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Veronica: Who's a little bit sunburned because you went outside yesterday to get some yard
work done? All right. Who feels like all of these programs are wonderful but you never
get the chance to use them yourselves? OK. Who has a feeling that you're doing it all
alone in your agency and that it's just you? You're the one champion, right?
I wanted to take a few minutes right now for us to maybe talk about what we can do at OPM
to make this work better for you. We absolutely recognize that you need more from us and we
want to be here for you. I know that you've started talking about it in your breakout
sessions, but I'm wondering is there anyone out there that thought, "I heard a lot of
good ideas, but I still...I think there's more we can do. I think we can do better."
Does anyone out there have some concrete ideas? All right, let's hear from the lady in the
back here. I'll repeat back, too. Go ahead because I don't want you to feel like you're
on the spot. Woman 1: [inaudible 01:11]
Veronica: OK. All right, a good couple statements there. The statement was that at OPM, we have
10 people working on this. We have 10 people government wide, so this is for the government
wide initiative. Internal to OPM, I think we, too, are like everyone else. We have one
person, right? What we're asking folks to do is tell us how
can you leverage our resources? Can we do trainings together? How would people feel
about training the trainers on how to maximize some of these programs? Does that sound like
something we need? OK. Electronic training, do those work in agencies?
Not really? OK. For some. What if we make it really cool? No, just kidding. [laughs]
All right, I think the other comment was that some people, their titles shifted and they
didn't get the promotion. How about that? Did people feel like that happened at all?
I'm not seeing as much of that. Maybe in a couple places. Back here? [laughs] All right.
Those are a couple things we can work on. What else? What else is there? I hate to be
difficult. It is easier with the microphones. Can folks come to the microphones please?
Sure. Woman 2: It's on?
Veronica: Yes. Woman 2: We talked in a group earlier that
this is a very hard sell in this economic environment because there are so many folks
looking for work. Those who have a job don't want to do anything to jeopardize their job.
I think the sales pitch has to occur at the top. So, I wonder if OPM is doing anything
in some of these courses where SES training, director training, where you're selling to
the decision makers of the organizations versus those of us at lower levels in the organization
trying to sell that leader on the program. Veronica: Right. OK, good question. What are
we doing to sell the program? This is part of the overall Diversity and Inclusion Initiative,
but it's also something separate that agencies are hearing about because of the Telework
Act, because of all of the attention that's being drawn to this area. I think we need
to do more. One thing that's becoming clear to me is I think we were under the impression
people had champions at their agencies and that you didn't feel like you were alone.
One thing that's becoming very clear through this meeting for us is that you need more
from your leadership and some more overall goals, a vision of what we're trying to create
and what you need to create in your workplaces. So, I think those are good points, and it's
something that we will go back and work on. I'm wondering if some of our speakers from
earlier today can also speak to that a little bit in terms of what they've done at their
agencies to build that support, but I know there are couple of other questions or statements.
Woman 3: Actually, this ties into the same thing. I think one thing that could be done
is I think it goes without saying that what gets noticed gets done. I think that if you
could raise the visibility of effective telework programs in organizations and recognize those
very publicly, I think the minute people see that this is something that gets positive
recognition rather than people trying to say, "Well, this doesn't really work for us," and,
in particular, if you find environments where it is a little bit more challenging to make
it work and it has worked effectively, the more you can publicize that, the more you
can get the word out on that and the more you can make that very visible and highly
recognized at very senior levels in government, I think that's going to help sell it to people.
Veronica: OK, great point. We are, right now, coming up with metrics. I see Jessie Frank,
who's on our staff, right now taking all these notes, and we're going to have key performance
indicators. What I'm hearing from you all is that we need to have some key performance
indicators around telework, around this work life balance issue, so, definitely we'll include
that. Yes. Woman 4: Right now Congress and the President
are really looking at how we can do more with less. If we really implement telework and
mobile workforce the way it can be done, we can save billions of dollars. We just haven't
actually quantified it. I think that if we actually quantified it and went to the White
House with a proposal that if we implemented telework on a federal wide basis and it was
going to save X billions of dollars and minimize real estate costs and electricity and all
kinds of things which will impact our health, transportation, et cetera, and it's actually
quantifiable, measurable, and it's directly related to return on investment, I think they
would actually really drive it and management would also get on board.
But because we really haven't looked at telework, and actually sold it from that framework,
we have the resistance that we have. When really, if they looked at it from a business
case, that it really is in our best interest as the American taxpayers to use our money
wisely. We're just making it harder than it needs to be, because we're not really looking
at the metrics that we really need to be looking at. Because it really is a business issue,
and it really is strategic, and we really can be using taxpayer dollars much more effectively.
Veronica: OK, great. So, some help from OPM developing that return on investment argument,
that business case through and through, we can certainly do that.
Woman 5: One of the things that came out that I had not heard before, was the degree of
flexibility various in telework, meaning it could even be parts of days. That's particularly
applicable if somebody is doing part of their work classified and part of it not, so that
it doesn't have to be whole days, it could be part days. That message had not come through
before. I think on another note, resistance parameters is that I think a lot of managers
are not really well defining performance measures. Because if you had well defined performance
measures, whether somebody is doing something in the office next to you or halfway around
the world wouldn't matter because the performance would be evident. I think that's a missing
link on the part of managers. So maybe that's where some of the work needs to happen as
well. Veronica: OK, great. Thank you. Great suggestions.
