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Search - 79 Results - date is 1993 and latch-key kids
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER January 26, 1993, Tuesday
Copyright 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
January 26, 1993, Tuesday / FINAL
SECTION: LIVING
LENGTH: MEDIUM: 64 LINES, Pg. C3
LENGTH: 560 words
HEADLINE: HOT LINE REACHES OUT TO LONELY KIDS
BYLINE: M.L. Lyke P-I Reporter
BODY: "I was a latch-key kid," says Kyle Duarte. "I got lonely. I remember wanting to go out and
play, but I couldn't go out. It was kind of scary.
"After a while, I got used to it. Then I started thinking about breaking the rules. I never did, but I
thought about it."
Duarte, a 16-year-old at Redmond High School, is one of the volunteers who answer phones at the
Camp Fire hot line for children stuck home alone. The "phone friend" line - 1-(800)-KIDTALK, 3-6
p.m. weekdays - has been in operation since 1986.
Kids call bored. Kids call lonely. Kids call scared. Kids call hungry. "The thing that bothers me the
most is when it's getting late, and they don't know what they're going to have for dinner. There's no
food and they're hungry," said Kerrie Ramby, hot line coordinator.
Demographic data indicate there may be more than 10 million school-age children left alone before
and after school every day in America.
"Most people acknowledge that preschool kids need to be in some kind of adult care when parents
are at work. That's a community norm," said Karen Tvedt, chief of the state's Office of Child Care.
"But particularly in low-income families, when the kids get in school, you start getting tradeoffs
between buying groceries or buying shoes and paying for day care."
"And when kids get a little older - 9, 10, 11 - they start having a voice. Sometimes they decide child
care's a 'baby' thing to do."
It's a difficult trade-off. It can be a dangerous one, too.
Jennifer Murray is one of Seattle School District's 40 family support workers, people sent out to visit
homes when teachers report problems. One is truancy.
Some children are kept home to care for younger brothers and sisters. "You go to the home, find a
9-year-old in charge of three younger siblings. The parents don't say, 'I'm keeping the child home
because I need a baby sitter. What they say is, 'She overslept."
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Other children simply ditch school once Mom goes to work. And continue to ditch it. "It might be
because they're having academic or social problems. It's more comfortable to stay at home and not
confront the issues here at school," said Murray.
"If they're not around a lot, it snowballs. Kids and teachers don't get to know them, and that feeds
on their feelings of insecurity. It's a downward spiral."
Murray and other child welfare workers sympathize with parents trying to make ends meet. A boss
changes shifts at work. The school schedule changes. A child is sick - and there's no extended family
around to care for him. "It's not just irresponsible people making these decisions," she said.
Skyrocketing day-care rates fuel the problem. Average cost at a Seattle child-care center is $ 130 a
week for an infant, $100 a week for a preschooler. Before- and after-school care averages $90 a
week.
Typical minimum wage in the state is $150 a week.
Something's got to give. In the short run, it may be day-care fees. In the long run, the child-welfare
advocates warn, it could be the kids.
"I worry about the poor little kids being home alone and lonely," said Laura Wells. As director of
Child Care Resource Center Referral, she hears the stories of hundreds of desperate parents.
"We as a society are going to pay the price. We don't know what it is yet, but we're going to pay it."
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PAGE
2
11TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1993 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company
ASAP
Copyright 1993 Peggy O'Mara
Mothering
December 22, 1993
SECTION: No. 69 ; Pg. 22; ISSN: 0733-3013
LENGTH: 571 words
HEADLINE: Family support beyond the bottom line; Family and Medical Leave Act
BODY:
The twice-vetoed Family and Medical Leave Ct (FMLA) went into effect two
months ago. Now, parents who work for companies with 50 or more employees are
entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for their newborns. Prior to the
bill's passage earlier this year, about 70 percent of medium- and large-sized
companies were offering family leave policies--many of them far more generous.
According to a survey by Towers Perrin, a New York-based management consulting
firm, 58 percent of 701 companies provided unpaid family leave, 9 percent
provided both paid and unpaid leave, and 3 percent offered paid leave. More than
90 percent of these businesses stated that their costs were not significant.
