(This post originally appeared in FastCompany.com)

Last week I attended a fascinating forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation. As is often the case in any discussion about the demands of work and family, the need for work flexibility was front and center, with the primary challenge being, “How do we get middle managers to support it?”

Middle-manager support can be the difference between success and failure of a work flexibility strategy and, yet, it remains elusive. The advice on how to solve the problem ranges from “Put the policy in place. Tell managers this is the way it is. Reward those who do it and punish those that don’t,” to “You can’t lead a horse to water. I guess you need to wait for the dinosaurs to die off [sigh].”

In my experience, a top-down policy and an ultimatum will fail. It only creates more resistance. And waiting for a generation of managers to leave is not only inefficient, but it unnecessarily leaves money on the table as the organization and its people miss out on the benefits of flexible work.

Over the years, we’ve succeeded in getting even some of the most skeptical middle managers on board the work flexibility train. But it requires a larger upfront commitment of resources (e.g. time, money, and people) than it takes to write a policy or rely on attrition. However, the return on that investment is a group of middle managers who not only accept work flexibility but understand how to use it as a powerful tool to run their business.

Here are five the ways we’ve gotten middle managers to support flexible work:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves, bottom up and top down.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Make sure that work flexibility in the organization is built on a partnership model where employees have as much responsibility for the success of it as the managers do… (For more, please click here)

I invite you to join me on Twitter @caliyost.

(This post originally appeared in Forbes.com)

Even though 82% of the respondents to our 2011 Work+Life Fit Reality Check national study of full-time employees said that they had some form of work flexibility, I still hear stories of people experiencing resistance from their managers because of the “floodgates fear.”  What’s the floodgates fear? The scenario looks something like this:

Employee to manager: “Susan, here’s my plan to work from home every Wednesday. I’ve outlined how I’m going to get my work done, how I’m going to communicate and handle any unexpected needs that might come up.”

Manager to employee: “Chris, this flexible work plan looks terrific, but if I give to you then everyone is going to want it.”

Susan, the manager, has been paralyzed by the fear that the floodgates for work flexibility will open and chaos will ensue. In fact, one manager confessed that he became so frightened that he imagined that he was in a big white room with hundreds of desk. On each desk was a phone. All of the phones were ringing and he was the only person in the room to answer them.

The managers who usually struggle most either haven’t ever had an employee work flexibly, or they’ve tried it in the past and it didn’t work.

So how do you help your manager move beyond the fear that the flexible work floodgates will open?  Here are a few tips:

Don’t take their reaction personally. Realize this fear is so common amongst managers that it has its own name, the Floodgates Fear. It’s based upon the very real concern that if they allow you to work differently, then suddenly they will be inundated with requests. The manager doesn’t want to be the bad guy or gal and have to say “no,” but they also have a business to run. If you don’t take their reaction personally, then you can work together to come up with a compromise that’s comfortable for everyone. You do this when you…

Agree to keep the lines of communication open with your manager. Another big fear that managers have about flexible work is that once they say “yes,” to a specific plan they can never ask to change it. The reality is that circumstances do change. It will give your manager a sense of comfort to know that if they need to come to you and say, “You know what, I can’t have two people working from home on Tuesdays. It’s affecting customer service on those days,” that your reaction will be, “Okay, let’s talk about how to fix it.”  This will…(For more, please click here)

I’ve decided to use Slide Share more often to share the PowerPoint slides from some of my speeches. Here is the slide deck from this week’s Jam Session for 85 Broads! Let me know if you find it helpful.

What’s one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they present a proposal to work more flexibly to their manager? They focus on “why” they want to work differently, when they should emphasize “how” they are going to get their job done.

Here’s a true story that a manager shared with me that perfectly illustrates the different response you will get.

A young man walks into the manager’s office.  He explains that he’d like to talk about shifting his hours to come in by 11:00 am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and leave later in the evening. This new schedule will help him train for a marathon, “because it’s getting too dark to run at night.” The manager confessed that his response was, “Yeah, and I’d like to ride in a hot air balloon on Wednesdays.  I’m going to have to say ‘No’.”

Thankfully, the young man came back the next day and took a different approach. He never mentioned marathon training. Instead he focused on how he would get his work done with the new schedule, how he would communicate with customers and his team, and how he would come in if something important needed to get done.  And he would be happy to review the flexible work plan in three months. The manager thought about it and responded, “Okay, let’s give it a shot.”

The manager telling the story said that the first time he felt like he was being asked to do an unreasonable favor. But the second time, the young man had reframed the proposal as a win-win and he felt comfortable saying “yes.” Same proposal, different response.