Back here? Terry: Hi, is this working? OK. I'm Terry
from DHS. I just want to recommend that OPM sort of have a social network for work life
type people. I know World of Work has one. Sherman has nice communities. But there is
no community that's managed by OPM or anybody in government to share ideas on a continuous
basis. These symposia are nice, but those using technology is really...it doesn't cost
much, and you get a lot of benefit from it, too.
Veronica: I'm so glad you said that. I have just the thing for you. [applause]
Veronica: At first you're going to go, I don't like it. But trust me, it's not the same version
it used to be. You know where I'm going with this. OMB.max.gov, we actually did create
communities of practice there. It's been real hard to get people to use it. But folks, it's
going to require one thing. You're going to have to sign in with a password. I think that's
what everyone's, like, I don't want to have to remember another password. No one would
ever tell you this, write it on a sticky next to your computer. [laughs] Please do get on
there. If you put in diversity in government, or diversity in inclusion in government in
the search engine, you will jump to our page, and we will devote one of the communities
of practice to work life. I promise that. Now, you all promise me you're going to use
it. Promise? All right. I'm very happy to see here, Miss Tina Chen.
She's the Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and she
is an assistant to the President, and Chief of Staff to the First Lady, Michelle Obama.
Within the Obama administration, she also serves as the Executive Director for the Council
on Women and Girls, and the past director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
Miss Chen was previously a partner in corporate litigation at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom
LLP. Again, one of our great speakers, she's got a long bio, you might want to check it
out. I just want to thank her for being here, because she's the reason we're here today.
She said to us, what are we going to do to make sure we are giving everyone the best
tools in their agencies so they can do the work they need to do for families?
And so, because of her, we're here today, and I can't wait to bring her to you.
[applause] Tina Chen: Hi.
Veronica: Do you want to use this? Tina: Yeah, I think I probably will.
Veronica: All right. Tina: Great introduction by the way.
Veronica: Thank you. Tina: I tend to use my hands a lot [laughs]
so I'll leave those free. Free to wave around up here. Well thank you Veronica and apologies
for running a little late this afternoon. I am delighted to see you all here today.
This turn out is terrific. Veronica is right, that having you all come together and talk
about work life balance and what we can do as a federal government to be the model employer
is something that has been top of mind for us in the White House for a long time. I am
so glad to see that you all are here. That you're invested in this conversation and I
hope that you will generate new ideas and take away new ideas for yourselves.
I'm really here on behalf of both my bosses, both the First Lady and the President, because
both of them feel quite strongly about this issue. They, as you know from their own history,
were a dual working family with both parents working for their entire lives, raising two
young children. They know first hand and have experienced themselves this stresses that
confront our workforce. So, really, from the earliest days of the
administration when we created the Council for Women and Girls, that I'm the executive
director of, workplace flexibility has been one of the things at the top of the agenda
for us to look at. That led to the first ever White House forum on workplace flexibility
that we held in March of 2010. The report that we issued that day from the
President's Council of Economic Advisors still is, now two years on, one of the best pieces,
I think, collecting all of the available economic data that was out there at the time on the
benefits of workplace flexibility. The point that the President made that day when he addressed
the group, which was an assembly of CEO's in the private sector, the not for profit
sector, academics, activists, small business people as well as big Fortune 100 companies.
All who shared an interest in workplace flexibility. His message that day, and backed up by the
work of the President's Council of Economic Advisors is that this is an economic necessity.
It's an economic necessity for our workforce because we know that with women now over 50
percent of the workforce, and with two thirds of our families having either a single working
mom or a family where mom and dad are both working so all the adults in the family at
work, that we need to address this issue. In a time of economic recession, it's especially
important because we don't have families that can afford for one parent to stay home if
somebody gets sick or if there's a new baby in the household. They need that income and
we need to provide workplaces that do that. More than that, more than being economically
important for our individual families, it is economically and competitively important
for our country as a whole. Because what the CEA reports shows is that businesses that
have flexible work arrangements are more productive, have better bottom lines. It actually isn't
a bottom line cost issue, it's a bottom line savings issue, an enhancement issue.
It means that you have a workforce that has less turnover, so you have less turnover cost,
less absenteeism, one that is more productive, when they are at work, one that allows you
to do better knowledge transfer at the end of someone's career, because you don't just
have them retire on day one and you can step that down.
For all of those issues, companies need to pay attention so that they can be more productive.
Our nation needs to be more attentive to this, because, in terms of international competition
and our ability to stay at the top of our game and competitive in a global economy,
we need to solve this problem. I often say, when I talk about this issue,
and I am a single working mom, so I am personally very passionate about this myself. I often
say work today is still organized the way that it was over 100 years ago, at the start
of the Industrial Revolution. Think about it. Shift work, nine to five,
five to 11, punching in, punching out of the clock, all of that goes way back to when factory
work was set up at the start of the Industrial Revolution, not just at the start of the last
century, but at the end of the century before the last century. That is how long we have
been working with these patterns of work and what it means to put in a full day's work.
We don't have to do that any longer and still be productive. We have got lots of companies.
