Focus On: Stewart D. Friedman

The Changing Nature of ‘Having It All’

Posted on January 25, 2013

work“Men have become more egalitarian, but women are more realistic.” That’s how Stew Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management, describes some of the preliminary results of a 20-year study on careers and family life based on data collected from Wharton undergraduates in both 1992 and 2012.

As part of his work with Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project, Friedman surveyed members of the graduating classes from both years and then compared the results. He also checked back in with the 1992 graduates to see how their attitudes had changed after 20 years in the working world.

Among his findings: In 1992, nearly 80% of men and women responded “yes” to a question about whether or not they planned to have children. That number dropped to 42% for men and women in the graduating class of 2012. “This result speaks to a number of important trends, one of which surely is the challenges today’s young people anticipate in raising children and having productive work about which they feel good, proud, and successful,” Friedman says. While the survey did not ask for all of the reasons that students responded in the ways that they did, Friedman notes that one of the study’s other findings was that while graduates in 1992 expected to work an average of 53 hours per week, the class of 2012 anticipated spending about 70 hours a week on the clock — nearly two work days more than their peers from 20 years earlier.

“Think about … that perception of work demands just in terms of raw time,” Friedman says. “I’m not surprised that people are thinking, ‘I’m not going to be able to have children, or I will have fewer children.’ And the reduced likelihood of having children held true for men and women, which speaks to how the attitudes of men and women have evolved over the last two decades.”

The survey also asked the graduates to weigh in on whether two-career relationships are better able to thrive when one partner is less involved with his or her career. Men in 2012 were less likely to agree with that statement than men in 1992. But women were actually more likely to agree with this view. Two-career relationships are much more prevalent today than they were 20 years ago, when male survey respondents likely expected that they would advance while their female partners slowed down to accommodate a family, Friedman notes. “Men’s attitudes now are increasingly more like women’s,” he adds. “It reflects that more male graduates now expect to be in dual-career relationships, and they want their partners to be pursuing their careers. Over the last couple of decades, we have set the cultural norm more clearly that women’s careers matter, and the advancement of women in society is something we can all expect and should support.”

But what about the reactions from women in 2012? Were they simply more realistic about the realities of integrating work and family than female graduates in 1992 — or more pessimistic? “Twenty years ago, Wharton women graduates were thinking they wouldn’t have to sacrifice career for family, but given the experience of the last two decades, the models they’ve seen and the education they’ve gotten about what they will have to do to be successful, today’s 22-year-old women are more likely to see that someone is going to have to make some sacrifices,” Friedman says.

While there’s no way to know just yet how the 2012 graduates’ attitudes will change, Friedman notes that the definition of career success did evolve for a group of survey participants from 1992 who were queried again last year. “Flexibility was a lot more important to them as 42 year-olds than it was at 22. Where they lived mattered more, but prestige, power and influence, and even enjoyment in work didn’t matter as much as it did when they first started out.”

As attitudes toward work continue to evolve, Friedman says there are numerous possibilities for progress in the area of fully integrating career with family and personal life. “The combination of radical changes in technology and the changing values of men and women with respect to the place of work in their lives indicate that we’re going to see a lot more experimentation and creative alternatives for what work looks like and what families look like and how the two look together,” he notes. “I’m hopeful as a result that there will be new models and solutions that make it possible for people to have more of what they think is ‘having it all.’”

From 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. ET on Tuesday, January 29, Knowledge@Wharton and Friedman will host a Twitter chat to further discuss the changing nature of work/life integration:

Q1 How has your definition of “having it all” changed over the course of your career?

Q2 What life- or work-related factor most influences how you define “having it all”?

Q3 How is the changing nature of work affected your ability to integrate career and the rest of life?

Q4 If you could change one thing about your work that would make life easier, what would it be?

Q5 For whom is “having it all” easier – men or women?

To participate in the chat, follow @knowledgwharton and @StewFriedman on Twitter and include the hashtag #kwchat in your replies.