This is even more critical when you are asking for flexibility to address a personal issue that would be very difficult to say “no” to based on the reason alone…(For more go to Forbes.com)

Our client, the professional services firm BDO, recently produced a short video about their award-winning approach to work and life flexibility.  Here are the six lessons every organization can takeaway from the clip to help better position flexible work as part of the culture, or the way the business and people operate every day:

Lesson 1: Language matters. BDO Flex is a “strategy.”  It’s about getting work done, serving clients, and managing people.  It’s not a program or policy.  There are policies to support various aspects of the strategy (e.g. compensation, telework equipment) but “flexibility” itself is not a policy.  There are programs that use BDO Flex, but “flexibility” is not a program.

Lesson 2: The employee AND the business must succeed for flexibility to work. All of the stories and key themes in the video reinforce the point of “dual” benefit and impact:

• ReThink–The possibilities are endless
• ReFresh–You work hard. Use Flex to recharge
• ReDefine–Don’t accept business as usual
• ReDiscover–Don’t lose sight of your dreams
• ReAssure–Small changes can make a big impact

Lesson 3: Take the time and invest the resources to create a shared vision of success that anchors the strategy. It took months for the firm to create the “BDO Thrives on Flexibility” vision statement, but that process changed hearts and minds and created a shared understanding which moved the culture.

Lesson 4: Flexibility is not just about formal flexible work arrangements. It’s about both formal and informal, day-to-day flexibility in how, when and where you work and manage your life. It’s not an “arrangement,” but a well thought out plan tailored to meet your unique needs and the needs of the business.

Lesson 5: Men and women want and use work flexibility. Work flexibility is not a women’s issue.  It’s a strategy to help all people fit the unique pieces of their lives together in a competitive, hectic, global economy and for businesses to work smarter and better.

Lesson 6: Flexibility is not about child care only. Yes, parents absolutely need to work flexibly; however, as the video shows so do employees who have spouses who relocate, who have a passion for ballroom dancing or cartoon drawing, and who want to stay healthy.  And it’s for leaders who want to reduce the level of employee burnout and service clients better.

What other lessons did you learn from watching how one organization is talking about and positioning strategic flexibility in their business?  What is your organization doing?

If you haven’t already, I invite you to connect with me on Twitter @caliyost!

The other day I sat with three senior leaders from three different industries. One was the CEO of an international PR and communications firm. One was a partner of a professional services firm, and the other the president of a national not-for-profit. As it often does, our discussion about work and life turned to technology. I asked them how they used their smartphones and laptops to stay connected to work after traditional business hours:

”I keep my phone on 24/7, but I don’t respond to everything, all the time.”–CEO of the PR and communications firm.

“I sometimes send emails at 4 a.m., and on the weekends just to get a jump-start on my day and week.”–president of the national not-for-profit.

“My phone goes in my briefcase when I get home and I don’t look at it again until the next morning.”–partner of a professional services firm.

Three leaders, with three very different uses of technology. So I asked them, “How many of you have sat down with all of your direct reports and explained how you prefer to connect with work, and specified what you expect of them?”

All three shook their heads and said some variation of the following statement, “No, I haven’t done that, but they all know that I don’t expect them to do what I do.” My response was, “I’ll bet that isn’t true,” and I shared what I see too often in many organizations:

Leaders fail to clarify their personal preferences for staying connected to work with technology, and don’t share their expectations of the responsiveness with their direct reports. This leads to misguided assumptions that can wreak havoc on the work/life balance of their employees. And most leaders have no idea any of this is happening.

Here’s my advice:

Recognize that you have to initiate the conversation with your direct reports. They won’t because they don’t want you to misinterpret their questions as, “I don’t want to work hard.” For example, I worked with a senior leader who always caught the 5:00 a.m. bus to the office. On his ride, he did all of his emails and was so pleased that his team were “morning people, too–they get right back to me!” Imagine his surprise when I told him, “Actually, many are setting alarms for 5 a.m. to be awake and reply to you.” “What?!” he responded, “Why didn’t they say anything?” To the person, they all told me they were afraid he would question their commitment if they did.

Decide what you really expect in terms of response and connection. Part of the problem is that leaders are so busy using technology to manage their own work/life balance that they haven’t thought about what they actually expect from their team. The leader who emailed from the bus at 5:00 a.m. told everyone that if he really needed them he’d call their mobile phones. If an email was priority, he’d identify it. Otherwise feel free to respond whenever they can.

Have a meeting, state the parameters clearly, and then be consistent. People watch the behavior of leaders like a hawk. If there’s even a whiff of inconsistency between what you told them and how you actually behave, they will go back to assuming they need to follow your technology schedule. So if you state, “You don’t need to respond to emails at night, I’ll call you if anything is urgent,” don’t penalize someone who missed an important issue because they didn’t answer an email, but were never called.