Your last speaker of the day today is going to talk about what has been going on in the
private sector. We've got lots of examples about how you can do flexible scheduling,
have leave banks, have family leave, different methods and telework that actually make things
more productive and better for your workforce. That's where you all are so key. I know that,
in lots of places in our federal workforce, we are obviously implementing the Telework
Act, which was huge in terms of getting that passed, getting those telework plans put in
place, those of you, who are telework managers, getting you all identified and at work in
making work telework a reality. We know places, like the Patent Office, which
has used it to such a tremendous degree, so much so that when the snow falls, they can
still be productive, when that happens and things shut down. Leave banks...I was just
at the FTC to celebrate Women's History Month last month. The Chairman there talked about
how they have a leave bank that they have set up there amongst the employees of the
FTC so they can combine and share their leave with workers, who might have a family issue
or a new baby at home. We've got compressed work schedules. How do
we do flexible scheduling? How do we do compressed work scheduling? How do we have staggered
starts and stop times? Those ideas are out there. There are pockets of them happening,
throughout the federal government. What we really need to do is take those to scale.
What are the barriers we are confronting in taking those to scale? What is it that we
need to do to make this work across the federal government? In doing so, if we can implement
this across the federal government, because of the vast numbers of employees in our workforce
who do work for the federal government, and because of the example that we set as an employer,
we will make a huge leap forward I think in making workplaces change and change in this
direction, for the better of all of our workers. While this comes out of the Council on Women
and Girls, because it is the reality that predominantly the responsibilities at home
fall disproportionately on women, it is not a women's issue. It's not a women's issue.
This is an issue that men at work face the same as women at work, whether it's in their
own schedules or whether it's in the schedule for their spouse. The productivity improvements
that we have are things that will benefit everyone, all of us, and, in the case of us
a federal employer, will benefit tax payers, as well.
The President, I have to say, reiterated this. A week ago Friday, we did a major event at
the White House. We held a forum. This spring, we did our forum for focusing on women was
on women and the economy. We issued a report about women and the economy. A part of that
report and a part of the President's speech was, again, on this issue of workplace flexibility,
because it has been such a central part of our agenda that we're moving forward in this
administration. I will note that the Council of Economic Advisers
included a whole section on workplace flexibility in the report to the President on economic
conditions that they are required to give the President every year. It's a big, thick
report on all the state of the economy. In looking to the economy of the future, again,
his economic advisers once again reiterated the importance to our economy overall of addressing
this issue of workplace flexibility. So my message to you today, first of all,
is to thank you. You all are the front lines for us in the federal workforce of this issue.
I want to thank you for the work that you are doing right now every day. I want to inspire
you, I hope, to really keep thinking about this, keep working on it. I want you to raise
issues and give us new ideas. Tell us what are the barriers you're facing, so that we
can figure out how to overcome those. One of the new ideas that are out there, because
I do think that the people who know best what the challenges are that you're facing, and
actually the people who know best about how to reorganize the work that they are doing,
is our workforce themselves. This isn't just something that can get reorganized from the
top and come down. We really, truly want to hear from all of you and from your colleagues
around your agencies. How could this be done better? What can we
do to make things more flexible? Are you in a particular kind of work where you've got
a lot of inspectors who are out doing work remotely? Maybe we do something that is much
more telework and much more hoteling of their offices and flexible scheduling.
Do you have the kind of work like the patent office, where a lot of it can be done on computer
and at home? Are there ways that we can organize that? Are you trying to keep an office open
on some sort of schedule that's supposed to be 6:00 am to 6:00 pm? How can you work that
scheduling in a way that accommodates people's different schedules?
How can we create scheduling that accommodates the fact that people won't need these accommodations
through their entire career? You don't need to always work from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm. When
your kids get older and they're not coming home from school, then maybe your needs shift.
I had this argument with one of our more recalcitrant economists one time about this. I had to say,
"You can't look at workers as being static through their lifetime." There are going to
be times at which people can do that 12 hour shift gung ho when they're younger. When they're
having kids at home, they may need an adjustment. Then they're back going 12 hours again. And
then, they're older and they are not well themselves, and then they're ready to retire.
We need to be able to respond to the life cycle of our workforce overall.
I, as you can tell I hope, am passionate about this. I absolutely think it is the major issue
confronting our workforce right now at this moment in time in the 21st century. It's the
problem that we need to solve that will really increase women's participation in our workforce,
and women's leadership. I'm passionate about it because I see the
barriers that it creates for women becoming senior managers, becoming deputy secretaries,
rising to the highest ranks of all of our professions. This, I believe, is one of the
major barriers to women achieving that full potential, and I think it's also a barrier
for many of our men, as well. Finally, I'm passionate about it because it's
the right thing to do for our families. It's the right thing to do for our children. It's
the right thing to do for our elderly parents, for our colleagues. It's the right thing to
do. For those of us who have religious observances or are disabled, the whole variety of ways
in which our workforce is diverse. We can, and we have the tools. It's the right
moment in time because we have the technology to do it. We have the means to do it. We have
a lot of learning out there. I'm here to tell you, you have the support from the very top
of this administration and the very top of this federal government to achieve this and
to work on this. As I said at the beginning, you're the front
lines of this. We are so excited that you are having this session today. I really want
to thank Veronica and our colleagues at OPM and DOT for hosting us here, to really put
this together, and for the time and devotion that John Berry and his team have really given
to this, to all of you for your leadership on it.
I would urge you again to stay in touch with us about your ideas and what we can do to
really expand this out across the federal government. Again, thank you for spending
this time today, for spending the time that you do every day in your work, and I hope
you enjoy the rest of the sessions. Thank you.
[applause] Veronica: All right. So now you believe us,
right? This really is coming from the White House. We're not just making that up as we
go. What we're going to do now is a review of the important takeaways and lessons learned
from our breakout session. I'd like to invite Mika Cross from USDA, Sara Harrington from
US Customs and Border Protection, and Doris Rippey from OPM to come up here and talk to
us about what they discovered during the sessions with all of you.
