WORK & FAMILY

Future Work Policies
May Focus on Teens,
Trimming Workloads
By Sue Shellenbarger
 
12/30/1998
The Wall Street Journal
Page B1
(Copyright (c) 1998, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

IF OUR FUTURE is evident anywhere, I think, it's along the fault line where the two great preoccupations of our lives -- work and love, as Freud identified them -- collide. Amid the friction and stress along that fault, creativity and change bubble up.

What do current developments on the work-love front suggest about the future? A few forecasts:

Families will break the mold in their quest for better ways to blend work and child-rearing.

Tim Clark and his wife and business partner, Keiko Onodera, operate what I see as the family farm of the future. When this couple decided to have a baby, they bought a home in Portland, Ore., with a free-standing, 660-square-foot garage that they converted to an office for their Internet consulting business, TKAI Inc.

Networked workstations occupy house and office, and an intercom links the buildings to allow Mr. Clark and Ms. Onodera to talk easily to each other about work or their baby. They also employ two part-time baby sitters, enabling them to move back and forth between work and parenting, as needed. "If you want to enjoy a truly integrated home/work life, you'd best consider designing and creating it yourself," Mr. Clark says.

Three factors will fuel more innovations. First, after decades of growing reliance on wives' income, many families are hooked. Working wives contributed 23 percentage points of the 25% increase in family income, adjusted for inflation, since 1969, the Census Bureau says.

Second, technology is opening frontiers. This year's 7% growth in all forms of working at home, full time or part time, will likely continue for another year or two, predicts Tom Miller of Cyber Dialogue, an Internet consulting firm in New York. And third, parents will turn an increasingly keen eye on kids' developmental needs, amid a continuing parenting revival.

CONCERNS ABOUT parenting teens will reshape use of employer benefits and scheduling. As the vast baby boomlet generation moves through adolescence, teens will outnumber people in their 20s by 7%, and a generation of parents will "discover" teen problems anew.

Though parents have traditionally thought of working part time when children are small, Catherine Brillson temporarily switched to three days a week as a marketing manager when her daughter turned 14 and was changing schools. Sensing that her child needed a mother's help navigating adolescence, she says, she traded "two-fifths less money" for "100% more interaction. I was accessible when I was needed. I did not always have my eye on the clock."

The payoff: "an incredibly re-invigorating time" for mother and daughter. With her daughter thriving after 15 months, this Chicago mother will return to full-time work next week.

Programs providing after-school activities for teens will be hot. And "the perk du jour may be college loans," says WEFA Group's Sandra Shaber.

"Work redesign" will be the new work-life buzzword. After several years of stressing flexible schedules, most big companies now have flexibility language on the books. But the policies lack impact, largely because Godzilla-size workloads keep employees from using them. "Workload is the issue, and it has become the greatest single obstacle to flexibility," says Paul Rupert, a flexibility consultant with WFD Inc., Boston.

Few employers will hire more people amid a likely economic slowdown, but many will give employees a fighting chance to work flexibly by redesigning work -- putting tasks in priority, erasing nonessential duties and smoothing work flow. Citibank, Chevron and Warner-Lambert were among 10 employers that met last month with WFD consultants to air work-redesign efforts.

The work-life generation gap will widen. Differences between the work-life attitudes of baby boomers and everyone else will become more marked as Gen-Xers take a bigger workplace role and the baby boomlet enters the work force.

WHILE BOOMERS were known for paying their career dues with long hours and other sacrifices, post-boomers are more diverse. Some Gen-Xers still are willing to log killer hours in offices where "there's almost a cult around working around the clock," says Maury Hanigan, Hanigan Consulting Group, New York. But a second, polar-opposite group resists, hewing early toward nesting, family and community, she says.

In an e-mail, a post-boomer man writes me: "The tide is turning as the children of divorce and neglect recommit themselves to family."

Employers will adapt to this diversity by handing workers more control over their time. Paid time-off banks, awarding days off for any purpose, will grow as much as 20% in 1999, says Carol Sladek, a Hewitt Associates work-life and time-use specialist. Sabbatical policies will continue to grow at a brisk 10% to 15% annual clip.

Coming up behind Gen X, the baby boomlet will further rewrite the work-life recipe book, with technology as its tool. Children using the Internet rose 63% to 16 million in the past year, Cyber Dialogue says. This generation will further integrate work and home; a Drexel University study found 42% of teens see at least an 8-in-10 chance of working at home as adults.

How does it all add up? If you think the family dynamics of the workplace are in turmoil now, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Prognostications or potshots of your own? E-mail them to sue.shellenbarger(atsi gn)news.wsj.com, or fax 503-636-6951.