(The Christian Science Monitor, 21 June 1993, p. 7)
"The recent national debate over whether parents should be allowed three
months of unpaid leave is ridiculous,' says Amitai Etzioni in his book The
Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda
(Crown, 1993). "No one can form the minimal bonding a newborn child requires in
12 weeks Corporations should provide six months of paid leave, and another
year and a half of unpaid leave, with the government financing six months of
the unpaid leave from public funds. "Many European countries do at least this
much," he notes. "Even in the Ukraine," says Peg Lopata, a Mothering contributor
who recently returned from Crimea, "new mothers get 18 months of fully paid
leave plus 18 months of unpaid leave to care for their babies."
The Rose Garden signing ceremony for the FMLA has not silenced the cry for
government support, corporate flexibility, and family-friendly perspectives. At
this year's meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC,
researchers reported that parents with multiple caregiving tasks are
experiencing emotional stress in the workplace, and that employers must develop
ways to help these workers fulfill their family responsibilities. Work overload,
pay inequities (a woman's earnings average 70 percent of what a man is paid for
the same labor), and inflexible work schedules must all be "constructively
reexamined," they concluded. (University of California, Berkeley, Wellness
Letter, July 1993, p. 6)
Parenthood should be "welcomed with ceremony, thankfulness and celebration,"
not degraded as a workplace disruption that "weakens employees' attachments to
their jobs, increases absenteeism and reduced productivity," explains Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead, a research associate with the Institute for American Values in
New York. "We call for a well-trained work force to meet the challenges of the
new century," she adds. "But we continue to create pressures and incentives for
parents, our society's most important teachers, to spend more and more time away
from their children." (Los Angeles Times, 17 May 1991)
PAGE
3
Already, the air is sweetening at the Department of Justice. After paying
tribute to her mother, Attorney General Janet Reno announced to her staff this
past spring: "I want to do everything I can in this Department to put the
family first, and to develop new attitudes and programs that will enable people
to achieve their professional goals, of having the opportunity to spend quality
time with their family. ("Address to DOJH Employees," 6 April 1993) For a free
transcript of her speech, call the Department of Justice, Office of Public
Affairs, at 202-514-2007.
GRAPHIC: Other
IAC-NUMBER: IAC 14658129
IAC-CLASS: Health
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 28, 1995
PAGE
24
76TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1993 The Press Enterprise Co.
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE (RIVERSIDE, CA.)
October 27, 1993 Wednesday ALL ZONES
SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C01
LENGTH: 1290 words
HEADLINE: Equal (house) work for equal sexes;
UCR researcher's family is living example of his contention that there's no such
thing as 'woman's work'
BYLINE: Gordon Johnson, The Press-Enterprise
BODY:
RIVERSIDE
By the duty chart posted on his refrigerator, Scott Coltrane
knows it's laundry day.
Once he's stuffed the dirty clothes into the washer, he'll mop
the kitchen floor, then start dinner for his wife and two children.
Coltrane doesn't like housework much, but he's a man who
practices what he preaches.
A sociology professor at the University of California,
Riverside, Coltrane is one of the new breed of husbands who
believes in doing his fair share around the house.
He's even written a book about it called "The Family Man:
Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity. "
Due out next year from Oxford University Press, the book
explores the change in husbands as money pressures force more and
more wives to work outside the home, leaving men not only to pick
up their own underwear, but to scrub the bathroom tile while
they're at it.
Tall, with a jogger's leanness, the bearded Coltrane looks like
a man who can handle a dust broom or a framing hammer with equal
ease.
Sitting in his campus office surrounded by books of his trade -
"Sexual Politics," "Gender and Society in the New Guinea
Highlands," "The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies, " -
and the like, he warmed to his subject.
The 1950s icon of the father as the breadwinner and the mother
as the aproned homemaker striving for whiter whites is disappearing
fast, he said.
Citing numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Coltrane said that in 1960, there were twice as many families with
PAGE
25
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE (RIVERSIDE, CA.) October 27, 1993 Wednesday
only the husband working as there were dual-income families.
In 1975, the ratio stayed about the same. But in 1990, the
situation flip-flopped, with twice as many wives and husbands
working as there were families where only the husband worked.
Labor statistics indicate that in about 75 percent of America's
more than 33 million families, both husbands and wives work.
With more women earning money to bolster family incomes, women
have been asking for, and getting, extra help from their husbands
with both housework and child care, he said.
In more than half the families where both work, housework is
shared to some extent.
"Families are faced with an overload of things to do and not
enough time to do them, so by necessity, fathers are pitching in,"
he said.
