"Ethical Dilemmas in Balancing Work and Family: Is Your Idea of 'Success' Big Enough?"
Wednesday, May 21,1997
Presenter: James M. Childs,
Academic Dean,
Trinity Lutheran Seminary
Location: NOWS Services, Inc.
2765 Eastland Mall,
Columbus, Ohio
This month's conversation was hosted by Evelyn Walker,
regional human resources manager, Eastland Operations
Center of NOVUS Services, Inc. NOVUS Services is the
credit portion of Dean Witter Discover that is in the process of
merging with Morgan Stanley. NOVUS is the number-one
credit card issuer with 39 million accounts and ranks second
in charge volume at $54 billion. The Eastland Operations
center has 1,200 employees.
With a young and predominately female workforce, balancing
lvork and family life issues is very important to NOVUS
Services. Employee opinion surveys are conducted every two
years to stay abreast of concerns. Sick-time for family care
was started in 1991. The company then moved to expand the
flexibility of work hours. Work/Life training is currently
provided to managers, while pilot sessions for telecommuters
are now being conducted. The company adopted a corporate-casual
dress code and, if you see some employees in jeans, the
reason is that they have earned a "Dress-down Day" for
achieving specific goals. Dress-down Day has become a
popular form of recognition.
DR. CHILDS' REMARKS
Business ethics is not restricted to business. The issues of
ethical significance with which business must deal are more
than the narrow confines of business practices. It requires
only a slight nudge of the mind to recognize how many
socially generated concerns of an ethical
sort have changed the way business
operates. Environmental protection, equal
opportunity, and the need to curb sexual
harassment are only three examples of
matters external to business that have
profoundly affected the way business
operates internally.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the changing face of
U.S. family life, and related changes in the demographics of
the workforce, would occasion a new set of ethical questions
about the relationship of work and family life. These
questions are not only for individuals to answer, they
increasingly entangle corporations and businesses as well.
The challenge of balancing work and family life is proving to
be multidimensional, something that affects everybody. In
light of that fact, I want to address the topic in terms of three
dimensions: Social Context, Personal Choice, and Business
Response.
Before we consider these dimensions, it may be helpful to ask
why we view the balancing of work and family life as a matter
of ethics. Ethics has to do with our values. Ethics has to do
with our responsibilities to others. Ethics has to do with
justice. I want to look at each of these aspects of ethics in
connection with the three dimensions of the work-family
challenge. In each case I want to ask the overarching
question, "Is your idea of 'success' big enough?"
I. Social Context: A Question of Values
Earlier this week a friend from India was visiting our family. I
had been a guest of his in India thirteen years ago. Recalling
some bone-jarring rides in Indian-built cars and how the
government was at that time making tentative moves to
upgrade its highly protected state auto
industry, I asked him how that industry
was progressing. He told me it is now
open to all kinds of foreign auto makers
and other economic reforms that have
vastly expanded the availability of
consumer goods in India.
I then asked what the effect of these moves toward a market
economy has had on the overall quality of life in his land of
stark contrasts. He replied that the middle class has flourished
and is fast becoming consumer-oriented, with growing credit
card debt and a diminishing tolerance for supporting the
public safety nets serving India's millions of poor.
Furthermore, as agriculture becomes more efficient, the
economy is shifting to technology and the service sectors
where there are greater wealth and opportunity and a wholly
different style and pace of life.
One can see the early symptoms of a developing consumer
culture not unlike our own, in which the benchmark of success
is most often a lucrative career producing material gain and
the power and privilege that often go with it. This culture of
success that pervades so much of our society is fertile soil for
the growth of the "ideal worker" ethos. In the Civic Practices
Network Study Part II (see Notes), an ideal worker is
delineated as "career primary."
"This is a person who is able and willing to put work
first, and for whom time at work is infinitely
expandable. This translates into work practices that
include early morning meetings, planning sessions
that run after-hours, often ending with the suggestion
to 'continue this discussion over dinner', and training
and development programs that require long absences
from home. Moreover, organizational commitment is
measured not only by one's ability to meet these work
norms, but also through repeated demonstration of a
willingness to put work ahead of personal concerns."
Joanne Ciulla, a prominent business ethicist, has written about
the pressure of the idol of success in the culture we are
describing. She cautions against the widely held belief that
job success brings meaning and happiness to life. Young
people are willing to take stress tests, wear the right clothes,
and belong to the right clubs-all in the name of attaining the
position that will eventually give them the freedom to choose.
They argue that they will work a 70-hour week, make their
fortunes, and retire at age 40, but few ever do. This attitude
has taken a social toll in terms of loneliness, divorce, child
abuse. and white-collar crime.