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The Eye-opening Impact of Sleep Deficits

Posted on October 1, 2012

If you experienced the Monday morning blues today, you may be among the 41 million Americans who don’t get enough sleep and cause workplace productivity losses of up to 30%, according to recent research.

Sleep deficits seem to be a serious problem. Almost a third of all working American adults get six or fewer hours of sleep each night, a New York Times report last week said, citing research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to most sources, adults usually require between seven and nine hours of sleep a night to function optimally. Chronic sleep loss and sleep disorders are estimated to cost the nation as much as $16 billion in health care expenses and $50 billion in lost productivity, medical journal NIH Medline Plus says, citing studies from the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research.

Wharton practice professor of management Stewart Friedman says the expectation in most American workplaces is that employees should be fully alert during the entire span of their working day. Employers, of course, have formal “breaks” built into work schedules. “But often the span of expected work without rest is longer than employees can [manage to do while maintaining] 100% effort and focus,” he says.

More creative ways must be found to tackle sleep deficits hurting workplace productivity, because individuals vary in their need for rest, Friedman argues. “We would go a long way to increasing productivity if we made it legitimate and easy for people to take short periods of rest when they need to do so.”

In today’s highly connected world, sleep is a casualty also of text messages and emails that arrive at times when employees should be either relaxing or settling into bed for the night. “People feel this constant need to be connected,” noted Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard in a recent Knowledge@Wharton article. “There’s no priority structure. Everything is urgent. Everything is red flagged.”

Studies show that inadequate sleep leads to deficits in cognitive performance, including the ability to think clearly and quickly, perform efficiently, remember things and drive safely, according to David Dinges, associate director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, which has conducted studies on the subject for several federal agencies. Sleep deficits are also linked to higher rates of obesity, less effective emotional regulation, diabetes, heart disease and other issues, he adds.

Why do people lose sleep? The U.S. Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey, which measures the amount of time people spend doing various activities, including paid work, childcare, volunteering and socializing, shows that people tend to give up sleep time for paid work, but not for unpaid work like household duties. Because they are compensated for their hours spent on the job, “people will get up earlier, go to work earlier and work longer for greater compensation — and in doing that they will lose sleep,” says Dinges.

Long commuting times only add to the problem by extending the work day further. Jet lag is also difficult to overcome for business travelers. “The disruption of the circadian system and the effect [jet lag] has on inadequate sleep often leaves them at a significant disadvantage relative to their local host,” says Dinges. Caffeine and other stimulants have limits on their effectiveness, he adds.

Recovering from a sleep deficit accumulated over five nights requires more than one weekend night of sleeping longer, notes Dinges, who is currently researching such “catch-up sleep.” Moreover, he finds that many people report that they cannot sleep two consecutive nights consisting of nine-hour stretches because their biological clock wakes them up — not to mention noise, light and other disturbances. (And those with small children will agree that there’s usually no hope of sleeping past 7 a.m. on the weekend.)

Epidemiological studies show that “very, very few people” can manage with four or five hours of sleep, although many claim that they can, says Dinges. People who consider themselves “committed” to their work like to brag that they don’t need eight hours of sleep, because sleep is associated with laziness in some people’s minds, he adds. Those who seem to thrive at their jobs despite sleep deficits often have more flexibility with regard to getting their work done, he points out. “People get by even with deteriorated performance from inadequate sleep by simply not being under [as much] pressure [as others].”

And while it may seem that well-compensated CEOs and other high-level executives get away with less sleep, Dinges points out that they often catch-up in limousines and in airplanes, and by consuming a lot of caffeine and other stimulants. Also, he finds that these individuals engage in “wake-promoting” activities, like standing at their desk or holding conversations. “At meetings, they are not the ones who have to sit and listen; they get to stand and talk,” he says. “If they had to sit and listen, they would find out they haven’t had adequate sleep.”

