Working Fathers

A reprint from a current book called Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family.

Tweet

Further Reading

Thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation, in 1990 I began to explore what life was like for men as they tried to balance their commitments to work and family.* Much had been written, of course, about working mothers. What about working fathers?

I wasn't sure I would actually get any companies to enroll in our study, but when the senior management at Apple Computer quickly agreed to participate, it was a good sign. Still, as I strode into Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in October 1990, I was nervous. Would anyone actually show up for the focus groups I was supposed to lead?

During what turned into a two-and-a-half-day stay, the men did indeed come, usually in groups of about 10, and many didn't want to leave. This wasn't some men's movement retreat, a sweat lodge in the middle of the woods where New Age men bared their souls about unfinished business with their fathers. This was the heart of Silicon Valley, as competitive as it gets, with men from all ranks opening up about the tension between the two most important dimensions of their lives: being there for their families and succeeding at work.

For me, listening to these men was an "Aha!" experience. Here were dads talking about picking kids up at child care, about overnight travel assignments, about supervisors who needed to "get a life." In interviews at other companies, big and small, I began to hear the same stories.

Meanwhile, data from the Families and Work Institute's nationally representative survey of more than 3,000 members of the U.S. labor force confirmed what I was hearing from individuals and small groups. More men were feeling more conflict between work and family life than anybody had thought, but they were reluctant to talk about it. I decided to turn my research into a seminar called DaddyStress: How Fathers and Managers Can Deal Effectively with Work-Family Conflict.

By the mid-1990s companies like Merrill Lynch, American Express, IBM, and Time Warner--companies that a decade earlier would have given no thought to the working fathers in their ranks--were asking for that seminar presentation. The same demographic data that I had seen were inevitably pushing these companies to realize that working parents come in two flavors--mothers and fathers--and that for the sake of their businesses, they needed to start paying attention to both.

Implicitly if not explicitly, most of the research in the work-family field has been concerned with working mothers. But when companies do study both male and female employees, they find almost inevitably that responding to the family needs of working mothers and working fathers contributes to the bottom line.

Fel-Pro, for example, a company based in Skokie, Ill., that designs and manufactures gaskets and chemical sealants, reported that the more employees used family-supportive benefits, "the more they exhibited initiative, teamwork, flexibility, and openness to total quality efforts," and the more likely they were to suggest product or process improvements. At NationsBank, headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., the turnover rate is 50% less among employees who have taken advantage of programs designed to help balance work and family life. First Tennessee National Corp., based in Memphis, started treating family issues as part of its business strategy and reported that "supervisors rated by their subordinates as supportive of work-family balance retained employees twice as long as the bank average and kept 7% more retail customers...[contributing] to a 55% profit gain over two years, to $106 million."

One of the reasons men's work-family conflict remains an "invisible dilemma" is that men are reluctant to talk about it. The perception is that real men avoid admitting--much less talking about--any problems. And since work-family issues have tended to be defined as women's issues, men often fear being penalized should they broach them. A vicious cycle sets in: men don't make their needs apparent, and employers continue to define work-family issues as women's issues, which reinforces men's reluctance to express their needs. When employers invite men to discuss their work-family needs, make clear that it is "safe" to talk, and then listen to what they hear, they break the cycle.

A flexible schedule is the benefit fathers are most likely to use, because it does not compromise family income. Flexible scheduling does not mean asking employees to work less; it means giving them more control over when and where they get their jobs done.

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: