Balancing Work and Family: What Makes “The Best Places” Different?

Friday, 11. 2. 2007  –  Category: All Blog Posts, Employee Retention, Work Life Balance

Two of our board members, Ruth Bramson and Jared Bernstein, have recently collaborated on a new article entitled “Balancing Work and Family: What Makes “The Best Places” Different?  We asked them to think about how organizations are helping employees to manage work-life balance – not only for the white collar ranks, but for their hourly workers as well.   To us, it just makes good business sense to assume that greater flexibility for hourly workers should help organizations expand their candidate pools and retain their high performers.  It’s clear, however, that many hourly workers have far less flexibility than their white collar counterparts.  This makes sense for jobs that absolutely require face time (cashiers, nurses).  Even for these roles, though, there are options that can help.  Jared and Ruth explore some of these options in their article.

I encourage you to take a few minutes to read their article, and think about the questions below.  We’d love to hear your comments.  While you’re at it, take our quick poll.

Do you think that flexible work options should be available to hourly as well as salaried employees?

Does the availability of flexible work options help organizations recruit and retain hourly workers?  Or do organizations with high hourly populations accept high turnover as a cost of doing business?  

What are additional best practices that you’ve heard about that we should add to our list of recommendations?