What I think I'll do is I'll start at this end. I'll let you sit down. I'll give you
a microphone. Take it away. Dorris Rippey: I'm Dorris Rippey with OPM's
Office of Pay and Leave. I did the breakout session on leave flexibilities. Some of the
questions we were asked were the key takeaways, some of the challenges and barriers that are
faced, some of the lessons learned that we talked about in our session. I think I'll
be interested to hear what Mika and Sara have to say, because with the leave programs they're
a little bit different than some of the other flexibilities because a lot of it is pegged
to what is written in statue and what is written in regulation. So you can't really discuss
it. You don't have too much flexibility with how you implement the programs. It's more
of an issue of comprehension. A lot of the leave programs are very complicated.
You have your entitlements, but then you have how it's administered, and there are little
ins and outs. The programs can get very complicated, especially if you look at something like the
sick leave entitlement and the FMLA entitlement. Often times, they're confused. People think
that they're the same thing when they're actually two different entitlements, because you can
use them for similar circumstances. I think one of the big challenges is just
plain comprehension, whether that's comprehension on behalf of the managers themselves, the
HR specialists, the managers and the supervisors, or even employees. That was one of the main
issues that we talked about. Also, there's a communication issue. We talked
about the fact that there's a lot of turnover in the field, as well. The people that need
to be administering the programs are often turning over a lot, too. If they're turning
over and they're just trying to get up to speed, and they're supposed to be educating
the managers and the supervisors and the employees, that can cause challenges, as well. So there's
an education that needs to go on with employees, with managers, and with HR supervisors.
One of the other things we talked about in terms of lessons learned is, often times we're
asked about maternity and paternity. What kind of maternity leave do you have? What
kind of paternity leave do you have? I think one of the benefits to the leave programs
that we offer is, although we don't have a maternity program per se, or a paternity program
per se, we do have a lot of leave programs that you can use for maternity and paternity
issues. Whether that's the sick leave program, the
voluntary leave transfer program, the voluntary leave bank program, or FMLA, there are a lot
of programs that you can use. You can use them on a gender neutral basis. Whether that's
the father who's taking care of the mother who's had the child, or the employee who's
the mother herself, they are offered on a gender neutral basis based on the situation
and not based on who the employee is. The last thing I would say is one thing that
we talked about was that there needs to be management buy in. Some of the programs are
entitlements, and so there's really no question as to whether they're going to be offered
to the employee or not. But others of them are discretionary programs or they are discretionary
elements of entitlement programs. So the case has to be made to management why
it's in their best interest to be able to use these programs to help their employees
meet the various challenges that they're facing, and what's the benefit to them. There is a
benefit, as well, in terms of employee engagement, keeping that employee on the workforce to
be able to be available for the long term future, so that they're able to have an engaged
employee who's able to be fully at work and fully present when they're not dealing with
the various life situations that they use leave for.
Mika Cross: Thank you. Sounds like you all learned a lot. We had a series of very exciting
dialogues, as well, about telework and the federal government, and how the Telework Enhancement
Act really set the stage for setting some of the minimum requirements that agencies
are required to implement for telework implementation, of course. We discussed the key benefits,
and of course some of the challenges, to telework implementation that were commonalities throughout
different organizations in the federal government. But we really tried to focus on some of the
creative and strategic solutions, as well, to overcoming some of those challenges.
We identified some ideas about benefits that we can highlight and market, and use and infuse
in some of our training and education, as well. Some of those include strategic linkages
into other programs. For instance, you mentioned your maternity and paternity options with
leave using telework as a flexibility to offset the need to use some of that leave, for instance,
through flexible workplace arrangements and, of course, the telework arrangement itself.
Also, strategic linkages to the nursing mothers program, how you might be able to use that
to infuse strategic objectives and goals into your recruitment plans for people with disabilities,
your veterans employment program, and your diversity plans, as well. Really utilizing
COOP, that was a really key message to leverage some test beds and pilot programs for telework
across federal agencies, using that as leverage to really try it out on a small scale.
As you heard one of the audience members talk about when you were engaging them earlier,
thinking about some creative solutions so that it's not an all or nothing approach to
telework, but maybe thinking about the percentage of portable duties that could be done in an
alternative workplace. So thinking through if you could even implement it just for a
half a day, maybe for some mandatory training that we're all responsible for accomplishing,
in order to just set the stage for telework. Of course, talking about some of the common
challenges that we all experience with regards to management resistance, and some management
mistrust. But it really comes down to leveraging those best practices that we each encounter
every day and talking to one another as work/life strategists, as diversity strategists and
really sharing the best practices, marketing what is working well and trying to collectively,
the government, overcome some of those challenges that are really not unique to each individual
agency. Sara Harrington: It's funny, we actually talked
about a lot of the same things you did. We talked about our challenges. Obviously management
buy in is the recurring theme I think that we all face, as a challenge. We talked about
that. We talked about possible solutions to that, trying out a pilot program, starting
small, something gradual, where you're not saying, "We need to do this agency wide right
now." It's just starting small and then gradually building it. Maybe that can help overcome
some of the pushback that you get from leadership. We also actually had a lot of discussion in
our session this morning. We talked about that we are each other's biggest resources.
Let's not reinvent the wheel. We can share our telework policies. We can share our Nursing
Mothers Policy. I know, at Customs and Border Protection,
we have shared our Nursing Mothers 'Policy with other agencies. Just bounce ideas off
of each other. Share. I think that's why we wanted the social, that Terry from DHS mentioned,
because if we just share, we get good ideas from each other and bounce it off.
