Delaware Employment Law Blog

In time for National Work and Family Month, Families and Work Institute (FWI) released today full notes from conference calls it convened in September with policy leaders from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain’s campaigns.  

The calls focused on how, if elected, the two candidates would address work life issues ranging from sick leave to health care to early education and child care. “This is the first ever Presidential campaign in which both nominees have formally articulated their positions in this arena,” according to Ellen Galinski, President of FWI. While much has been written about how Vice Presidential candidates Biden and Palin manage their own work and family lives, and where Palin and Biden have been affected by work-life issues in the past, these calls move us from their personal to their policy stands on these issues. 

Among the questions addressed by the campaigns during the calls were:

• What are the work and family life issues the candidate feels are most important to address?

• What is the candidate’s position on workplace flexibility? What are the roles of the government, employers and employees in providing workplace flexibility?

• Should the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) be changed? In what ways? Should it be paid? By whom? Should sick leave be established and paid? By whom and for whom?

• How would the candidate address issues of the time famine that so many employees experience?

• How does each candidate plan to address the impact of the gas crisis on commuting employees?  

• How can work life issues help address the spiraling cost of health care?

• What would each candidate do to help the low-wage working family? And how would your candidate address narrowing the gap between men and women’s pay for all workers, especially for older workers?

• What is the candidate’s position on education and care for the first three years of life for those families who need and want to work- and on universal pre-K?  What proposals does each candidate have for after-school care?

• What if anything, does either party plan to do to support the 45% of employees taking care of our growing elderly population?  

The full notes from the call with Senator Obama's campaign and with Senator McCain's campaign are linked here in pdf format.  These notes provide great insight into the positions of the candidates on work-life and work-family issues. 

Delaware is all a-frenzy with the announcement of our very own Senator Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president. If you’ve seen The News Journal over the several days, you’ve seen the almost front-to-back coverage of Joe. With Barack Obama still fighting to win over many Hillary Clinton’s women supporters, there’s been considerable focus in the media already as to Joe Biden’s record on women’s and work-life balance issues.

We’ve previously posted on Barack Obama’s position on women’s and work-life balance issues. What kind of work-and-family experience has Joe Biden had, both in his personal life and as a policy maker?

The Wall Street Journal’s blog “The Juggle” noted Biden’s personal family tragedy: the 1972 car accident which killed his wife and infant daughter and left his two sons badly injured. To care for them while continuing his political career, he commuted daily by train between Wilmington, Del., and Washington, never securing a Washington residence.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, some alleged that he was too easy on Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and too hard on Anita Hill, a former co-worker of Thomas' who had accused the federal judge of sexual harassment. Some even maintain that "he very self-consciously tried to shore up his support from women voters after the Anita Hill episode."

Although Biden is perhaps best known for his focus on foreign policy, he has also had a hand in legislation targeting work-and-family issues. According to a cached version of Biden’s senatorial campaign Website (which since this weekend has automatically referred visitors to the Obama-Biden campaign site), the Senator is a co-sponsor of the Healthy Families Act, which would require employers with more than 15 employees to offer seven paid sick days a year. In the 1990s, he was the primary sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act and supported the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a family member.

Work-life balance, toxic bosses, and generation gaps.  Three of our favorite topics at the Delaware Employment Law Blog.  They're also the focus of a Special Edition of Businessweek.  The magazine, on stands Monday, has a feature called Business@Work.  The workplace special report was created, really, by readers.  In surveys, blogs, and polls, readers talked about their top concerns at work and their strategies and practical tips for how they deal with it all.  The topics covered include, in addition to the ones above, how to stay creative and entrepreneurial in uncertain economic times, time management, and managing the bureaucracy of Corporate America.

There were lots of fascinating tidbits among the nine pages of text.  One of the main articles deals with the initiatives being taken by employers that focus on their employees' "happiness."   Go figure.  A "happiness initiative" is not necessarily a new idea.  After all, that's what employee benefits are, for the most part.  But some of the efforts being made by companies like Safeco, IBM, and BMW N. America, are new to me. 

How would your employees like the idea of being flown to Disneyland for the day--families included.  (If you like it enough to transfer, you'd want to apply at the L.A. office of law firm DLA Piper).  Or maybe you'd be interested in hiring a Chief Happiness Officer, who, if he's like the CHO at London ad agency, iris Worldwide, is in charge of managing regular pub crawls.  And for the academics in the group, there is happiness learning just around the corner.  Companies including Qantas and Sanofi-Aventis have called in experts to assess the emotional health of their employees. 

So are these "perks" really seen as perks by the employees who receive them?  Or does the fact that they occur during working time with coworkers and monitored by management make them any less enticing?

Employee retention has garnered a great deal of attention as a result of the notoriously short stints of Generation Y employees.  The battle for talent requires more strategic tactics than ever.  But, as many employers have learned, getting them to stick around after they arrive is just as difficult.  As a result, more and more employers are spending more and more resources on employee perks of every variety.  But are some jobs just so unbearable that no perk can entice employees to stay?

BNet has a recent article explaining the "five telltale signs that recession is putting your organization in a chokehold, and possibly making your job unbearable."

Four of the five signs that your organization is in trouble and that your job is about to get "crummy:"

1.  Loyalty goes out the window. Employees, who normally work to please others, with whom they've developed an emotional relationship, instead become transaction-oriented.  Instead of wanting to satisfy those people in the workplace who are important to them, employees turn inward and do the minimum required to satisfy their obligations.