Finally, keep the lines of communication open and encourage ongoing clarification. Assumptions people make about their manager’s expectations are rarely accurate, especially when it comes to connection and access to work via technology. Set the record straight. It’s an easy way to offer your people more control and consistency over the way work fits into their lives–something we all need.

If you’re a manager, have you clarified your expectations of access and connectedness with your direct reports? If you haven’t, why not? If you did, what did you learn? What difference did it make?

(This post originally appeared in Fast Company)

Later this week, I facilitate a session at the FWI/SHRM Work-Life Focus: 2012 and Beyond Conference entitled “HR and the Business: Strategic, Co-Owners of Flexibility.”

My goal is to help each participant answer the question, “What role does/should HR play in making flexibility in the way work is done part of the culture and business strategy of an organization?”

But I’d also like to know what you think, so please take a minute to answer the question below (once you’ve made your choice, scroll down to enter):

Please forward this post and survey to anyone you might think would want to weigh in and answer the question. This is an important and often confusing issue inside organizations, so the more votes…the better!

I will report the results of this survey and the outcomes from my session in a blog post after the conference. Follow Twitter hashtags #workflex11 and #SHRM for conference updates which begin Tuesday 11/8 and ends Thursday 11/10.

And if you are in DC at the conference be sure to find me a say “hi.” Thank you!

(This article appears in the October, 2011 issue of Talent Management Magazine and was co-authored with one of my Flex+Strategy Group partners, Donna Miller)

As the dust settles from the Great Recession and a new economic reality emerges, businesses are beginning to take a hard look at how they can manage their talent for maximum business impact. The urgency to review and rethink is driven by leaner headcounts, larger workloads and greater stress as technology and globalization.  These trends erased the traditional lines between work and life. The result is a shift in expectations about how to manage responsibilities on and off the job. Businesses are moving beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all model of work and career and taking a more strategic, flexible approach.

Since 2007, Work+Life Fit Inc. and Opinion Research Corp. have conducted a biennial national study to track the state of work-life flexibility from the employees’ perspective. The results of the 2011 Work+Life Fit Reality Check study confirm that new, flexible ways of working have gained traction since 2007. However, organizations need to do more. Helping employees manage the way work fits into their lives and organizations’ profits and growth plans in a transformed economy will require making flexibility — informal and formal telework, flexible hours, reduced schedules and compressed work weeks — an integral part of the operating business model and culture.

Traditionally, that meant writing a policy or training managers. But strategic flexibility requires dedicating people, time and money to a coordinated culture change process — one that clearly defines a business’ unique rationale for greater flexibility, establishes a shared vision of how managers and employees will use it and executes with relentless communication.

(Click here for more)

As I contemplated what to write about in my post for National Work and Family Month, an interesting piece of research crossed my desk entitled, “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices a Valuable Firm Resource?”

What caught my attention was the ironic disconnect between what the study intended to conclude and what the findings actually proved (and the authors missed):

• Intended Conclusion: “Family-Friendly” work practices (FFWPs) are not valuable to organizations;
• Actual Unintended Conclusion: “Family-Friendly” workplace practices are very valuable to businesses and people…as long as they’re implemented well and you know what you are talking about.  Unfortunately, too often that’s not the case.

How does a gap like this happen?  The researchers made the same mistakes that many stumble over, and these common oversights are what suck the value out of “Family Friendly” work practices.

The authors didn’t consider the importance of effective implementation and what that looks like in action.  And they didn’t position and talk about the practices in a broad, strategic, business-oriented way.  When FFWPs are effectively implemented and strategically positioned, the value that they provide to the business in terms of financial performance is proven and measureable.

So, how do you reconcile these two radically different conclusions?

Let’s start with a real-world example of how strategic flexibility helps a business run better, smarter and save money

We’ve been working with a multi-national company that wants flexibility in the way work is done to become a more visible and consistent part of their day-to-day business (the authors of the study consider all forms of flexibility “Family-Friendly” work practices).  As we interviewed leaders and employees, they shared numerous examples of how flexibility in the way work is done has allowed the business to run smarter and better:

• Because people were able to work from home, the company was able to stay open and operational on a number of days when snowstorms would have, otherwise, halted business.
• By shifting and staggering the times people on the team started and stopped working, the business was able to expand customer service hours without paying overtime to the non-exempt staff.
• Because their job requires absorbing and analyzing large amounts of complex information, people will often work remotely either from home or another quiet location to get more done efficiently and productively.
• As the company has grown, office space is a premium.  By coordinating days worked at home, and in the office, it limited the need for additional office space.
• Because many of the employees at the company have long commutes through heavy traffic, by shifting hours to avoid the worst traffic or working from home periodically the level of employee stress has been reduced.

And when asked, “What do you think the role of flexibility will be in the organization five years from now?”  Every person, no matter what level, said, “There will only be more of it” for all of the reasons listed above and more, because they know that flexibility, informal and formal, helps the business run more productively and saves money.

