3 posts tagged sandy burud

The first week in May is Flexible Work Arrangement week, promoting experimentation with rearranged work schedules and locations outside of the conventional office setting.

To celebrate, members of the FlexPaths team offer their ideas for flexing your work arrangements this week.  We hope that these will inspire you to embrace flexible work this week if you don’t already.  And if you are already a flexible worker?  We hope you’ll take the opportunity to encourage others to flex their work this week, as well.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Encourage managers to extend on site coverage of their teams while promoting flex work. Every Friday, have team members decide if they want to start two hours earlier or later to avoid peak commute times. Promote it as a win win for the company and its customers.

  Clare Flynn Levy, Managing Director, UK:

Ask your team to each spend an hour thinking about what their ideal work arrangement would actually be, assuming that their role didn’t change, but if “face time” wasn’t an issue and/or there was no concern about career progression being jeopardized.  How would their work be affected? How would the team be affected? Then sit down, as a team, and spend an hour reviewing them together. Are any of the “ideal world” scenarios actually both possible and win-win for the team member and the company? If so, why not give them a shot?

  Sandy Burud, PhD, Principal:

Pick some jobs that seem ‘inflexible’, like administrative assistant positions — and think about how they can be restructured to make more flexibility possible.  Better yet, have the people in those jobs – not just the individual, but the team as a whole — think about how to use technology, restructure responsibilities and how to collaborate in new ways, to allow for flexible scheduling and remote work.  The process itself – besides leading to good ideas – helps the whole team buy in to the solution.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Be proactive.. If you have an employee who you believe can work well in a flex arrangement and it will be a win-win for him/her and the business, suggest it. The increased productivity, engagement and simply goodwill will be well worth it.

  Karol Rose, Principal:

Try a flex simulation as a way to help managers and employees get comfortable with managing/working remotely. Invite employees who would like to work remotely some or all of the time and their managers to participate in a remote work simulation where they work away from each other in another part of the building or different office for one month. The ‘rule’ is  they cannot have ‘face time’ during this period. Managers need to provide guidance about deliverables and performance without seeing their employees. Employees need to decide what kind of support they need and how best to do their jobs without the usual office resources. Both need to figure out what’s required to make remote work a success in terms of technology and business ‘etiquette’ for things like meetings, client or co-worker needs, etc. They should debrief during the month to determine what’s working and what needs to be fixed. The simulation is a way to practice remote work before committing to doing it all or some of the time.

  Kelly Gouteix, Sales:

Flexibility doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” proposition. Sometimes just working flexibly once or twice a week might be all that you need. With a strong action plan in place for how you will get your work done, you can reassure your manager that you’ve thought through the company’s best interests as well as your own.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Attention all CEOs. We just had ‘Take Your  Sons & Daughters To Work Day’. Follow that up by encouraging parents to visit their child(ren)’s school so the experience can be shared in the classroom and have the parents use the rest of the day to work offsite. Have them share the experience with you.

  Robin Roschke, COO:

We know you want to flex … but cross the chasm and improve productivity through flexible work.  Start by test driving your company’s tools. Here are some ideas:

•  Set aside a half of day and declare NO emails unless you need to send an attachment.  Want to reach a colleague?  Send an IM.
•  Schedule a meeting- a VIRTUAL one….insist that everyone be in a different location and turn the video webcam on; share a document and collaborate in real time.
• Got wikis? Identify a topic that you want the team’s weigh in and capture it via online discussion threads, encourage folks to tag their content too!

  Jessica Smith, Marketing:

Try rearranging your schedule to avoid the longer commute times.   Arrive 1-2 hours earlier and leave 1-2 hours earlier.  If you have a meeting later in the day, try calling in during your commute home (using a hands-free device) or video conference once you’re home.

Here’s our “Shift Happens” video that was shown at the Unconference

Last week, Sandy Burud, Chief Strategy Officer at FlexPaths®, attended the AWLP (Alliance for Work-Life Progress)  Unconference in New Orleans along with other leaders in the work-life space.

After the whirlwind trip, she let me interview her and provided a recap of the unconference.

Was there a running theme that seemed to emerge during the course of the conference?

Sandy:  Where should we go from here in the work-life field – to achieve our common goals

What seemed to be top of everyone’s mind?

Sandy: We need fresh ideas, perspectives.

Was there a common challenge that everyone seemed to be facing?

Sandy: How to blow past attitudinal barriers, being embraced by business decision-makers as a business opportunity, rather than a non-essential nice-to-have.

 Any highlights that stood out for you?

Sandy: It was an ‘unconference’…the whole group (90+) are work-life thought leaders and practitioners, so everyone was part of the collaborative learning, through interactive activities. Lots of motion!  

One highlight was the ‘living history’ – by decade (70s, 80s, 90s, 2000’s, 2010’s), five ‘choral groups’ showed (rather than ‘told’) what the key events/ideas/challenges/solutions of that decade were.  A graphic recorder captured it pictorially.

Another highlight was very creative out-of-the-box thinking sessions designed to break open our thinking.