With respect to the impact of this culture of success on family,
regardless of your situation (whether a one-working parent in
a two-parent home, a two-parent-worker family, or a single-parent
worker), the Civic Practices Network Study found the
following:
"In situations where 'ideal workers' are assumed to be
those whose first allegiance is to work, people with
career aspirations go to great lengths to hide their
practical commitments to families. Some people give
false reasons for leaving work in the middle of the
day. They feel that attending a community board or
other civic meetings is not likely to brand them as
uncommitted, but taking a child for a physical exam
might. Some secretly take children on business trips
with them but make sure no one ever knows. Others
leave their computers on in their offices while they
pick up children from sports events so people walking
by will think they are in a meeting. Still others send
sick children to child care centers and hope they won't
get calls to come get them, or on the night-shift will
lock sleeping children in their cars and use coffee
breaks to go check on them. Both men and women
with career aspirations strive to present this image of
a 'career primary' worker who can keep family under control
and not let personal issues interfere with
work."
Is this idea of success, so prevalent in our society and still so
influential in work life, a big enough idea?
Lawrence Shames in his recent book, The Hunger for More:
Searching for Values in an Age of Greed, writes about how
U.S. culture has developed what he calls the "habit of more,"
the expectation that we can always have "more" and the way
in which we stake our self-esteem on this hope.
But in terms of values, wealth is only one measure of success.
"More" is not big enough. A big enough idea of success
means the integration of a variety of values in which career
and economic success serve the larger purposes of caring and
community. This immediately raises the connection between
the values of our society and our responsibility to others. This
is the second dimension of this presentation.
II. Personal Choice: Our Responsibilities to Others
Regardless of your family situation, co-operating with
conventional expectations for success on the job-playing the
ideal worker game-is an alluring and seemingly defensible
choice. A lot of values related to our responsibility to family
hitchhikes on the typical road to success:
I work long hours to provide a quality life for the
family.
We both need to work if we are to keep the house and
have the benefits our family needs we almost have
no choice.
I'm building our family resources so the kids can go to
college.
Our children are struggling in their new marriage and
we want to help them out.
We are preparing for retirement so that we won't be a
burden on our children or society.
I can use my wealth and position of influence to make
changes at work and through charity in our
community.
These along with others are very good values that hitchhike on
the road to success.
This is not a one-size-fits-all matter. I do not have a single
ethically sound pattern for balancing work and family to
commend to you. But we do have a compass by which to navigate as we try to balance work and family life. How does one follow this compass in a society that often defines success in terms that are incompatible and in a business environment
that often seems not to care? This brings us to our third
dimension.
III. Business Response: The Ethical Issue of Justice
A recent Wall Street Journal special section (Focus, 3 1 March
1997, vol. CCXXIX, no. 62A) cited the following research
results on Work and Family:
"According to research by Juliet Schor, an economics
professor at Harvard University and author of a book
on the subject, the average American is working 163
more hours each year-or a month more of full-time
work-than in 1970. At the same time, some 42% of
employees nationwide have children under 18 and
75% of married employees have spouses who also
work. Yet businesses remain decidedly non-family-friendly:
Only a handful of U.S. companies have on-site
or near-site child care, and most limit flexible
scheduling and part-time work to a handful of
workers."
". . . Underlying some of the increased stress is the
rapid pace of technological change, which has created
a constant crisis mentality, a feeling that everything
has to be done now . . . Moreover, in the reengineered
workplace, slowing down seems an
impossible fantasy, Downsizings have saddled
survivors with more work-and workplace paranoia.
'There's such gratitude to have a white-collar job that
people develop a masochistic adherence to
superhuman demands,' says Steven Berglas, a clinical
psychologist and director of the Executive Stress
Clinic in Chestnut Hill, Mass."
Is it fair to expect businesses to be family-friendly and, if so,
on what basis does one make that claim? This is the justice
question. Perhaps if we look at the efforts and the rationale of
one major company, Eli Lilly, we can get a handle on the
question. Here are some excerpts from the speech given by
Randall Tobias, CEO of Eli Lilly, at a Work and Family
Conference held in April 1996.
"When we took a look at our workforce, things were
not the way they used to be. For instance, only 1 8
percent of our 14,500 employees in the U.S. are part
of the nuclear family of a married couple in which the
father goes to work in the morning and the mother
works at home and raises the children.
"Eighty-two percent of our employees' families are in
some other model with large numbers of single
parents and dual wage-earners, as well as singles,
childless couples, and so on. And therefore, 82
percent of our people have needs that were not
a n t i c i p a t e d . For many of these people,
accomplishing the daily chores needed to keep a
household running can be a logistical challenge.
Dealing with a 'snow day' in the school system can be
ti crisis. Coping with the sudden illness of an elderly
parent can be a catastrophe.
" . . . Over the past several years, we've initiated a
wide array of work-family programs to try to help our
people cope with these new needs. Among other
things, we've created:
Personal leaves up to three years for dependent care.
Flexible work arrangements including flextime, part-time,
job sharing and work-at-home arrangements.
Nursing mother stations for new moms.
A child development center at our corporate
headquarters. This center will provide day cart for
220 children of our employees. We also have
programs to help parents with back-up care when their
regular care falls through.