To tap into the national scene, Coltrane relies heavily on a
survey of 13,000 households conducted by the University of
Wisconsin. He conducts in-depth interviews with families in this
area to get a better feel for how they'r coping.
In his research, Coltrane found that the amount of housework the
husband does depends on the amount of money the wife makes.
If you have a woman who is a part-time teacher's aide married to
an attorney, the man doesn't feel as obligated to help out.
But if you have a woman working as a highly paid program
coordinator married to a school teacher, he willingly does more.
"So the general finding is that it makes a difference who earns
what and how important those jobs are considered by those people,
he said.
As time goes by, men's and women's jobs are becoming more equal
in pay and prestige, he said. The employment picture for men has
degraded in real earnings since the 1970s, while earning power for
women has gone up. And Coltrane expects the trend to continue.
When jobs finally do equalize, he contends, there will be more
sharing.
Not that everybody wants it to be that way, but if there's a
commitment to a clean house and to well-cared-for children, sharing
is the common-sense choice, he said.
But the changes evolve slowly, much too slowly for many women,
he said. In most households, even in homes where work sharing is
stressed, women usually do more, especially when it comes to child
care.
PAGE
26
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE (RIVERSIDE, CA.) October 27, 1993 Wednesday
However, as working women alter the division of labor in the
home, fathers end up spending more time with the children, feeding,
clothing and nurturing them.
Coltrane's studies with UCR colleague Masako Ishii-Kuntez
indicate that many men think it's important to spend more time with
their offspring.
Men who delay fatherhood into the late 20s are usually better at
child care, Coltrane said. They've had time to concentrate on
career, and are ready to devote more time to children.
And many who were raised in the 1950s and 1960s, when fathers
weren't around much, compensate by trying to be better at parenting.
Coltrane takes exception to those who consider shared housework
and child care emasculating.
In his book, Coltrane shakes his head at a notion touted by poet
Robert Bly in his best-selling book "Iron John," that men have
become passive and naive, blindly taking abuse from women who enjoy
dominating them.
Taking Bly's "mythopoetic" philosophy to heart, men across the
country have been drumming, dancing and sharing their feelings at
weekend retreats to regain their lost sense of manhood.
Coltrane writes: "In fact, ancient chest-pounding rituals are
likely to contribute to increased gender antagonism rather than
promoting some idyllic balance between fierce men and yielding
women. "
He bases some of his opinion on a cross-cultural study of 90
non-industrial societies that he did in 1988. He holds that
societies with strict dichotomies between the sexes, such as the
Mundurucu Indians of the central Amazonian tropical forest, the
sexes are usually violent societies were men dominate women.
Coltrane doesn't see himself as some kind of fire-breathing
feminist. He just thinks women deserve a fair shake.
He has conventional roots. He grew up in a traditional
middle-class family in the Los Angeles area. His mother tended to
hearth and home. His father, like most men at the time, pretty much
limited his chores to mowing the lawn.
Growing up, Coltrane did the typical boy things, like playing
sports, but his mother taught him there was no law against learning
to vacuum, clean up his room, or cook a meal now and then.
While at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he met and
married classmate Wendy Wheeler. His first job was as a city
planner for Santa Cruz, but academia pulled at him, so in the early
1980s he re-enrolled as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz to
pursue a doctorate in sociology.
PAGE
27
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE (RIVERSIDE, CA.) October 27, 1993 Wednesday
Meanwhile, he fathered a son, Colin, and soon his studies
drifted toward learning more about children in society.
Despite his hectic graduate studies, Coltrane wanted to be a
good father, so he found himself backpacking his infant son with
him to do the laundry, where he could play with Colin between loads.
His early child-rearing experiences set the shared-housework
pattern that prevails in the Coltrane home today.
Wendy teaches third grade at Victoria Elementary School in
Riverside and stays plenty busy. Colin, now 14, and his 12-year-old
sister Shannon, spend long hours rehearsing with the Riverside Children's
Theater in addition to school work. And Coltrane has a
full dance card with research and teaching duties at the university.
But nobody wriggles out of housework.
Most heavy housework is done weekends, with Wendy doing the
shopping and vacuuming the rugs, Coltrane mopping floors and
cleaning one bathroom, Colin mowing the lawn and cleaning another
bathroom, and Shannon doing some laundry and the third bathroom.
