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Team-based flexible work programs are pushing into the mainstream

Posted on 08. Nov, 2005 posted by Bill in Employment News

Team-based flexible work programs are pushing into the mainstream

Laurie Dowd, a manager of PNC Financial Service’s PFPC, says of the team approach, ”We rely on each other, and it works.”

Flexibility is high on everybody’s wish list, but as often as not, it’s still a special perk that’s tough to wrestle from a reluctant boss. How can we make money with a workforce that’s sometimes here and sometimes not, ask management skeptics? We can’t afford to have epidemic flexibility, they say. A small but powerful batch of workplace experiments now percolating across the country is providing some of the best evidence yet that the skeptics are wrong. Pilot programs in 10 companies are injecting flexibility in some of the most inflexible corners of corporate America — call centers, mailrooms, a maintenance department — while reaping impressive gains in productivity. The project, managed by The Bold Initiative, a nonprofit consulting group, and funded by the Alfred J. Sloan Foundation, is pushing flexibility further into the mainstream.

And yet the groundbreaking strategy is disarmingly simple: Employee teams are allowed to redesign their jobs so that they can work flexibly and efficiently. Chubb Corp. supervisor Julio Bernal got together over bagels and juice with his staff of six casualty claims adjusters in Phoenix and hashed out ways for the whole team to try different schedules that would also boost performance.

By working 80 hours across nine days and beginning at 7 a.m., Bernal now is able to find quiet morning time to knock off relentless piles of paperwork. Plus, he takes his 4-year-old son, Corbin, to preschool on his extra day off every other week. ”He tells me, ‘It’s the coolest thing when you take me to school,’?” says Bernal. ”These are the things that are priceless.” At Chubb’s Western Claims Service Center, where Bernal and 20 others took part in the Bold pilot program, unscheduled time off was halved and productivity rose 5 percent in three months. The insurer is preparing to adopt the strategy at a number of claim centers nationwide.

Similar success stories arose out of initial pilot programs this year at nine other companies: Frito-Lay, Gannett Co., Johnson & Johnson, Macy’s Northwest, Pitney Bowes, Puget Sound Energy, Prudential Financial, Weyerhaeuser, and Nextel Communications. Backlogs, absenteeism, and overtime costs dropped. Productivity, accuracy, teamwork, customer satisfaction rose. Most of the companies are expanding the programs. ”You can’t argue with the results we’ve seen out of this,” says Judy Sammarco, a vice president of human resources for Warren, N.J.-based Chubb.

In many ways, the time is ripe for flexibility to broaden into an accepted management tool. This week, the nonprofit Corporate Voices for Working Families will release a report showing how flexible work programs are boosting the bottom line at 28 major corporations. And pockets of unsung successes are scattered around the country.

”We rely on each other, and it works,” says Laurie Dowd, a manager in the Boston office of PFPC, the administrative processing arm of PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. Dowd and attorney Teresa Hamlin work part time, and Hamlin largely telecommutes, so they meet weekly with five other team members to make sure their schedules and workload are in sync. Their boss, Linda Hoard, says the unusual situation has fostered high levels of cooperation and individual autonomy in the team. ”In a sense, it’s bonded them,” says Hoard.

It’s important to remember that many workplaces aren’t as progressive. It took a year and dozens of no’s from companies before Bold chief executive Bea Fitzpatrick found 10 willing to try. Flexible work options are often unavailable to low-level workers, and employees who do adopt them fear career penalties, according to a report by the Families and Work Institute. Even firms with flexibility programs often lack a supportive culture and buy-in from managers.

But there’s one last bit of good news from the Bold pilots: Many management skeptics became converts.

Greg Thiessen, director of the Seattle internal human resources call center of forest products company Weyerhaeuser, says his ideas of how to manage people changed after 19 of his call reps and specialists joined the Bold program. They redesigned their work to gain more flexibility and more efficiency, including quiet blocks of time for complex cases. As a result, accuracy and speed rose by several measures.

”Eight to five is a very easy way to manage. You know where your people are. You see them in their chairs or not,” says Thiessen. ”I consider myself a fairly young and aggressive leader, but it’s surprising how unconsciously entrenched you are in the 8 to 5. It forced us to challenge a lot of our

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