Unfinished Business (22 page)

As it turns out, you need to get much more specific—less
about the little things than the big ones. In 1970, the feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman wrote
a now-famous essay called “The Marriage Agreement,” which stipulated that all household and childcare tasks should be shared between Shulman and her husband equally. It listed all the details of their shared responsibility, down to the most picayune, like brushing their children's hair. Forty-odd years later,
Slate
writer and academic Rebecca Onion wrote an essay in 2014 about how she would only consider motherhood if she and her husband made a Shulman-style agreement. But hair brushing is far less of a problem than travel planning.

Start by being as honest as possible with yourself and each other about your deepest career aspirations. If you could wave a magic wand, where would you ideally find yourself in twenty or thirty years? Whom do you wish you could be? How ambitious are you? What will you consider a life well lived? What life goals do you have other than career success?

Then ask yourselves about your family plans. Do you want children? Do you—as is often the case with men—simply assume that you will have them someday? Do you imagine yourselves caring for your parents when they reach that stage of life?

If you see caring for loved ones in your future, particularly for children, and you both aspire to careers that will require you to work largely on someone else's time and at someone else's direction, here are some scenarios you should consider along with some questions you should ask each other:

You probably won't have answers to all of these questions now, but it's essential to have the conversation to focus both your minds on the real issues and trade-offs that combining career and family are likely to entail. If he says that of course he wants you to have your career, but that he cannot actually imagine deferring his own advancement or even changing jobs so that you can reach for the stars, you may want to think again. At the very least, you will both learn something important about yourselves and each other.

Once again, you can of course point to the tiny handful of couples who have equally high-powered careers and seemingly perfect children, but surely you should also consider the millions of women who started out on an equal track with their mates and then found that something had to give. Or look hard at the domestic arrangements of the women you most admire and see how many have an indispensably supportive mate who is the lead parent and either does or oversees much more than half the housework!

You will want to keep having these discussions at regular intervals down the road. And they are relevant even if you aren't sure about having children. It's very hard to anticipate at twenty-five
what you will want at thirty-five. Many people also end up having unanticipated caregiving responsibilities for elderly and sick relatives, so it's worth at least beginning to talk about what that might look like for you. You are very likely to find yourselves both making choices that you did not anticipate at the beginning, but you will be far happier if they are explicit and open choices in which each partner recognizes what the other is gaining and what he or she is giving up. You can also plan together about how you will switch places down the road.

T
HIS CHAPTER WAS ABOUT PLANNING
your career, which assumes that you are early enough in your working life to be in the planning stage. For those of us who are already in the middle of “the juggle,” the concept of intervals and tours of duty may be lovely, but they have little to do with our daily reality. Moreover, intervals assume a degree of financial stability that many families simply don't have—taking downtime and working on a freelance or consulting basis, in particular, can mean sharp monthly variations in income.

To take advantage of the talent of the millions of women who are doing their best just to hang on, and to make intervals of competition and care a much more realistic option for everyone, it's time to talk more about the future of work and insist on sweeping cultural change of the same magnitude as attitudes about smoking or same-sex marriage.

The good news is that change is already under way. You just have to find the right workplace….

How many articles have you read about the amazing benefits of exercise? Hundreds if not thousands have told us that just walking briskly for thirty minutes a day can regulate our weight, lower our blood pressure, reduce stress, boost our immune systems, and stimulate our brain. As journalists routinely write, if a single pill could do all that we would all take it every morning. But somehow many of us find it hard to take the fairly small steps necessary, no pun intended, to become more active.

That's the way I feel about businesses that just don't get it when it comes to the benefits of allowing employees to fit together work and family. Reams of research demonstrate the impact on recruitment, retention, productivity, creativity, and employee morale. Moreover, in an age of continual CEO laments about the war for top talent and of national worries about whether the American workforce is educated enough to be competitive in a digital and global economy, it's astounding that an enormous pool of highly educated and credentialed women in their forties and fifties remain completely shut out of leadership-track positions because they chose at one point to ramp down in order to make time for care.

So why are we still stuck in this rut? Because, as I have argued
throughout this book, drawing on decades of work by legal scholars, economists, and feminists, the majority of Americans are mired in a 1950s mindset when it comes to assumptions about when and how we work, what an ideal worker looks like, and when to expect that ideal worker to peak in his or her career. Men who came up through the old system and succeeded in it simply find it very hard to believe that their businesses could flourish any other way.

Fortunately, help is not only on the way, it's here. As the head of human resources for a company where I serve on the board recently told us, millennials want to be able to work “anywhere, anytime, anyhow.” The U.S. economy is also evolving in ways that are already changing working conditions for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Further, a growing number of traditional companies are starting to get it and are finding new ways of working that allow their employees much more flexibility and even cash support for parental leave and daycare, and in some cases even eldercare.

