Feature Article
How They Did It
By Alice Trimmer

“I could do it, but I know how it would be—we’d end up eating takeout every night, and I don’t want Jacob to have a heart attack before he’s 40.” Joanne, shortly after the birth of her first daughter, was mulling over possible scenarios that might result from juggling a demanding job in publishing while caring for her growing family. The solution she eventually chose—giving up a promising managerial position and working freelance for awhile in order to gain scheduling flexibility, seemed risky at the time, but fourteen years later, both career and family are thriving.

Over nearly four decades of working in a corporate setting I have watched with respect and awe many women raise strong families while building active careers. How do they do it? How do they clarify their priorities? To whom do they turn for advice? To find answers, I interviewed several women who are raising families while holding down demanding careers in large corporate environments.

Melding family and corporate life is not easy. Anne, Vice-President and Managing Editor at a large educational publisher and mother of a 15-year-old boy, rises at 4 am in order to put in a 10-hour day at the office, from 6 am to 4 pm. This demanding schedule has a payoff: no work at home, and she has resisted getting a BlackBerry so that she can use the commute home as a transitional period to de-stress from work. Others routinely pull out the laptop for an hour or two of work after the children are in bed, a daunting prospect that enables them to keep in check the hours that they have to be physically present in the office.

The experiences of these women can help anyone faced with the need to get control of working hours, whether it is to help care for aging parents, adapt to their own changing health and energy needs, or carve out time for a graduate degree.

Communicate Your Needs
Cynthia, an inventory manager in an educational publishing company, who has 8- and 10-year-old sons, juggled conference calls and strategizing during a brief time when her younger son was having surgery. Realizing the challenges of working from a distance, she asked for—and received—a laptop. When this raised eyebrows among her co-workers (“How come we don’t have one?”), she encouraged them to ask for the same, if they needed it. Soon, all the inventory managers had laptops, and this saved substantial time and money for the department when the company was closed for a week during the Republican National Convention. The week of the convention coincided with the opening of school in most parts of the country, one of the busiest times of year for the inventory department. Because of Cynthia’s son’s tonsillectomy, the entire department was able to work from home and take care of business as usual at this critical time.

Polite persistence pays: Joanne’s initial request for extra time off when her first daughter was born was met with a chilly reception (“I didn’t take off extra time, why should you?”) but she took it anyway, as unpaid leave, and the job survived.

The need to communicate one’s needs is equally critical at home. Isabella is a senior technical specialist for a large telecommunications company, and mother of 8- and 10-year old boys. She also takes care of her mother one day each weekend and has realized that her all-male household needs gentle reminders from time to time. “Sometimes my kids and husband get into that ‘mom does everything’ mode. It is ok to let them feel the net effect of mom working by having them pitch in more.”

Create Your Own Compass
For many women, the initial decision to keep working or take a break is relatively easy, dictated by or made possible by economic factors, availability of family help, husband’s work schedule, and/or their own perceptions and expectations. What is often harder is dealing with the small day-to-day decisions, perceiving or experiencing small missed opportunities in both family life and at work. To guide themselves through this, they use the same problem-solving and analytic skills that they have developed on the job, partnered with a healthy dose of intuition. “I work on instinct and weighing the information received,” says Isabella. Joanne watches her daughters, now 12 and 14, for clues. If she feels they need more of her time, she cuts back.

How many hours of work are too many? To what extent is it possible to cut back, even if strongly motivated to do so? The answer, not surprisingly, owes more to the nature of the job rather than official company policies. Kim, a Business Support Manager. for a large bank, who has a daughter, 4, and a son, 7, says, “I struggle with how much time to put into my job and career and it is something I still wrestle with. I used to put in 50-60 hours a week. I saw that people who were moving up in the corporation routinely did the same. But now I see that I am able to accomplish what I need to within the working day, with an occasional hour or two at home after the kids are in bed.”