Coltrane's convinced shared housework has been a positive
influence on his chldren.
Colin "doesn't like housework, but then none of us really do,"
Coltrane said, "but he does it or it's no movies that weekend. " And
Shannon doesn't assume that she's responsible for picking, cooking
or caring for people.
"I think both of them will have a more equal view of what a
good relationship is, Coltrane said.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO [Caption] Jay Racz; The Press-Enterprise; Scott Coltrane,
sociology researcher and father.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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The Washington Times, April 4, 1993
Copyright 1993 News World Communications, Inc.
The Washington Times
View Related Topics
April 4, 1993, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: Part A; MONEY; Pg. A13
LENGTH: 2682 words
HEADLINE: Inflexible hours ;
Without family-oriented benefits, many employees of small compnaies feel trapped by their
workplace
BYLINE: Laura Cianci; SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
BODY:
"That about does it," Tricia Jones told her staff as she picked up the last of the half-dozen boxes in
her executive office suite. "Time to go."
In March, Mrs. Jones (not her real name) felt compelled to leave her $55,000-a-year job as an
account executive, despite the recessionary economy, because she wanted what so many other
women in the workplace want - flexibility at work to allow her to do a better job of balancing her
family and work lives.
Many large corporations over the past decade have recognized compelling reasons to offer family
benefits: the labor pool is shrinking, the globalization of the business world carries a need for
diversity of staff, and work force demographics are changing. Work-family experts note that already
86 percent of women who work are married and three out of five new workers through the year
2005 will be women.
Reports from companies with family-oriented benefits show that when employers help employees to
balance work and family life, the employees are happier and more productive.
But few medium-size and small companies offer family benefits. And even though these companies
often end up losing their more talented and productive workers, they are not going to change their
traditional, 9-to-5 concepts about the workplace in the near future, experts say.
Mrs. Jones, 32, who lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter, is consulting for international
business organizations until she can get a job in a firm that will provide flexible hours.
"I haven't given up my career; I'm just setting my own hours," she said in a recent interview.
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Martha Redstrom-Plourd, senior vice president of Right Associates, an international outplacement
service with offices in Washington, said that in many cases, if finances allow it, women in
middle-management jobs will leave their company if it refuses to be flexible about work hours.
"Not all of them [women employees who have family responsibilities] are willing to stay and fight the
traditional structure because it divides their energies too much," Ms. Redstrom-Plourd said.
"In some respects," she added, "these companies are giving us the opportunity to create our own
solutions.
When we are in a company that will not work with us, we create a different vehicle to
meet our career objectives."
In Mrs. Jones' case, she had worked for nine years for a management company with offices in
Washington and other major U.S. cities. She started at the company as an assistant, earning
$14,000 annually, and worked her way up by putting in 80-hour workweeks and traveling two to
three months a year. She says she postponed plans for a husband and family until she achieved her
career and financial goals.
Three years ago, Mrs. Jones got married and, a year later, became pregnant. She worked through
her pregnancy and even worked several weeks of her maternity leave.
"I always felt that if I worked hard and paid my dues, I would reap the benefits," she said.
After her daughter's birth, Mrs. Jones decided she wanted to spend more time at home, partly
because her job still required her to travel two and three months out of the year.
In an age of family benefits such as flex-time, child care, elder care, job sharing, alternate work
schedules, home-based work and compressed workweeks, Mrs. Jones thought her request for more
flexible work hours she asked to work from home one or two days a week when circumstances
allowed would be agreeable to her supervisors.
But Mrs. Jones discovered, as many women who work for small companies have found, the benefits
so often described in the popular press seem to apply only to larger companies.
The first indication Mrs. Jones had that her boss "didn't have a high regard for women with family
responsibilities," was when she was told she wouldn't be compensated for work she was doing at
home during her maternity leave.
"He then outlined an incredible work load for my return," she said. Furious, she returned to work two
weeks earlier than scheduled. "I'm still emotional about it even after all this time. My husband feels I
wasn't being valued by the company and he's right."
Mrs. Jones couldn't afford to leave her job at that time, and ignoring the evidence, she continued to
harbor expectations that "I could prove myself capable in spite of my working-mother status" and the
company would come around.
But instead of becoming more receptive to her request to work at home, Mrs. Jones' bosses made no
concessions.
In February, when she watched President Clinton sign the Family and Medical Leave Act into law,
Mrs. Jones thought her time had come.
