The Problem of Work-Life Conflict in an Academic Setting: Strategies and Policies for Restoring Balance Shane J. Ralston Pennsylvania State University Hazleton sjr21@psu.edu Word count: 4,271 Working Draft: comments welcome. Please do not cite or quote without permission. Abstract More and more families face a shortage of time negotiating the responsibilities of work and home life. Matos and Galinsky’s research confirms this fact: “The lack of time to attend to family and oneself in the preferred manner, which we term a ‘time famine’, appears to impact a diverse array of employees in multiple sectors.” For more progressive companies, the solution to the time famine has been to offer greater flexibility through work-life policies, i.e. “any organizational programs or officially sanctioned practices designed to assist employees with the integration of paid work with other important life roles such as family, education, or leisure.” This paper examines the work-life conflict experienced by a couple with two small children, both of whom work for a satellite campus of Penn State University. Key Terms: work-life balance, human resources, higher education, human resource management. The Problem of Work-Life Conflict in an Academic Setting: Strategies and Policies for Restoring Balance I. Introduction More and more families face a shortage of time negotiating the responsibilities of work and home life (Galinsky et al., 2011, p. 143). Matos and Galinsky’s (2011) research confirms this fact: “The lack of time to attend to family and oneself in the preferred manner, which we term a ‘time famine’, appears to impact a diverse array of employees in multiple sectors” (p. 13). For more progressive companies, the solution to the time famine has been to offer greater flexibility through work-life policies, i.e. “any organizational programs or officially sanctioned practices designed to assist employees with the integration of paid work with other important life roles such as family, education, or leisure” (Ryan and Kossek, 2008, p. 295). This paper examines the work-life conflict experienced by a couple with two small children, both of whom work for a satellite campus of Penn State University. The paper is organized as follows. The second section gives a brief overview of their work-life situation. In the third section, I identify some stressors arising from their work commitments. The fourth section looks at the mounting responsibilities and challenges associated with their busy family life. In the fifth section, I consider how academic institutions, generally, and Penn State, specifically, address the matter of employee work-life balance. The sixth section proposes some employer strategies and, in the seventh section, some governmental policies that might help to ameliorate work-life conflict for faculty couples. What should be kept in mind is that, “WLB [Work-Life Balance] is about much more than flex time, part-time, and work from home. It is about assisting people to match their behavior to their values” (Reiter, 1 2007, p. 289). Although higher education faculty may experience work-life imbalance on par with their private-sector counterparts, their behaviors and the organizations they work for are unique, and so the value-laden solutions to their work-life conflicts will be equally unique. Finally, the paper concludes with speculations about the likelihood that the proposed solutions will be adopted. II. Family Profile Jane and Steve are both faculty members at a satellite campus of Penn State University.1 Jane is a full-time assistant professor of Psychology, while Steve teaches various interdisciplinary courses, mostly in the Humanities. They have two children, a two-year-old and four-year-old, who they support on an annual combined income of $70,000. Jane is on the tenure-track, but struggles with the workload. Steve is an adjunct or part-time faculty member who receives significantly less pay than his wife, but unlike his wife has no research or service obligations. Since Jane’s scheduled days of instruction are Tuesday and Thursday, Steve can work alternate days (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), thereby allowing them to care for their two children without using paid childcare. Jane and Steve look forward to reduced childcare responsibilities after their oldest starts attending Kindergarten in less than a year. Both feel a special calling to be higher education faculty and believe in the Penn State mission of teaching, researching and delivering service with “pride and focus on the future” (Penn State University, 2014). Jane and Steve met and married while in graduate school. They accepted that the odds were against them finding two full-time, tenure-track positions in the same region. One of them, in this case Steve, had to sacrifice his career ambitions, taking a part-time adjunct position, in order for them to live and work in the same city—something notoriously referred to as the “two-body problem” in academe (Reed, 2013). 