For example, we heard quite a moving presentation from two gentlemen from Ozanam Inn, a homeless shelter, who shared their personal experience about homelessness in New Orleans.  It was a great example of the discussion point about the social context in which we live…how our communities are part of the total picture and how we can create a more livable and equitable society.

What session did you moderate and what insights emerged?

Sandy: I moderated and provided commentary to the Living History.  It asked:

What have we in this field tried to do?  What have we actually done?  What was the primary goal?  Has that changed?  Who are ‘we’?  Has that changed? Should it?  How has the external environment changed…or not?  How has that impacted the emergence of the field.  

Most importantly, we addressed the question:

Where are we headed and where should we go in order to achieve our goal?

The Living History was showcased through skits and other media that the field of work-life began in response to more women entering the workforce, remaining employed and moving to higher levels when they had children; at this time, their ‘latchkey’ children and the quality care of young children became a focus of concern.  The ‘Employer-supported child care’ issue/industry was born.  Child care consultants who wanted to get employers to provide work-site child care and parenting specialists were the primary drivers and genesis of the profession. 

In the 1980’s, the field began to pay attention to the need to care for other family members besides young children…and the field started to call itself work-family. Referral services (to help people find family care and other services) emerged, as did non-profit research organizations.  In the 1990s the term ‘work-life’ became the nomenclature – and the quality of life at work and out of work became the focus.  Service providers began to proliferate (EAPS, for example), whose innovations and services began to create change.  Employers began to hire ‘work-life professionals’ to start work-life ‘programs’ and those corporate practitioners were the impetus of progress from within companies. 

In 2000, we became aware that it was more than ‘programs’ that were needed, but an organizational culture that supports a new way of working and a new valuing of people as ‘whole people’ whose lives outside of work were to be attended to.  Flexible work came into the conversation big-time in this decade and other terms (human capital – valuing people as assets, not simply replaceable cogs) came into the dialogue.  In the 2010s, three young work-life practitioners showed us the present and the future by using Facebook and social media to communicate the message of the work-life field and to connect our conversation with others outside the event.

What kinds of questions were asked during the session and what were the answers?

Sandy:  What were the obstacles and enablers at each stage and how did we address them?

The external environment played both a positive and negative role.  In the 90s when the economy was booming and companies were hiring and resources were plentiful, there was a proliferation of work-life programs, as employers tripped over each other to be ‘employers of choice’.  Then came the recession and work-life’s image as a ‘perk’ caused it to be threatened.  In the 2000’s, there became more talk of workforce practices like these (e.g., flexible work) being a business imperative – to reduce operating costs and keep key employees engaged (and performance high).

What is your overall summary of the conference now that it’s concluded?

Sandy:  It opened the dialogue up to considering very bold new ideas…now we need to keep the thought process going; to get more granular on where to go, what new partners to include, what new language to use.  We need a continued online and offline conversation to extend the value.

The ‘field’ of work-life probably needs to morph into a more ‘invisible’ trend of reinventing how work is done to give people more autonomy and choice and recognizing trends toward contingent work that change the whole nature of the employment relationship.

So now that you’ve gotten a glimpse into the AWLP Unconference, what are your initial reactions?

If you and your organization also attended the AWLP Unconference, I invite you link up share your own recap here in the comments.

Yesterday, Sandy Burud, Chief Strategy Officer at FlexPaths and Jim Rottman, Global Vice President Human Resources at American Express presented a webinar in partnership with World at Work.

The topic?  A Fully Flexible Workforce: A New Approach to Creating a Sustainable Organization.

In the webinar, Burud and Rottman outlined the five steps toward creating a sustainable organization:

1. Leverage Employee Wellness Promotion
2. Get at Root Causes of Wellness and Performance
3. Expand Flexible Work Design
4. Connect Wellbeing and Engagement
5. Foster a Healthy Culture

The webinar was based on a white paper, provided below, jointly issued by FlexPaths and American Express.

Creating Sustainable Organizations: How Flexible Work Improves Well-being and Performance View more documents from FlexPaths.

I asked Sandy Burud to share some commentary afterward…

One of the big questions on the audience’s mind was how to bring leaders along to be champions of flexible work.  I mentioned an experience I had meeting with DuPont executives (the CEO, the CFO ) as I wrote up their fascinating case study for my book, Leveraging the New Human Capital. I was aware of what caused these leaders to change how they thought about flexible work – why DuPont had come to embrace it with full leadership support.  It wasn’t data about the savings that could be achieved or a specific ROI, valuable as that was that changed the leaders.  It was logic – seeing a new connection – a cause and effect they were not aware of before.  They had what they called a “BFO – a blinding flash of the obvious”. In their case it was seeing a structural change in their workforce — realizing most people (not an isolated few) could no longer could or wanted to focus exclusively on work — even during work hours.  That their lives were much more complicated than that and it meant they had to work and be managed differently.  That was true even for the very leaders I was speaking with.

Don’t want to miss our next webinar?  Be sure to sign up to receive our work. smart. newsletter for upcoming webinars, events, and insights around work-life effectiveness.