Then you can say, "Well, I got this idea from this agency. What do you think? Let's benchmark."
When I wrote the Nursing Mothers Policy for CBP, I benchmarked EPA and the National Security
Agency as well. I came with examples. I found that management was open to it. So definitely,
the buy in is important, starting out small and sharing resources.
Veronica: Thank you. Now, I'm wondering, based on this conversation, what you have heard
thus far, are there other ideas? I know we were continuing to share, when Tina arrived.
Are there other ideas out there? How about here, our panel members? Do you have anything
that you would like to talk about that you think the whole group needs to hear? We've
had a lot today. We have heard a lot from a lot of different folks. Anything really
novel out there? Can anyone say, "You know what I have seen or heard? Is it true that
the private sector is doing...?" Here we go. Woman 6: I don't think it's a novel idea.
But I mentioned it in one of our breakout sessions. We talked about telework. But I
said, "Why not look at making us all mobile?" For some of this, if we were already mobile,
maybe we wouldn't need as much sick leave, because there is no expectation of you to
be in at office. If you need to take some time off, you have that flexibility built
in, because you can work away from the traditional office environment to start with. So maybe,
as we look at the telework arrangement, look at making us mobile anyway. It may be a balance.
You may find some employees don't need to traditionally telework, if they are mobile
anyway. I do most of my work, and I'm here, off my
Blackberry. I can take my Blackberry and a laptop, find an Internet connection and I'm
doing the work I could do sitting in my office. So maybe a better idea or a better way to
go is looking at making us all mobile anyway. Veronica: OK. Great. Great point. Thank you.
Any others? Yes. Woman 7: I think that the young lady had started
to mention about metrics. I think that what helps us, from a leadership standpoint, is
looking at what the end task is and what the metrics are. That gets you away from watching
everybody. You want results. That's the bottom line. As a leader of the organization, I want
to make sure that my staff has met the performance metrics. When I have partnered with a lot
of the private sector, they don't get as caught up as the federal government does in setting,
"Are you watching your child? Are you home with your mother? Are you home with whomever?"
It's bottom line results. I think if we get a little more into looking
at what the bottom line is, that is very helpful, because that keeps us out of the, "What are
you doing? Who are you talking to? Where you going?" kind of thing. That's what has been
very helpful for me. Sometimes you have to look at the performance systems.
We still have pass/fail. It makes it hard sometimes to look at those end results. But,
when we sit with our staff, we walk through what the expectations are for the job. So
if I have someone, who is out today, and they had a delivery for today, that is what I'm
expecting. That's how we measure it, from a leadership standpoint, for me.
Woman 8: I just want to share a personal story. I was pregnant in February 2010 during Snowmaggeden.
I was due. I was on a medical telework agreement. I have a very supportive office supervisor.
I love it. But anyway, I was on a telework agreement for the month of February. My due
date was towards the middle, end of the month, and when the government shut down, I still
worked because at Customs and Border Protection we have offices everywhere. I did stuff with
our Minneapolis hiring center, I did some webinars with El Paso. Just because DC shut
down doesn't mean I shut down. I continued to work. I had Internet access, I had power.
I was the only one working, but I was working. I did not have the baby, thank God, during
Snowmaggeden. She was a week late. But, I always use that as an example. I had
my telework agreement in place, I was approved for medical. I continued working and you would
never know I wasn't in the office. That's just a personal testimonial. I'm sorry. That
was a month before and then I had the baby. I went on leave for eight weeks and then my
supervisor let me telework an additional month before coming back to the office.
It was great for me, personally, that I had that flexibility and that they trusted me.
I delivered and it just gave me that extra time that I wanted to be not really commuting
but just staying at home recovering from a caesarean. It was just a great example. I
always talk about that. Woman 9: Thank you. I have very similar stories.
I think that we can all agree here that, by design, workplace flexibilities are meant
to be flexible. It's really hard to think about programs that aren't designed to be
implemented the same way for everybody. It causes extra work for all of us as human resources
professionals, as diversity strategists, as managers and leaders and providers, and even
as employees who we might see coworkers who are able to use telework to extend a maternity
leave, although you're really working, you're not on leave, or to use workplace flexibilities
in a different way that we may not be able to partake in.
It just causes a really interesting dynamic. If we start educating not only our employees
but our leadership at high levels that, by design, they're meant to be that way and that
the expectation of leadership is that you have to make those hard decisions. It includes
communicating. It includes setting strong and clear performance objectives and measures,
and it includes holding employees accountable. Then I think maybe we'll start overcoming
some of that cultural resistance and cultural barriers to implementing any of these workplace
flexibilities that we see and that we experience in common together collectively. Just a few
thoughts. Veronica: All right. One thing I want everyone
to remember is we want this to be a constant dialogue. I know the room wasn't real cozy.
What we will continue to look at is how we're going to bring the groups together like agencies,
like professions because we know that in some professions there's a natural affinity towards
doing this. For others, it's really difficult for the agency to figure out how it works.
We're going to be looking at how we can develop those types of teams around very similar backdrops
in terms of where your leadership is. I want folks to be thinking about this one piece.
This is about organizational leadership, but it's going to take those first line supervisors
and we so often forget them. In the government, we always talk about driving
it down. The top leadership has to be engaged and that's still true, but as professionals
who are working in this area, if we're not connecting with those first line supervisors
and making sure that they're willing to have that flexibility with their line employees
we're not going to be able to be successful. Let's keep thinking about them as we started
developing what's going to make this work better.