For Daniela, Vice President and Editorial Director for an educational publisher and mother of a four-year-old son, job responsibilities have proved more intrusive. “I try to compartmentalize time at work (8:30 am to 7 pm) and time at home. This does not always work. I’ve tried to confine my work at home to reading email and reviewing manuscripts. After he goes to bed I work about an hour each night, and a few hours over the weekend. If I don’t work on the weekend, I feel guilty and behind when Monday morning comes.” Daniela had to travel extensively after her product was launched last year, and then it was a case of minimizing the damage. She tries to restrict her nights away to no more than four in a row, avoiding weekends, and when possible, plans something special such as a stay with grandparents so that her son is somewhat distracted from her absence.

Kim’s and Daniela’s companies both made Working Mother magazine’s “100 Best Companies” list for 2005. Both companies have a full complement of programs such as flextime and telecommuting to help families cope. But factors such as understaffing and out-of-control schedules can undermine the best of policies.

Consider Calculated Risks
For people who do their jobs well and have marketable skills, opportunity seldom knocks only once. Sometimes it is easier to negotiate from a position outside the company than from within. (“If you want me back, here’s what I need” can be more persuasive than “Here’s what I need.”)

Joanne moved from a full-time staff position to part-time freelance after her first daughter was born, working two or three days a week, then gradually moving up to nearly full time. When the second daughter came along, she was working full time, but again took a break, working two to four days a week. Six years ago she changed to another publisher, working four to four and a half days a week. The project that she helped develop was very successful, and she is now Director of Instruction for the Intervention Group at a major educational publisher. Although her daughters are older now, she still leaves early one day a week so that she can share part of their day life. She worried throughout that the breaks she took would look odd on her resume, assuming they would prejudice future employers, but in fact this had not happened.

Anne also took a short break of about one year when her son was born, and moved back from freelance to staff. In addition, she turned down a vice-presidency six years ago because the new job would involve too much travel and much longer hours. However, her responsibilities continued to expand, and three years later, her own position was upgraded to vice president.

Where do we go from here?
Without doubt, gains have been made in improving company policies that assist working families. Nonetheless, current marketplace issues can work against taking full advantage of these policies. Downsizing of staffs, corporate mergers, and layoffs that often seem arbitrary have increased employee anxiety and reduced the impetus to take even small risks with a career. Managers are contending with smaller staffs, intense market competition, and demands for increased productivity from those higher up in the corporation. This can make them less receptive to any perceived threat to achieving departmental goals, such as an employee requesting leave. Even if they are basically sympathetic to the need for family time, their own job responsibilities often leave them with little time to facilitate creative work-life solutions for their staff.

Managers throughout the chain of command in corporations need to be more pro-active in supporting the real-life consequences of putting corporate policies into action. This means examining carefully their own interactions with their employees and making sure that the subtle forms of psychological blackmail that can flourish in workaholic environments are avoided. Employees need to be assured that they are asking for rights, rather than privileges, when they make efforts to ensure reasonable working hours and sufficient time for their families. A good first step for many managers would be to meet individually with each of the young mothers on their staff and ask what they can do to support them in keeping their hours on the job within reasonable boundaries. The creative problem solving that would take place may well result in solutions that would benefit the entire staff.

Although technological advances have fostered an overall increase in the pace of work, they have also given substantive help in getting parents physically out of the office at a reasonable hour, and reciprocally, allowing valued employees to be connected and productive even when working from home. Email is so much a part of our lives that it is hard to remember how new it is, but Joanne vividly recalls bundling up her small girls in the middle of winter to go outside to send faxes. Today, all such communications can take place from the desk chair. It is easy to see, on the other hand, how the omnipresent laptop could become intrusive. Daniela tries to ensure that her weekend and evening work sessions are realistic by scheduling definite times and setting discrete, achievable goals. This prevents the “undone homework” syndrome that can ruin the entire weekend.

The “wish list” from the mothers interviewed reveals a wide arena for future progress: on-site day care, more help from managers in scheduling overdue vacation days, more help in instituting flextime, more assistance with child care expenses, better managing of work flow and schedules, a formalized policy for granting compensatory days for weekend work, summer hours, improved backup systems so that employees can take two weeks of vacation at a time, more than six weeks of pay for maternity leave, paternity leave with pay. Meanwhile, mothers in the workplace will continue to exercise the skill, common sense, and energy that has brought them success in their careers and enriched their homes.

Alice Trimmer is an editor living in New York City.