These large-scale changes are important. Over time, they will affect how each of us lives and works, but it is hard for us to figure out how to effect them. At the other end of the spectrum are the small changes that each of us can make on a daily basis in terms of how we think, talk, and plan. The workplace offers a middle ground where economic and social forces and individual efforts can meet at a practical level. Workers and managers can decide, separately and together, to create an environment that allows everyone to fit care and career together in ways that benefit both.

T
HE LANDSCAPE OF WORK IN
the United States is changing as radically as it did in the move from the agricultural to the industrial
age. Digital technology pushes the workplace away from centralized offices and toward distributed networks. No one can actually foresee the full scope and scale of these changes, although commentators and prognosticators abound. I will oversimplify a mass of complex processes that are already under way to identify at least some of the biggest changes that I see coming, so you can understand what kind of workplace you want to be in and take charge of your own career trajectory.

I
N THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY, INDEPENDENT
contractors—freelancers—work on demand for whoever needs their services rather than for fixed periods of time for a single employer. They are connected only by a platform that matches them with customers and provides verification, security, and payment systems. This is the world of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit.
It will increasingly be the world of just about everything: handyman services, cooking, laundry, shopping, personal training, coding, doctoring, lawyering, bossing, and creating everything from television ads to Ebola suits.

Providing services on demand is connected to the “sharing economy,” which started from the idea that people who have a car they don't use all day or an extra bedroom in their apartment could make money by sharing that extra capacity with those who want it. Instead of everyone owning one of everything, we can generate income by sharing things that we already have. Other labels for the same phenomenon are “project economy” and “gig economy,” in the sense that you can earn income project by project rather than at fixed times for fixed sums.

The on-demand economy has already come in for plenty of criticism. An Uber driver who is a housewife or student driving to
earn extra income whenever he or she has time is one thing. But drivers who are actually trying to make a living often receive below-minimum-wage pay and no benefits—no health or disability insurance, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, or retirement plans. That's what it means to be a contractor rather than an employee. Some job is better than no job, but the inequities are stark. As
New York
magazine reports, a platform start-up that connects housecleaners to customers ends up employing homeless people to clean the homes of the prosperous. Even as the entrepreneurs succeed in attracting hundreds of millions in investments from Silicon Valley investors,
they do not provide the pay and benefits necessary to allow the service providers they profit from to rent a home of their own.

That said, the on-demand economy is bound to continue growing, and it has enormous promise—even now, it at least allows low-income workers to stay home when a child is sick or school is closed and not lose their jobs. To make it work for everyone, however, we'll have to find ways to make the sharing economy a caring economy, just as workers in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution turned to unions and strikes to claim their fair share of the wealth they were creating. We have to attend to the needs of all platform workers to ensure that they can earn a living wage, have access to good healthcare and education, and provide for their futures.

New forms will emerge, or rather new adaptations of old forms. MIT professor Thomas Malone, who wrote
a prescient book called
The Future of Work
in 2004, predicted that freelancers with a craft or a specific profession would be likely to organize as guilds to exert the power necessary to even the playing field with employers. He used the example of the Screen Actors Guild, now known as SAG-AFTRA, which brings together a wide range of media artists—actors, singers, dancers, broadcast journalists,
voiceover artists—who work as independent contractors. SAG members come together on specific creative projects—a play, a movie, a sound recording, a broadcast—and disband again, much as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, and other small businesses or individuals come together to build a house. The guild itself negotiates and provides health and pension benefits, allowing members to work flexibly on different projects as much as they want or need to.

If we can provide for contractors or freelancers in ways that ensure they can earn a living and provide for their families and their futures, the on-demand economy offers the prospect of far more flexible, self-scheduled work hours. It points to the end of the office as we know it, the place you must go to earn a living. That is exactly what many workers who are trying to fit their work and their caregiving responsibilities together need.

Moving up the income scale, the on-demand economy is likely to be a godsend for professionals who are also caregivers. Lawyers, business executives, bankers, doctors, and many other professional women could continue to advance in their careers or at least stay in the game while being the kind of parents they want to be. Consider Axiom Law and
Bliss Lawyers, both of which have a bench of high-quality law firm alumni whom they rent out on a project basis to large companies—doing the same work that law firms do but at a fraction of the cost and a multiple of the flexibility.
Topcoder matches freelance computer coders to projects; Eden McCallum provides project-based consulting services; Medicast allows patients to request a doctor through an app, charging a flat fee for a basic visit and paying malpractice insurance for the doctors on their roster. The Business Talent Group, based in Los Angeles, even rents out bosses who use their executive skills to get a specific project done.