I want to take a moment to thank some folks. First off, we have the Council of Federal
Women program managers, who we worked very closely with. How many Federal Women program
managers are in the room? I want our guests to know what the audience looks like. Thank
you all for all of your support. We also worked closely with FEW, Federally
Employed Women. I see Sue. How many members do we have here from FEW? Look at that. That's
fantastic. We also have the Work/Life Coordinators here. Let's start there. Work/Life Coordinators.
How many of you are here? Thank you for taking the time to be here with us today.
The telework coordinators and managers. OK, all right. You need our love, we're here to
help you too. I also want to take this moment to say thank you to EEOC. They've been a wonderful
partner, as we're developing this, and they've been pushing this for years now. So, thank
you to all of those of you who are from EEOC. Go ahead, raise your hands. Get the love from
the audience. And from Department of Transportation. This
has been wonderful. It's a great facility, so thank you to all the DOT folks. Thank you
to our speakers. [applause]
Veronica: Now, we have a real treat for you. I am very honored to present Laura Kellison
Wallace. I know her as Laura, we've become best friends today. She's the director of
work life programs at Software and Services, or SAS. Many of you may have read about them
in the media. I know they were on 60 Minutes. Miss Wallace has been supervising and designing
programs working with individuals and families for nearly 20 years. She received her Master's
in Social Work from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1995 and her undergraduate
degree from Smith College in Children's Psychology in 1987. She is a trained mediator, facilitator
and trainer. She has taught pre school, high school and multiple classes and seminars for
adults. Wow, she'll definitely teach us today. Right?
She has developed and taught curriculum on over 35 topics, ranging from work life balance
and stress management to grief and loss, communicate skills with your ex spouse. Oh, wait. Did
I read that right? With your ex spouse. Hey, maybe I'm reading into this too much. [laughs]
Brief skills and communicating with your ex spouse. So, please take a moment to join me,
and thanking Laura for being here. [applause]
Laura Kellison Wallace: Thank you, Veronica. I'm going to see if I cannot pour my vitamin
drink into that speaker. So, hi everybody. I'm not usually nervous, but I got to tell
you I'm so impressed with all the things that you guys are doing and thinking about and
caring about that I'm honored to be here, and I am a little bit nervous. So, I just
wanted to go ahead and say that right from the front. I guess you heard my overview from
Veronica, but I do want to say, work life balance, what it means and coming into the
profession as a social worker might seem a little bit odd. I actually used to be a Federal
employee myself, I worked for Americor. I worked for Head Start. I did a lot of work,
and I got into looking at working families, and what a struggle it was.
And so, it was a natural segue for me to come into...I became the work family manager at
the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I called up the director at SAS of the
child care programs and what was the work life program then, and I said, "Can I come
and steal all of your ideas?" She said, "Sure, come on."
I went to SAS, and I followed her around for a day, and it seemed like utopia to me. All
these resources, everyone had offices. It was so beautiful. I said, "Will you hire me?"
[laughs] The rest is history, that was 13 years ago. So, I'm going to talk a little
bit about SAS. This is my intention today. I don't want to get too into what we do as
a software company, because I don't think you're here for that. I honestly can't be
too articulate about it. But talk about who we are, what SAS does,
and why culture matters to us, and how we show that culture matters to us because I
think that that is something that we're all on the same page about. How we do it, and
how you do it, might be a little bit different. One thing that occurred to me...Sorry, I'm
getting over a cold, and so I'm very dehydrated. One thing that occurred to me, listening to
you all, is that you all are very policy driven. You have a lot of things on the books.
Now, you're emphasizing how to get that culture in place, how to get everybody on board. Bizarrely,
SAS is a little bit different. We flip that. We have the culture in place. For a while
we've been building that culture. Actually, what we are doing is trying to get all these
things more on the books. So, it's interesting, that backwards twist. I know if you all had
your druthers, you'd rather have it in my sequence than in yours. But there are good
parts about all of it. Having the policies on the books is really
useful, in a lot of ways, including sustainability. So, anyway, I want to talk a little bit at
the end, not about flexibility, not about teleworking, but actually about some of the
things that we do that are really where the rubber hits the road. What does it look like?
People think SASS, you have such deep pockets. We're a huge software company. Actually, our
programs are not expensive at all. We don't use a big budget, and I'll talk to you a little
bit about that. I'm hoping that we get all the way through
this and that we'll actually have a little bit of time to talk at the end. Let me see
if I can work this fancy thing. Here's SAS in a nutshell. We do business analytics, which
is something I can't very articulately about so I'm not going to talk very much about that.
Basically, it's looking at statistics, it's looking at data.
We work with large corporations and small, a lot of government agencies as well. We look
at data to predict trends, marketing, make decisions about the future. This is my laymen's
way of understanding it, my social work way of understanding it, is that we look at data
from the past to make decisions about the future.
Our software is in I think it's 90 out of 100 of the top companies in the Fortune list
and it's used over 55,000 sites in 129 countries. That's not why you're here. We're going to
talk a little bit about how we look at our employees. We have a value proposition for
our employees. We think it's really important to have compelling work. We think it's really
important to empower our managers. We'll even be talking a little bit about today,
to manage people with balance, to enforce our culture, to integrate our culture, and
to really help people to be creative and innovative. It's imperative that we have our employees
be innovative. Otherwise, we don't get to be the progressive top software company in
the world in business analytics. If people aren't creative, they're not any
good to us. That's probably true with everything that you all do every day. I'll take a side
moment to say if you know how you are when you're stressed, if your dad just fell down
and broke his hip, if your baby is sick, if you've got a teenager that's doing some things
that are little off, not what you'd prefer, then your creativity is one of the first liabilities.
