viselike deadlines, they plow through vast piles of financial and operational data to get a fix on a business and look for danger signs. With the boom in private-equity investing, the pace only seemed to be getting more intense. Top partners like Slager can pull down seven-figure incomes for shepherding such high-pressure deals. Yet last year, at age 45, with 4- and 6-year-old boys at home, he often found himself wondering whether the sacrifices were worth it."
The Myth of Multitasking
"The time has come to pop a long, sharp stickpin in the rumblings that men are less than equal at multitasking. ‘I don't believe the functional data supports that,’ reports neuro-psychologist Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University. He disputes a 1998 study, done by scientists elsewhere, that he believes wrongly suggested that women might have the upper hand when it comes to multitasking. Just, who has spent years peering into the human mind through functional CT scans that map brain activity during cognitive tasks, reports that only when asked to listen to two things simultaneously do women demonstrate higher capacity to do so. In every other pairing of cognitive tasks, listening to a series of true-false statements while mentally twisting three-dimensional figures, for instance, men and women show equal capacities.”