If we can provide the right kind of portable social safety net,
this deep flexibility will make it far easier for a wide range of platform workers to navigate the phases of life when they need to be caring for family members. But in the meantime, of course, millions of Americans still have day jobs with fixed hours, fixed locations, and bosses who expect fixed amounts of work. How can we change
that
economy to make room for care?

T
HOUGH MANY OFFICES ARE STILL
stuck in a framework that was established over a century ago, some imaginative and innovative workplaces are making dramatic changes today. These workplaces allow employees to shape their own working environment together with their supervisors. They have opened up spaces for conversations that previously took place in secret or not at all and opened the door to an entire array of possibilities that can improve productivity, community, loyalty, and contentment. All of these changes make room for care. All of them are part of something called OpenWork, a platform and movement that I am proud to be a part of.

OpenWork is both a noun and a verb. It means a kind of work, a way of working, a spirit and set of values that animates a particular workplace. Openworkers are employees who have been able to make change from the bottom up, either collaboratively at their employer's invitation or more insistently, helping their superiors see and understand the enormous benefits of trust, mutual respect, flexibility, and mutual accountability. Kathleen Christensen, board chair of
OpenWork.org
, describes it as a place where “
we share stories of organizations shattering the poverty of imagination that limits business productivity and societal well-being.”

OpenWork works, for management and workers alike.
Ninety-seven percent of openworking companies see increased
productivity; 88 percent of employees report greater job satisfaction; and 45 percent have reduced rates of stress and burnout. To see how the elements of OpenWork have been put into practice, the website offers a wide range of examples. These are real places that have made real changes.

At the financial arm of General Motors, for instance, the company wanted to increase engagement and decrease stress at their call centers:

[GM Financial] handed over the scheduling to employees to figure out the best way to work. They ended up allowing employees to make their own assignments and schedules. They came together and came up with a plan [under which] they could show up within 3 hours of their start time—or compress their hours during the summer—as long as they were working the equivalent of an 8-hour shift every day. It's resulted in significant reported decrease in stress and a 90 percent reduction of tardiness. People can have their home lives, and get stuck in traffic without panicking. It's really reduced attrition rates. They're now below industry average at just 6.2 percent.

Another company that exemplifies OpenWork principles is a multiservice tax firm from Dallas, Texas, called
Ryan, LLC. They lost a number of star employees to burnout in 2008 and, in response, created a program called myRyan, which “enables employees to work wherever they want and whenever they want, as long as their work responsibilities are met.” They can monitor their own progress through an online dashboard, but they monitor
performance
, measured with a score, instead of hours worked. The goal is to maintain a high score, not to work a certain number of billable hours.

Accounting firms, both big and small, have been particularly innovative—perhaps because women have often been the bookkeepers in family businesses and accounting has long featured more women than law or finance. It's a particular plus that at least some of the partners in the Big Four global accounting firms—KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EY, and Deloitte—were promoted from part-time positions. In 2013, for instance,
Ernst & Young (as it was then named) promoted more than two hundred employees “to executive levels while on formal flexible work arrangements.”
Deloitte has a program of “mass career customization” for all employees, based on a book of that name coauthored by Deloitte vice chairman Cathleen Benko and Anne Cicero Weisberg. It allows each business unit to come up with a set of options for its employees that would allow them to either ramp up or dial down their careers as necessary. Sharon Allen, who was chairman of Deloitte from 2003 to 2011, said of the system, “
Over the course of a long career, almost everybody has a need to adjust what they're doing—the pace, the location, whatever that might be.”

Beyond accounting,
consider 1-800 CONTACTS, a direct-to-consumer retail business with more than nine hundred employees in Utah. It has an ingenious attendance system that is modeled on airline frequent-flier programs. Employees can earn points for “positive attendance behaviors” (like coming to work on time) and then redeem those points for up to one hundred unpaid days off a year and more than thirty paid days. Like an airline system, employees can use fewer points on each redemption if they provide more advance notice. They can also trade, release, or pick up shifts from home or even from their smartphones.

In still other sectors,
Delta Air Lines has created a host of flexible options to allow employees to manage their time better and fit together their professional responsibilities with their family
lives.
Southern California Gas Company has a program called the SmartWork initiative, which offers flexible work hours, telecommuting, and extended-leave options. Other options include collaborative software to help employees work from home. According to Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas,
American Express employees who work virtually “produce 43 percent more business than their office counterparts. IBM saves $700 million in real estate costs by allowing 25 percent of its employees worldwide to work from home.”