2 III. Commitments to Work Jane and Steve both have hefty work obligations. Jane must juggle the three work functions of a full-time, tenure-track faculty member—teaching, research and service—while Steve focuses on his teaching, but earns a significantly smaller wage than Jane. Once they had their second child, Jane considered joining the so-called “opt out revolution,” leaving the workforce to become a full-time stay-at-home mom, but after brainstorming the possibility realized that it was not feasible unless Steve secured a high-paying job, probably outside of academia (Belkin, 2003; Still, 2006). Jane and Steve are motivated mostly by the challenges of their jobs, more than by extrinsic incentives such as pay and benefits, so a move to a higher-paying, non-academic job, even with greater flexibility, is not a genuine option for either of them. Indeed, Kasser and Sheldon (2009) note that “for people oriented toward the intrinsic satisfactions of work, high incomes are associated with lower subjective well-being and job satisfaction” (p. 243). Jane and Steve wish that their supervisors were more supportive of flexible work arrangements, especially telecommuting (e.g., more online courses that they could teach from home), a compressed work week (e.g., more one-day-per-week seminar courses, instead of two- or three-day-per-week courses) and possibly a job share arrangement (e.g. part-time work for both, but with the same benefits of full-time faculty). Jane and Steve feel that they are similarly constrained in their ability to use flexible work options. The 2012 National Study of Employers shows that between 2005 and 2012, “fewer employers report that management rewards those within an organization who support effective flexible arrangements” (Matos and Galinsky, 2012, p. 28). In a study of supervisor support, Kossek and Hammer’s (2008) conclude that “employees who perceived their managers as unsupportive had significantly worse attitudes, blood pressure, heart rates, sleep quality, and general overall health, and were less likely to be with the company a year later” (p. 3 36). Generally, though, “[h]igher wage employees have access to greater overall workplace flexibility than low-wage employees” (Bond and Galinsky, 2011, p. 8). While Steve may have less access to flexible work options than Jane, he can opt to teach fewer courses or find work at other regional higher education institutions when he needs greater flexibility. Although Jane’s work hours are not too onerous at this point, as she approaches her tenure decision, the time demands become greater. Even though tenure is a rare employment benefit, the trend towards increased hours, especially among highly-educated professionals, is common nowadays. According to MacDermid and Wittenborn (2007), “the labor force has become increasingly bifurcated, with less educated workers (i.e. less than high school) losing hours of work and more educated workers increasingly working extremely long hours” (p. 558). Jane has heard stories of faculty who must spend numerous sleepless nights, having little contact with their family, in order to make strict deadlines associated with the tenure process. Though more consistent over the course of a career, the expectation of extreme family sacrifice for the sake of workplace advancement is widespread in corporate America. According to Williams (2010), “[t]he norm [of extreme devotion to work] is policed through language of community and mutual responsibility: one’s refusal to sleep proves one’s commitment to the team” (p. 87). IV. Commitments to Family Jane and Steve’s roles are the reverse of the traditional family, since Jane has the full-time job and Steve has a part-time position that affords him greater flexibility, but less take-home pay. Steve has to fill in where Jane cannot attend to key chores, such as housecleaning and meal preparation. In this way, they have successfully bucked the so-called “separate spheres” norm, whereby “it is natural for women to take sole responsibility for hearth and home and equally natural for men to eschew caregiving in favor of employment” (Williams, 2010, p. 23). 4 Nevertheless, Jane feels the pull of the devotion to family schema, or the need to behave as an ideal wife and mother, actively caring for her husband’s needs and intensively supervising the activities of her young children, even though she is often short of time and energy (Blair-Hoy, 2013, p. 19). Both Jane and Steve experience the so-called “time famine” that comes with juggling home and work responsibilities on a tight schedule (Matos and Galinsky, 2011, p. 13). Another strain on Jane and Steve’s family life is the difficulty of finding reliable, high-quality and affordable childcare for their two small children. According to Bianchi (2011), “[f]or families in the middle of the income distribution, the dilemma is that wages are too high to qualify for public assistance, but that work offers little flexibility” (p. 24). Caught in this dilemma, they choose to alternate days caring for the children. Bianchi (2011) also notes that, “[f]amilies may often engage in ‘tag-team parenting’ and work different schedules to reduce child-care costs” (p. 28). Besides the cost-savings, Jane and Steve tag-team parent because they worry about the poor quality of childcare facilities in their area. According to Ruhm (2011), “[t]he average quality of child care in the United States is not high” (p. 49). While having more time with their children, one unintended consequence of tag-teaming is that they do not have sufficient time with each other. According to Galinsky, Sakai and Wigton (2011), “[p]arents, full-time employees, more highly educated employees, managers and professionals, higher paid, and younger employees are the most likely to feel deprived of time with their husbands, wives, or partners” (p. 142). Many of the stressors in Jane and Steve’s family life are associated with unexpected events (e.g. a child’s sickness or the last-minute cancellation of a childcare arrangement). According to Christensen, Schneider and Butler (2011), “unpredictable situations can occur on any given day and fall outside prearranged care; it is in these situations where workplace flexibility is most salient” (p. 76). 