It's one of the first things to go. When we're stressed, we get right into our
lizard brain. We just go right into the mode of problem solving. When it's our family,
it's our family first. You can be all the way up the food chain and if one of your parents
is hurt or your kid is hurt your creativity and innovation, sense of humor, problem solving
skills, all that goes out the window. At SAS, we really know that and we're a software
company that relies on innovation so we can't have our people be stressed. It's really important
to us about this culture. It's not just something that we say. I'll show you, this is the great
place to work index. I guess there's a great place to work for federal employees, too,
an index. You'll see that SAS in 2012, we have pretty
great scores. Credibility, respect, fairness, pride, camaraderie. Our overall score from
our employees is a 97 out of 100 of great places to work. We've been in the top three,
actually we're number one place to work in the country two years running and then this
past year we're at number three. We're still really proud of that. Nobody's ever got to
be number one twice in a row. I'll toot my horn just a little bit here and
I'm going to say it again, our work/life balance programs were number one four years running.
[applause] Laura: Thank you. I would love to take full
credit but it does take a village so I'm not going to take full credit at all. In fact,
our employees drive a lot of what we do so that's another important point here. Why does
this all matter to you? I'm going to step back for a second and talk about...I don't
know if any of you have ever heard of AWLP. It's Alliance of Work/Life Progress. It's
an organization that I joined 15 years ago and it was very much in its nascent stages
and it was looking at work/life balance. What does it mean? A lot of what they look at is
the kind of things you guys are talking about today. Here are the seven pillars, the gold
standard of work/life balance. You've got caring for dependents.
These are all going to be familiar to you and I don't even have to read them to you
because you can all recite them from your experience, I'm sure. It's health and wellness,
workplace flexibility, financial support for economic security. That's nice. We all could
do a lot more if we had that, right? Paid and unpaid time off. Community involvement.
That's something we hold as a good standard for work/life balance here. It's also part
of our relationship with our communities around us.
We are representing SAS when we go out to our communities. We want people to know who
we are and that we care about the communities because we live in those same communities.
That's a big value of ours. Then eliciting management buy in, transforming
organizational culture. That's all stuff you've talked about today I've heard in various forms
and fashions all day long. I'm going to get a little self righteous here. This is the
world according to Laura Wallace. I think that those concepts, those categories
that I just went through, AWMP categories, are really important. I think what's missing
sometimes when we talk about work life balance is, what's behind it? What do you need to
really make people feel like they trust you as an organization, as a manager, as a person?
I think that one of the things that we lack when we get too policy driven about "Here's
what work life needs to look like" or "Here are the categories that must be present,"
check, check, check, check. I would say some of these surveys that we
obviously enjoy, and it helps with recruiting and retention, are guilty of getting us to
this point where we're checking off the categories, but we're not really thinking about what's
behind it so much. This is my list. I think that in order to
be a successful work/life program, really looking at balance, you have to be nimble.
That's something that we can't do if we're really prescriptive by policy. We have to
be nimble and respond to what do employees need. So we customize our programs to our
employees. We look at our demographics. We listen to our employees.
We have employees do focus groups. We have employees call in...Somebody calls in and
says, "Hey, I'm a new stepparent. I'm struggling." I'll tell you a little bit about how we do
this, but we say, "It's a pretty good idea. We don't have a step parenting program. We're
going to create one." By two months later, we have a step parenting support group. We
have more books in our lending library. I'll talk about that in a second.
But we get to be really nimble because we work at that and people put those requests
in to us. We have that open stream. Our stakeholders primarily are the employees we're trying to
server. That's our information. That guides us.
We have multiple points of access. As a software company, we have a lot of introverted people.
They don't necessarily want to come into a big room like this and talk, so we do podcasts
and webcasts. We have phone relationships. We have people that will send something by
carrier pigeon and we'll respond. However it comes to us, we're going to respond to
them because there's multiple points of access. That's generational. That's temperament style.
All of those different things. This is something you guys have been talking
about is the state of cultural expectations. We state it all the time, it's who we are,
right? It's not an add on. It's not the sprinkles on the ice cream. It is who we are. Our expectation
is that we want our employees to feel great. We want to have their backs. The message that
gets lost in all this is we actually really want employees to succeed. We want them to
feel great, because those are the employees that are giving us the best innovative ideas.
Those are going to be the healthiest. They are going to stay off of our health care benefits.
That's really important. I think the active and deliberate integration
of work life programs and message in all business communications that you can get in to. If
there is a department of transportation newsletter, do you in that newsletter have a box that
is your work life message? If you are the department of agriculture and
on that front page where it says, "Hey, this is what we're doing right now in the department
of agriculture, and here's some more quaint messages, here's some tips from some experts,
or we're having this." It's got to be in everywhere, because that message is going out when it's
everywhere is, we want you to use this. We want you to see. We believe in it enough
to put it on the front page of our newsletter. It's on our website. You don't have to go
someplace else to find it. You can go some place and find it, and a lot of it, but we're
trying to integrate in to everything. A manager newsletter, something called take five, a
monthly newsletter goes to all managers at task.