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Taking a Long Lunch? When Doing Personal Chores on the Job Is OK

Posted on July 20, 2012

Thanks in part to the growth of mobile technology, it’s no secret that work is starting to seep into people’s home lives. But life is also seeping into the office, with an increasing number of employees setting aside a few minutes — or longer — during the workday to send personal e-mails, run errands or take a coffee break.

Those tasks were among the most mentioned in a recent survey by data protection firm Mozy. Other activities that respondents said they felt comfortable doing on company time included leaving early for doctors’ appointments or for a child’s performance at school.

The study of 1,000 employees and employers from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and Ireland also found that many managers are taking an increasingly relaxed attitude toward how workers structure their days, in part because the bosses assume — correctly, according to the study results — that many are putting in time outside the office to finish work tasks.

As the workday strays further from the traditional 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. structure, how do employees figure out when it’s permissible to slip in time for personal business — and determine what types of “life-related” tasks are acceptable?

“It’s a combination of factors,” says Wharton practice professor of management Stewart Friedman. “You’ve got to consider the work culture [and] the personal ethical standards and conscientiousness of the employee. The age of the employee probably has an effect as well.” But the most critical factor is the “social and political environment at work, what the expectations and assumptions are about how people are supposed to operate, and whether the emphasis is on results as opposed to how those results are achieved,” he adds.

Workers on an assembly line or in similarly regimented and location-dependent positions are limited in the amount of flexibility they have. “In the pre-Internet world and in the manufacturing-based economy, your physical presence was really the thing that mattered,” Friedman notes. “Performance management systems were created around the idea of time as the essential metric.”

That remains the traditional model and mode of thinking for many organizations, Friedman says. But he adds that managers should consider that it’s just as important for employees to be psychologically present. “It’s harder to be psychologically present when you’re distracted by the demands of other parts of your life. I think the principle to go by is that if [time for personal tasks on the job] helps you take care of things that matter to you – and that you are  responsible for in other parts of your life — an employer is going to want you to do that so long as you meet performance standards and deliver results in ways that create value for the company.”

Friedman knows of a company where employees have even been put in charge of their vacation time. Instead of earning a set number of days, “you take vacation when you need to, just in the way they trust [employees] on a daily basis to figure out when they need to check out to do other stuff.”

Moving toward a more flexible, less location-dependent method of accounting for a worker’s time requires a certain level of trust on both sides, in addition to a transparent, results-focused system to evaluate employee performance, Friedman says. “What you want are people who have a sense of responsibility for the outcomes that matter, and you engender that when you give people the authority to make decisions about when they get things done.”

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A Digital Timeout for Employees — and Parents

Posted on May 15, 2012

So you want to stop your employees from using their smartphones, tablets and laptop computers 24/7 — during staff meetings, strategy sessions and lunch hours as well as vacations, family reunions and graduations? How about simply stating that they can’t use them for work purposes from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., or that they are banned every Thursday from 2 to 5 p.m., or that they are off limits during any vacation or national holiday?

Apparently, such a blanket, imposed-from-the-top prohibition isn’t the best approach, suggest some Wharton faculty.

Wharton operations and information management professor Maurice Schweitzer suggests the idea of a retreat instead. “A retreat takes people out of their environment and away from the usual distractions and allows people to think differently. If a retreat is too hard, then try something else that gets people out of their routines.”

Many employees “feel compelled to ‘keep up,’ and will [worry] that taking time to unplug will merely put them behind schedule,” he says. In that case, managers might have to revert to a top-down command role. They could, for example, “require … and coordinate a specific time … when [certain groups of people] shut down their email, turn off their phones and spend time unplugged. For this to work, managers may need to penalize anyone caught on e-mail or on the phone.”

Like most people who have studied this issue, Schweitzer says it should never be a one-size-fits-all approach. “The importance of ‘unplugging’ will vary across areas. For managers, strategic thinkers and anyone doing creative work, getting unplugged is critical. These people may do well taking time to go for a walk” as a way to escape the digital grind.