5 V. Work-Family Conflict for Faculty Employees in the Academy As previously mentioned, higher education faculty behaviors are unique. Their jobs and the kinds of work-life conflict they encounter are equally unique. Faculty jobs share only a few elements in common with so-called “extreme jobs”— unpredictable workflow, (sometimes) high frequency of travel (mostly for conferences) and a sense of calling (“extreme jobholders . . . love their jobs”) (Hewlett and Luce, 2006, p. 51). While adjunct and contract faculty may have more demanding work schedules, most tenured or tenure-track faculty spend as little as nine to twelve hours in class and two to four hours weekly meeting with students and advisees in their office. So, it might be objected that higher education faculty members have a quintessentially flexible employment situation and little work-life conflict, at least compared to other professionals, such as financial managers, lawyers and corporate executives. However, this objection fails to appreciate the multiple sources of pressure on faculty members—from department chairs, deans, students, and colleagues—to perform at a high level in three areas: research, teaching and service. Penn State satisfies several of the 2012 National Study of Employers’ conditions that predict for increased employee flexibility. Specifically, it is larger, has a significant number of female employees, few union members (only maintenance workers are unionized), few hourly employees, more part-timers and more women and minorities in executive positions (Matos and Galinsky, 2012, p. 7). However, over the past ten years, Penn State’s employee benefits, including its work-life benefits, have shrunk with budget cuts and reduced enrollments. In contrast, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004) offers its employees a menu of flexible work options.2 The effect of work-life policies on campus inclusion and diversity is of utmost importance to higher education institutions. Attracting diverse faculty depends on offering 6 flexible benefits. According to June (2014), “[c]ampuses that are family-friendly in name only will be at a disadvantage in hiring.” Ryan and Kossek (2008) insist that the ways in which worklife policies are implemented can strongly influence whether employees see them as inclusive or exclusive (p. 297). For instance, a paid leave policy that makes individual employees responsible for negotiating the leave conditions with their supervisor is too open to “subtle discrimination” through the exercise of discretionary authority (p. 301). How work-life policies are implemented can also become a matter of contestation. Faculty members who support shared governance (i.e. the practice by which faculty and administration share institutional leadership) will likely reject any policy that has not, at the very least, been subject to a process of faculty consultation. Ryan and Kossek (2008) make a similar point: “The most inclusive approach to implementing a worklife policy would be one where the organization obtains a direct assessment of needs and preferences rather than assumes these” (p. 303). Almost a year ago, Penn State’s employees protested a decision by its human resources department to implement the Take Care of Your Health Initiative, a program that imposed punitive sanctions on employees who did not submit to mandatory health screenings, without consulting faculty and staff (Brady, 2013). To its credit, Penn State did compose a report based on focus group research with faculty and staff (during 2008 and 2009), recommending ways to improve work-life balance (Penn State University, 2010). VI. Employer Strategies and Government Policies to Ease Conflict and Restore Balance Specific strategies that Penn State could adopt in order to ease work-life conflict and restore balance for faculty couples such as Jane and Steve include: 1. Require that all Commonwealth campuses have a dedicated high-quality childcare center (on par with the one at State College) or offer subsidized childcare at a top7 ranked local or regional center. Parents should only pay a nominal fee, such as the $5 a day charged by one program in Quebec, Canada (Ruhm, 2011, p. 54). 2. Train supervisors to show emotional encouragement, offer structure, exemplify a model of healthy work-life behaviors and collaborate with other supervisors in support of workplace flexibility options (Kossek and Hammer, 2008, p. 36). 3. Eliminate early morning and late evening departmental meetings that most faculty members with families have a difficult time attending (Penn State University, 2010, p. 1). 4. Make flexible work arrangements, such as telework, job-sharing and compressed work week, more accessible for faculty members, especially faculty couples with children (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004, pp. 15, 17, 19). 5. Create a faculty couple accommodation program to generate full-time, tenure-track positions for faculty spouses who have worked in a part-time or adjunct position for five or more years, especially when their partner already holds a full-time, tenuretrack or tenured position. Due to the largely hands-off, minimalist approach taken to work-life issues, few state and federal policies directly support a worker’s ability to maintain balance, and some—for instance, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—actually have the reverse effect.3 The FLSA requires compensation for overtime only among a subset of employees, but does not limit the quantity of overtime, and leaves a whole group of employees (mainly salaried professionals) vulnerable to working long hours that disrupt their home lives. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) only entitles individuals to twelve weeks of leave (assuming they are employed by a company with fifty or more employees), and does not require that the leave be employer paid (Ruhm, 8 2011, p. 45). Fortunately for Jane, Penn State has a generous paid maternity leave policy, though it still lacks a paid paternity leave benefit (Penn State University, 2010, pp. 11-12). In deciding to utilize Penn State’s work-life policies, an employee such as Jane has little protection or recourse (besides consulting with the ombudsman) if her supervisor retaliates against her for participating. One approach found in many British Commonwealth countries is for governments to “give workers the right to request a flexible schedule without fear of retaliation” (Boushey, 2011, p. 170). Such a legally enforceable right might make supervisors rethink the choice to retaliate or lead the employer to put in place protections to ensure that retaliation and litigation do not occur. In some states and municipalities (including State College, but few other Pennsylvania cities), there are laws prohibiting discrimination against individuals due to their status as caregivers (Bornstein and Rathmell, 2009, p. 14). Another problem is that Jane and Steve could work far more combined hours than is healthy for their family, but have little standing to complain, given that the hours worked individually are standard practice. One proposal is for the state to cap the amount of time that couples with children are permitted to work to no more than 60 hours a week. Research suggests that such a mandated limit on weekly work hours results in “significantly greater job flexibility, improved work-family fit, enhanced family satisfaction, and less work-to-family conflict” (p. 1184). However, in the case of higher education faculty, if this time only includes student contact hours (class and office hours), then the cap would likely be unhelpful for couples such as Jane and Steve. It would have to include time spent grading papers, conducting research, responding to colleague e-mails, committee work, etc., tasks that for faculty contribute to work-home blurring, whereby they find “themselves working during designated family time” (Galinsky et al., 2011, p. 143). 9 VII. Conclusion Although Penn State is notorious for its immense and grindingly slow bureaucracy, I believe that the mechanism of shared governance could enable the speedy implementation of some of the above proposals. Members of the university-wide Faculty Senate might increase their chances of success if they adopt the language of human resources personnel and executive-administrative leadership, making a business case for increased workplace flexibility and faculty work-life balance. According to Burke (2008), “[e]ffective and high performing organizations meet the needs of their people and the needs of the business simultaneously. Healthy employees in healthy organizations are more likely to achieve peak performance” (p. 170). Appeals to fairness and gender equity might be more natural for faculty to make, but less effective at convincing administration. Appeals to diversity and inclusion could also bolster their case. But to make the most persuasive argument, faculty leaders should connect work-life policies to behavioral and organizational outcomes, such as productivity, retention, engagement and employee satisfaction.4 Less organizational commitment can result in higher faculty turnover and, with heavy organizational investments in faculty resources and training, costly institutional losses. A couple like Jane and Steve will probably leave when the first scent of a better opportunity arises. According to Bianchi and Milkie’s (2010) summary of a recent study, “[pa]renting strains were more equal for mothers and fathers when both worked full time, more linked to depression for mothers than fathers when the wife worked part time” (p. 716). Since Steve is part-time, it is possible that he will suffer far less than Jane would if their roles were reversed. Nevertheless, he is likely to feel resentment since he has had to sacrifice his career ambitions, a situation addressed by the proposed faculty couple accommodation program. Formal work-life policies are not enough though. Penn State must also cultivate an organizational culture that lends significant 10 support to workplace flexibility, as many work-life researchers confirm (Bird, 2006, p. 3; Christensen et al., 2011, pp. 81-2; Galinsky et al., 2011, p. 149; Kossek, 2006, p. 68; Kossek and Distelberg, 2008, p. 2; Matos and Galinsky, 2011, p. 14). 11 Sources Alesina, A., Glaeser, E., and Sacerdote, B. (2005). 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They have been changed to ensure anonymity. 2 These work-life benefits include compressed work week (i.e. “condenses one or more standard workweeks into fewer, longer days”), flextime (i.e. “a work week with variable starting and ending times”), job-sharing (“two or more part-time . . . employees share the responsibilities of one full-time job at a pro-rated salary”), part-time work (i.e. “work schedule that is less than full-time”), personal or family leaves (i.e. “block of time off while retaining one’s job”), and telecommuting (i.e. “employees regularly work at home or at an alternative worksite”). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004, p. 6. 3 Ideally, the U.S. would imitate Scandinavian countries, mandating that employers provide extensive paid parental leave, limits on work overtime and even pay for time spent caring for one’s own children. Alesina et al., 2005, pp. 151-153. According to Wolfe (1997), “[b]y paying parents for the time they invest in their children, we would finally acknowledge that the work of raising the next generation is one of the most important forms of labor in our society” (p. 566). However, this is probably unrealistic given the U.S. commitment to a minimalist regime of employment regulations, support for the freedom of capitalist enterprise and aversion to any government programs associated with European socialism. 4 According to one review of current work-life research, “[t]here is . . . clear evidence that employees with higher work-family conflict report less organizational commitment.” Kelly et al., 2008, p. 329. Likewise, Williams (2010) notes that, “[f]lexibility enhances worker commitment because workers care about it” (p. 67). 15