"I told my husband my bosses will have to listen to me now, at least this law will bring enough
pressure to bear to make them give working at home a day or two a week a trial run," she said.
She renewed her request, even offering to take a corresponding cut in pay, but to no avail.
"My boss wouldn't even consider it. He said I couldn't be out of the office because it's not good for
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the clients or the company. That's pretty ridiculous," she said, "because we travel all the time and
we're still managing our other clients."
She finally approached the company's chairman with her request and was told that "nothing could be
done." A week later, she decided to leave the company to try her luck as an independent consultant.
Dana Friedman, co-president of Families and Work Institute, a New York research firm, said Mrs.
Jones' experience was not at all unusual for women working for smaller companies.
"The vast majority of medium and small companies are like the one [Mrs. Jones] worked for. Even in
some large companies with family benefits, you have individual managers that don't subscribe to
[the benefits]," Ms. Friedman said.
Workplace experts say that Mrs. Jones' expectations were reasonable and that even in today's slow
economy, wise employers recognize that family benefits such as flex-time will help to attract and
retain valued employees.
"The demographics of the work force have changed, and more women and dual-career families make
up the work force than ever before," observed Bob Abramms, senior associate of ODT Inc., a
management consulting and publishing firm in Amherst, Mass. "Work and family are not separate
anymore because there is no longer someone at home taking care of the family as there was in the
past."
Workplace statistics indicate a shrinking labor pool. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
between 1975 and 1990, the work force in the United States grew by 1.9 percent a year. However,
that growth will slow to 1.3 percent a year through 2005.
At the same time, the presence of women in the work force, which was 45 percent in 1990, will
increase annually by 1.6 percent to 47 percent by 2005.
The majority of these working women are mothers.
Cleveland-based 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women, which monitors workplace trends
for women, reported that in 1991, 75 percent of mothers with children between the ages of 6 and
13 were working, as were more than half of mothers with toddlers. Most were employed in medium
to small companies. Moreover, the association found, more than 80 percent of companies with fewer
than 50 employees had no family-leave policies.
Large companies have responded to the changes in the workplace.
A 1992 Hewitt Association survey of 1,028 primarily large companies found that 58 percent offered
flexible time arrangements for at least some groups of employees via job sharing, work-at-home and
part-time work options.
"A significant portion of large employers is already offering flexible work schedules and more will do
so," said Christine Seltz, public relations manager for Hewitt Associates in Lincolnshire, III., an
international consulting firm specializing in employee compensation benefits.
But the vast majority of workers are employed by small and medium-sized businesses, which have
yet to join the national trend. The National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group
based in Washington, reports that as of 1991, there were about 7,000 companies with 500 or more
employees. But there were 5.8 million companies in the country, three-quarters of which were small
or medium companies.
Experts say smaller companies offer fewer family benefits because they think they are too costly,
they fear loss of control over workers, or see potential for discrimination lawsuits - executives think if
they grant a concession to one employee, they may be forced to grant it to others.
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There is also a historical, cultural resistance to flexibility in companies, said Bruce Wilkinson,
president of Workplace Consultants Inc. in New Orleans. At the heart of the resistance is the fear that
managers will get into trouble if they don't have a uniform work-hour policy.
"Flexibility can become a problem when a manager allows one employee to work at home one day a
week and not another. There has to be a consistent policy," Mr. Wilkinson said.
He is confident that the family leave bill, the 1991 Civil Rights Act and the Americans With
Disabilities Act (ADA) will help lower the resistance and change management culture.
"Forced flexibility in certain jobs is going to occur as a result of ADA legislation," Mr. Wilkinson said.
"You can see how it works by looking at the seat-belt laws. Few people wore seat belts until it was
mandated. Now, if we rescinded the law, most people would continue to wear them because we
changed the culture."
The ADA, he explained, will require employers to make accommodations to employees with
disabilities, and eventually the notion of making concessions - or becoming flexible - will spread to
the entire work force.
But currently even when companies adopt family benefits and top management is involved, Mr.
Wilkinson and others agree, there are no guarantees that middle management will follow them. In
recognition of this problem, some large companies have hired family-benefit experts to sensitize
middle managers to changes in company policy.
For example, D.C.-based Marriott Corp., which employs 200,000 people worldwide, just launched a
supervisory training program for managers in its hotel division to acquaint them with work-family
issues.