“Family-Friendly Work Practices…do not affect firm performance directly or indirectly” Say What?!

This client came to mind as I read the “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices a Valuable Firm Resource? study by Nick Bloom from Stanford University, Tobias Kretschmer from University of Munich and John Van Reenen published in the Strategic Management Journal  (June, 2010).

Normally, I give research a quick review and move on.   But, in this case, I’m felt compelled to respond to the study’s conclusions for two reasons.

First, Freek Vermeulen, an Associate Professor at the London School of Business, wrote about the results in an article on Forbes.com entitled, “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices Worth Their Money? New Evidence.”  This means that the results have entered the mainstream press, and are potentially influencing the decisions of business leaders who may be considering whether or not to support a work+life initiative.

Second, the study’s rather emphatic conclusion that Family-Friendly workplace practices don’t positively affect the financial performance of a business is, in fact, wrong.

Here are the study’s official conclusions in more detail:

“In this paper, we studied the impact of Family-Friendly Workplace Practices (FFWP) on firm performance, and found that increased provision of FFWP is only (weakly) positively correlated with better firm performance if we omit management quality.  Once we control for general management quality, there is not significant association between FFWP and performance measured in different ways.”

And it goes on:

“Our results support the conclusion that FFWP are neither a value-creating bundle of activities nor a lever for existing resources they do not affect firm performance directly or indirectly.”

“FFWP have implications different from other SHRM practices, as they affect employee well-being rather than firm financial performance.”

“Therefore, FFWP should be treated as policies that improve firm performance in terms of satisfaction of a particular stakeholder group—the firm’s employees—but that financial performance should not be the primary goal of implementing FFWP.”

“This calls for recasting FFWP as a non-market strategy affecting other outcomes than financial performance.”

Wow!  Can’t get much clearer than that. Now, let’s look at how they are wrong… (Click here for more)

(This post originally appeared in the HuffingtonPost.com)

Around Labor Day, the commentary on the current state of the workplace increases. But this year, it seemed that the media focused more on what the future of work will look like. A couple of examples that I’ve seen over the past few days include:

• A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy, part of The Future of Work—A Labor Day Special Report (TheAtlantic.com): Advocates creating unions that bring together the increasing number of independent workers.
• The Blended Workforce: The New Norm (Talent Management): Foretells of a future workplace made up of a combination of employees, consultants, independent contractors and contingent workers. Not unlike the Shamrock Organization that Charles Handy first predicted in his 1989 management classic, The Age of Unreason.
• Are Jobs Obsolete? (CNN.com): Challenges the relevance of the entire concept of a job.
• The Future of Work (Creatingthefuturetoday.com): Sees a workplace dominated by virtual teams and global nomads.

For all of their futuristic and forward thinking, these articles miss a very important point–the recognition and acknowledgment that work and life are now one and the same. You can no longer accurately predict the future of one, without also imaging the future of the other.

But, with the exception of the need to transform education, the articles barely mentioned how the predicted changes will affect our lives outside of work. It matters because the success of any transformation at work along the levels imagined, will depend on a number of corresponding changes happening off the job as well. For example, if an increasing percentage of workers are part of a contingent, on-demand, virtual, global workforce, then:

• What does that mean for the type of houses we live in and how we finance them?
• How do the roles of women and men as providers and caregivers need to adapt?
• How will that affect our choices to partner with someone and have a family?
• How do we have to restructure child care and eldercare, and who will provide it?
• How will we need to manage our finances differently?
• Not only how do we update the curriculum taught in elementary and secondary school, but how does the school day and school calendar need to change?
• What does “retirement” look like?

If these questions, and others, aren’t considered then a contingent, global, on-demand virtual workforce will flounder under the weight of misaligned personal obligations and circumstances.

The omission of “life” from questions about “work” is very Industrial Age. Twenty years ago, work and life were two separate and distinct spheres, at least in theory. “Work” was 9-to-5, in the office, Monday-thru-Friday and the other parts of life happened around that framework. Thanks (or, no thanks) to technology, demographic shifts, and economic globalization that’s not the case anymore. Changes in the way we work will directly impact the way we live. And, changes in the way we live will directly impact the way we work.

It’s a Jetsons world, but we still talk and think like we live in an episode of Mad Men. So, whenever you encounter “What is the future of work…”, add two words to the question “What is the future of work…and life?” That’s reality.

Do you think we adequately consider the impact of the future of work on the way we live our life off the job?  What are some of the questions we should be asking about both work and life in the coming years that aren’t being adequately addressed?

(This post originally appeared in FastCompany)

For more, I invite you to join me on my Fast Company blog and connect with me on Twitter @caliyost.