School vacation programs, including a summer
science camp.
On-site shops and facilities to help employees with
daily needs-a full service credit union, of course, but
also a dry cleaning outlet, a shoe repair, a
convenience store . . and a company cafeteria that
prepares ready-to-serve take-home dinners four nights
a week.
We're a health care company so it's natural for us to
have really excellent on-site medical care. And by the
same logic, we also offer a broad range of exercise
and wellness services.
". . . These are neither 'perks' nor 'giveaways.' These
tools will help us attract, motivate, and retain people
who are more likely to be more dedicated, more
focused, more innovative, and more productive."
Lilly has decided it is good practice of justice to provide
family-friendly benefits for its people; not justice on the
performance-oriented basis of merit which governs promotion,
salary and other rewards, but on the additional principles of
justice that we would call contribution. It values the
contribution of employees as loyal and effective members of
the corporate community. Therefore, it wants to provide the
conditions necessary to sustain that kind of workforce by
helping with the manifold needs of people in balancing time
and family. If you look at the contribution that loyal, well-integrated
employees with healthy, balanced lives of work and
family can mean to the quality of the corporate reality . . . for
that, you have to have an idea of success that is big enough for
business-a business response that has more of a stakeholder
view than a stockholder view. No one denies the necessity for
a strong bottom line-no one denies the fact that if you don't
serve your shareholders, you will be out of business. But
there are larger and bigger ideas of success-the bigger ideas
of success are to see that there is an array of stakeholders. There are certain things that finally require almost a conversion-a conversion to a new way of seeing the reality.
This is what I think is going to have to happen before a great
deal of change in the challenges of balancing work and family
will take place. I hope that the three areas of social context,
personal choice, and business response will at least give you
some kind of fix or way of thinking about the multi-dimensional
character of this issue.
THE CONVERSATION
QUESTION: What about the young people who want to
be president yesterday and they started last week? And
what about the others who don't care if they get ahead?
Comment: You can't have it both ways. You can't have all
the perks and fun and still be president. Most of us attained
that position the hard way with hard work.
Answer: There is a generational range that we are dealing
with. Perhaps the workers you mention are a non-motivational
generation. The research I mentioned about the
ideal worker, or career primary person, is contemporary.
Comment: In a book by Roslyn Barnett, she found in her
statistics a change in attitude in the younger generation that
showed family values are as important as work values, and
showed greater balance between the two in choosing where
they would work-more so than in the past. It wasn't lack of
motivation but more a higher value placed on the family. She
also found that workers are hiding their family personal
concerns a great deal. They don't trust the family-friendly
policies. They are afraid to use them because of how they will
be perceived.
QUESTION: Do workers have reason to distrust family-friendly
policies? Is the old guard still at the top? Are
they going to lower the boom on the people who use them?
Answer: Perhaps. The time element has brought about
changes:
Innovations have downsized jobs.
Loyalty of employee to employer is greatly
diminished.
The individual has to look out for himself because the
employers no longer do this the way they used to do.
Workers now feel insecure.
Comment: Recently there was a story on public radio about
the new legitimacy of college graduates going to work for
temporary agencies. What is the covenant of the agency?
You can go to work for one like Manpower, and you can go to
their workshops to gain experience with PowerPoint or
Pagemaker software or a lot of technical skills that make you
more marketable. One of the situations where people feel
powerless is the covenant with the employer which is one that
the employer can maneuver but they can't. With a temporary
service you can walk out anytime. Maybe I'll stay with this job
and maybe I won't. If I don't like it, I can move on to another
job. There is still a confidence that their skills will be needed
somewhere. But it is a very different notion than the
aspiration of finding a good job and going to work for a
company. These are not just clerical but supervisory and
human resources people-some for high-level positions.
Comment: This looks fine when you are young and do not
think anything will happen to you, but will it look the same
way when you get down the road? Will society provide the
sick-leave and retirement benefits that are necessary?
QUESTION: How far do you go with family allowances?
Answer: This will always be a process of adjustment and
discovery. One thing you will find: exceptions don't work for
special needs. They make others feel that the company is not
being fair-especially when others have to pick up the slack.
Comment: We have a company of 13 persons and find that by
being flexible there is more loyalty. Our people know that if
they help when someone has a problem, they will be given
help when they need it. In answer to the question-What if
someone takes advantage?-they are counseled and if they
continue, they are let go. We have had this happen.
Scroll to the second paragraph of the section on Linking
Work, Family, and Gender Equity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
James M. Childs, Jr., is Academic Dean of Trinity Lutheran
Seminary in Bexley, Ohio. Among his many publications isEthics in Business: Faith at Work (Augsburg Fortress 1995)
in which he describes his involvement with the Council for
Ethics in Economics.
Council for Ethics in Economics
125 East Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215-3605 U.S.A.
(614) 221-8661 FAX: (614) 221-8707