2.  Bad news comes from the top.  Middle managers get stuck with giving bad news that they didn't create or relaying tough decisions that they did not make.  This makes them an undeserving target.

3.  Office politics get as heated as any campaign season.  When employees smell the fear of layoffs, they switch from the defensive to an offensive approach.  To avoid the chopping block, they start pointing fingers as others, hoping to divert attention away from themselves.

4.  Innovations come to a stop.  There is no room for change, so goes the line of thinking during tough financial times.  Inhibiting creative thinking is stifling to many of the best employees.  And those who aren't stifled stand to suffer even more because the ideas they do offer are shot down, leading to hurt feelings. 

There's no prediction of a sudden economic upswing.  Until there is, employers should be on the lookout for signs that employees are becoming dissatisfied.  As much effort should be made to prevent layoffs as goes towards preventing employee disengagement.

Employers who offer subsidized and on-site day care as part of their employee-benefits plan are very popular.  Employer-sponsored day care is a high-demand employee perk.  It is also a very difficult and costly benefit to implement. Google has recently learned this first-hand.

According to to a Joe Nocera of the New York Times, in an article titled, On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble, there has been a recent brouhaha about this very topic.  According to the article, Google has implemented a five-quarter plan to raise the cost of company-subsidized day care by approximately 75%.  [Gulp!]

Subsidized and on-site day care certainly aren't yet common but they've been around for more than a decade at many large organizations.  Google's own experience with day care has been a unique one.  Google began offering day care more than three years ago.  After devoting substantial efforts to it, the program offered only 200 (highly coveted) day care spots with a wait list of more than 700--resulting in a two-year wait for new parents and employees.  And the cost was no small thing.  Nocera writes that the cost to the company was $37,000 per child per year, as compared with the industry standard of $12,000 per year. 

The hyperinflation in cost will certainly reduce that waiting list. And if it doesn't, Google's recent practice of charging people several hundred dollars to stay on the waiting list should do the trick.  As a back-up, though, Google is opening new facilities, which should add another 300 spots. 

Sunday night, I had a meeting with about 10 people at my office.  When I arrived a few minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin, it was clear that the air conditioning was not operating correctly.  For those not familiar with Delaware summers, no air condition is not a good thing.   The conference room was stuffy already and bound to get worse. I immediately adjusted the thermostat on the wall, no response.  A call to the night desk for assistance brought the bad news -- "the air-conditioning system is shutdown at 6 o'clock on Sundays until the next morning." 

The guard at the desk then added, "it's hot down here too."  Misery loves company.

As I suffered through the meeting, with the lights dimmed to keep the conference room as tolerable as possible, my mind began to wonder.  I began thinking about how office temperature is a very frequent topic in our office.  Somebody is always complaining that it's either too hot or too cold.

After the meeting, I did some quick surfing of the Internet.  Turns out that the Sunday New York Times has an article on the topic of office temperature.  The article explores why some workers (usually female) are more likely to be cold and why some (usually male) employees complain that the office is hot.  It also cites a Cornell University professor who says that raising the office temperature from a chilly 64 to a balmy 77 increases productivity and lowers mistakes. 

As I type this post, everything has returned to normal. The thermostat in my office is appropriately turned down to 65 and the office is becoming nicely chilled.  It won't belong before someone enters with the familiar refrain "what do you have this thing set at?"  In the past, my usual response has been, "I don't know, I didn't touch it."  

But maybe a new response is appropriate, given my obsession with going green at work and at home, and my new-found knowledge about the correlation between office temperature and employee productivity?  . . . Naaaaaah.

A downward economy is the perfect time to motivate employees and reward worker bees.

With the slowed financial landscape, not all companies can raise salaries and offer big bonuses this year. In a recent report by msn.com, employees stated that their biggest concerns included the price of fuel, and they’ve sacrificed going out to dinner and the movies in order to make ends meet.

Employers, this is your big opening. Instead of waiting until the end of your fiscal year to boost morale, why not get a jump on it now? Although a gift card cannot replace cold, hard, cash, keep in mind that one of a company’s most important resources are its people. If you can keep your talented employees happy during less-than-steller economic times, you can certainly keep them during an economic boon.

Here are some suggestions to reward your best performers:

(1) Time. Employees increasingly complain that they cannot balance life and work. Here’s your opportunity to improve the balance. When an employee has just finished an overtime project (perhaps without the overtime pay?) give them flex-time off. This gesture accomplishes several goals: your employee feels like their hard work has been acknowledged, they realize that “the man” remembers employees have lives outside of work, and you can promote how your company favors a work-life balance.

(2) Cake. Yes, Marie, let them eat cake. This one is simple. Each month, purchase cake to recognize employment anniversaries, birthdays, whatever. Just let your employees take a break for a piece of cake. Trust me, if you get a good baker, everyone will look forward to this month’s “cake day.”

(3) Gift cards. Who said there was no free lunch? An easy way to recognize an employee’s performance is with an inexpensive gift card to the movies, dinner, or your local gas station. Remember, these were on the list of things employees were most concerned about- the cost of fuel and giving up entertainment to make ends meet.

Now, not everyone will appreciate your efforts. National Public Radio recently reported on the growing number of “happiness committees” cropping up at large companies. The committee’s purpose was to surprise employees (a.k.a. worker bees) with unexpected milkshakes and cookies to entice employees to work late that day, or to reward them for working late the day before. Not all of the bees appreciated the effort, and some said they would rather the company take the Happiness Committee’s budget, divide it among the bees, and send a check appropriate for people. In any event, working towards keeping employees happy is never bad for business.