The problem of workaholic societies – empowered by the digital world – isn’t going away any time soon. As a recent Knowledge@Wharton article pointed out, the typical workday no longer ends at 5:30. With smartphones, tablets and laptop computers, “we have become … intravenous hookups to our jobs. Not only do we have difficulty maintaining personal boundaries with work because our lives and jobs are so enmeshed with technology, but we also feel intense pressure from our organizations to be ‘always on’ and immediately responsive to calls and emails outside of normal working hours.”

But even companies – ranging from Deutsche Telekom to Google  to Vollswagen — are waking up to the fact that it’s unhealthy for employees to be tethered to the job. It can make for a less productive, highly stressed workforce that may be able to return more emails per minute than ever before, but has lost the ability to concentrate for long periods of time or step back from the clutter to come up with new ideas.

Pico Iyer, in an opinion piece in The New York Times last December called “The Joy of Quiet,” wrote that two friends of his “observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.”  

What’s clear is that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the best way to disconnect. Stewart Friedman, a Wharton practice professor of management, agrees that universal prescriptions don’t work. Instead, he says, “ask work groups to come up with their own proposals for experiments — time-limited for a month, for example –along with credible means for evaluating whether or not the experiments are working.”

And not everyone in that work group should be forced to do the same thing, he adds. “The group can decide ,and then monitor, who gets to do what. For example, one employee gets to leave on Fridays at 5 p.m. while another comes in at 10 a.m. on Mondays, and so forth.” Measuring the impact of such an approach is critical. “If you’re part of a sales team, for example, ask how your sales numbers are doing after a month of this experiment.” 

Addendum: Discussion of digital shutdowns leads to a Knowledge@WhartonToday pet peeve: Going into our local yogurt store and seeing parents glued to their smartphones while their four-, five- or six-year-old kids are silently eating their chocolate/vanilla soft serve and staring at the wall. Assuming that the child is not busy on his or her own device (and most of the ones we see are not, despite anecdotes about toddler technology geniuses), how about redrawing this picture? For parents, a rare moment alone with their child doing something fun together used to be called their “quality time.” Now, all too often, it seems to be their “digital time.”

 

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Daughters Rule

Posted on March 7, 2011

Everyone knows that men, on average, earn more than women. Indeed, says David Gaddis Ross, a management professor at Columbia Business School, women worldwide earn “9% to 18% less than men who have the same job description and equivalent education and experience.”

However, Ross, along with colleagues Michael Dahl of Aalborg University in Denmark and Christian Dezso of the University of Maryland, decided to study what happened to that gap when male CEOs had a daughter. They chose Denmark as their research site because it is considered an egalitarian society and because the Danish government keeps detailed statistics on the business community, including individual companies, as Ross explains in an article on the Columbia Business School website.

The researchers found that a short while after the daughters were born, the gender wage gap at their firms decreased, yet the birth of a son had no impact on that gap. In addition, “first daughters who were also the firstborn children of a CEO had a bigger effect than subsequent daughters, decreasing the gap by almost 3%. First daughters who were not the firstborn children had a less dramatic but still significant effect, closing the gap by 0.8%. The overall reduction in the gender wage gap was 0.5%.”

The gap was reduced the most at small firms — those with less than 50 employees — which the researchers say is because “CEOs at smaller firms are typically more directly involved in making decisions that affect the pay of individual workers than CEOs at much larger firms.” What had an even more significant impact was the education level of the women employees. Since most CEOs went to college, Ross says in the article, they would probably expect their daughters to do the same. These CEOS would then “be more apt to see their more educated women employees as resembling a possible future incarnation of their daughters.”

According to Wharton management professor Stewart Friedman, “What is interesting about this finding, which doesn’t seem surprising, is how it shows that business issues can really hit home when they are personal. For years, I have observed anecdotally that male CEOs are more likely to adopt family- and women-friendly policies when they have some direct experience as fathers that compels them” to see the discrimination their daughters can face in the business world.

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