"It's designed to handle the resistance managers may have to a new management tool like an
alternate work arrangement," said Donna Klein, director of Marriott's Work and Life Department.
Alternate work arrangements include working only mornings or only nights, working one day a week
at home, compressed workweeks - four 10-hour days, for example - or other time configurations.
Marriott already offers a wide menu of work-family benefits, including a child development center
that serves children until they enter kindergarten, said Ms. Klein. Some 55 percent of the company's
work force is women, as are 42 percent of all managers, she added.
Many large companies have begun to view family benefits as crucial elements to recruit and retain
talented workers, said Daniel Dreyer, research analyst with the Conference Board, a business
research organization in New York. He noted that 350 to 400 primarily large companies have hired
family-benefit program managers or directors.
"Ten years ago, there was no such thing as family managers or directors of work and family
programs. These are very business-oriented positions. This shows work-family issues have moved up
on the corporate agenda because there are definite competitive business reasons for providing
them," Mr. Dreyer said.
"But most smaller employers, to date, don't realize these programs can improve attitudes and
performance at very little costs to the company. It will take 15 years before we will make strong
inroads in small businesses."
"I feel there is opportunity for a greater number of ad hoc or informal arrangements [in smaller and
medium companies] than there is in larger organizations, because they're in smaller plants and
management and office people usually know each other," he added.
Mr. Dreyer further predicted that the family leave act will act as a catalyst for change for companies
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with more than 50 employees. "Now that they have to provide for family and medical leaves, it could
lead to the recognition of the need for other programs," he said.
Mr. Wilkinson of Workplace Consultants agreed. "Managers have to realize that the majority of their
work force have family responsibilities and companies lose money when they don't adopt flexible
policies to accommodate family needs. So long as the request doesn't alter the nature of the
business and pose an undue hardship on the company, managers should be open to it," he said.
Still, ODT's Mr. Abramms warned that traditional attitudes among managers about the separation of
work and family will get in the way of many women's requests for flexible work schedules.
Fully one-third of the nonmanufacturing jobs could be done at home a day or two a week, he said.
"Why does it have to be on site? The answer is it doesn't. If I could do my work at home, why can't
I? If I do a lot of telephone work, why does it matter where I take those calls? Is someone going to
know that I'm calling from my home, my car or the office?"
But many managers resist such requests because they need to maintain an illusion of control over
their employees' work lives, he said.
"Many managers say, 'This is how I've been successful so other people have to do it this way, too.'
"Many women are willing to perform in that fast-paced, high-powered lifestyle," he said. "But then
they confront the rigidity of a boss who thinks things have to be a certain way. Many bosses still view
their jobs in the mold of the male executive who can afford to dedicate 60 hours a week to a job and
know that his children are home and being taken care of.
"These men don't recognize that we now have new [middle] managers with different needs. They're
willing to work hard and pay their dues, but they also expect reasonable accommodations," Mr.
Abramms said.
****BOX
ASKING FOR TIME
ODT Inc., a management consulting firm in Amherst, Mass., suggests the following approach when
asking for flex-time.
* Ask your boss for a clear description of your position's expectations, standards and job objectives.
* Make your own list of those requirements and present them to the boss to assure that you both
agree.
* Review the list and decide what work can be done off-site and what tasks require you to be in the
office. Itemize those responsibilities and write the reasons why you can perform these tasks as
effectively or even more productively at home.
* Do your homework. Go into the meeting armed with studies showing that companies that have
instituted such programs improve their bottom lines, attract and retain talented workers, reduce
absentee and tardiness rates, improve productivity, enhance their opportunity to hire a more
diversified work force and foster loyalty and dedication among employees.
* Make an appointment with your boss to review the job requirements to make sure you agree. Then
in an indirect way, feel out your boss about his or her attitudes. Would he consider trying another
way to accomplish the goals, for instance, if that way was not so traditional?
*
If he says upper management will not allow it, but he himself is not opposed to such a plan and is
influential in the company, ask if he would be your advocate.
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* Be gracious, open-minded and circumspect while making these suggestions, as this approach is
well received in most cases.
Source: ODT Inc.
GRAPHIC: Illustration, NO CAPTION, By Paul Compton/The Washington Times ; Box, ASKING FOR
TIME, By The Washington Times ; Chart, NOT JUST 9 TO 5, By The Washington Times
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