Work life message. OK, so it's got to be everywhere. It can't be an add on. That's something that's
really hard to do, but once you get it going, actually people are glad to have the space
filled. It's a nice tip. They might be able to use it themselves. Then the tangible encouragement
and celebration for the people who are balanced. Ou've got somebody who's using your Telework
program and it's great, and it's really great for them, feature them. Talk about it. Celebrate
them. How'd this work out for you? You've got somebody at senior level that's using
this and it really succeeded for them? Have them bring in a friend and talk about it on
a webcast or something. You really just want to get that out there
to people. It's everywhere. Everywhere you look, because it's a value. It's not a program.
So, again, looking at this, I'm bringing this back again because when you look at this it's
really important to realize. What is trust about? When you trust another person, you
trust them to have your back. They have good will toward you. What it is, is they're showing
you regard. The people who we really regard...I'm not
going to give you a vocabulary lesson or anything. But I love the word regard. It's something
we forget. This is straight out of the dictionary, not modified at all. These are three definitions
of regard. It's attention. It's having an opinion of the quality or the worth of somebody.
All of your programs should be about regard. It should be about saying, I see you. I think
you're worthy. We want you to succeed. Who doesn't like to hear that? That brings about
the trust. People will use that, and if managers really believe that this is what they're supposed
to be feeling about their employees and they don't, that's the discord there.
If their messengers are not getting out there and saying this, I regard you. I regard my
employees. As a manager, I would take a bullet for any of my employees. I love them. I really
care about them. Do they drive me crazy sometimes? Sure. Are there issues? Sure. But I want them
to succeed. If they don't succeed, I don't succeed. I need to have that message out there
all the time. So, work life balance at SAS. We don't do
it very normally hence the upside down. Part of the reason why is because we do have this
fabulous environment. I'm going to tell you about it, because this is the part that's
on 60 Minutes, and the part that everybody loves to know about SAS and everybody goes,
I hate you. You're so lucky, you work at SAS. It's Utopia.
Well, it's pretty great. But these things are all add ons. We need all of our employees
who aren't working at headquarters to feel like they also are regarded. A lot of these
things here are specific to working at headquarters. So, yes, we have on site child care. We have
cafes, we have coffee bars. We have dry cleaning pickup. It's not free. We have massage. It's
not free. But it's right there. It's convenient services. They're on site services. Part of
that is to say to people, "Hey, let's make this convenient for you. A lot of you commute
to here, let's make it convenient." Getting a dry cleaner to come pick up dry cleaning
on site, that's easy. They want the business. They'll come.
Getting a massage therapist here, absolutely, they'll come. Sure, they get paid. Our hair
salon, they get paid. They'll come. All these folks are happy to come. But it's not useful
if the message behind it is just convenience. It's all part of the culture of regard.
The last two things, that work like a AP center, which is what I'm going to talk to you about,
and the on site health care and pharmacy. We do have on site health care. It's a fabulous
resource. We have an on site pharmacy. It's a fabulous resource.
All this is, you're probably going, like "Yeah, that's great. How is that going to help us?
We can't have an on site pharmacy." So I'm going to talk about the Work Life programs.
Because that's my area, and that's something I can help with. So, I'm going to show you
a little film, but I want to talk about the four legs of the stool, as what we call it,
in work life balance. We do networking and support, education and
skill building, resource and referral, and problem solving and personal coaching. We
do that. We are six master's level social workers and one guidance counselor. We are
full time SAS employees. We work at SAS. Our job is to do that. That's
what we do. We're not contracted, we're not an add on. We have our own building and our
own space. We have all the technology we need to get things to our regional employees.
The biggest message of all of that is permission. We're right there. You know if you come to
SAS, and the Work Life Center is a building. There's a bricks and mortar commitment to
the fact that you can use us. We're not just there one afternoon a month. We're there all
the same hours that all the other employees are there. That message is huge.
This isn't something remote. And now, I'm talking about regional employees, too, because
all of those programs exist for our regional employees too. It's hard getting to those
regional employees. I'm not just talking regional. I'm talking about telecommuters like Tom here
in the front row. He's with sales. He lives nearer to you guys than to us.
He can get all the same resources available on the computer. He can call us, we can even
Skype. He can look at all of our archive seminars, he can look at our podcasts, and his wife
can, too. His kids can, too. So, I'm going to play a little film here, more of my talking
face. [music]
Woman 10: Family issues. Woman 11: Emotional issues.
Woman 12: Adoption Services. Man 1: Going to college.
Woman 13: Parenting issues. Woman 14: Eldercare services.
Man 2: Divorce process. Woman 15: Trust management. The mission of
Work Life is pretty simple. It's to help people balance their professional and personal lives.
Man 3: Maintaining that balance can often be a delicate task. At SAS, the work life
center helps employees address all of life's major concerns. The Work Life Center offers
assistance to employees, retirees and their families, whose support groups, seminars,
one on one counseling, and resource referrals. These services are provided throughout the
company, wherever a member of the SAS family may be.
Woman 16: Because we're trained social workers and counselors, we can do something in an
hour that might take an employee a great deal of time.
Woman 17: I think at SAS, it lets people get the information they need to deal with their
personal life so that they can really focus on their job.
Woman 18: It minimizes the stress factors on an employee, which makes an employee more
productive. Man 4: I've got a built in support network
right here at SAS that I wouldn't have outside the company.
Man 5: At the Work Life Center, you'll find the Caring Closet, where SAS employees and
their family members can borrow medical support equipment. Work Life is also home to a library
full of books, CDs and videos covering a wide range of issues and concerns. The employee
assistance program, a confidential service, is administered by Work Life, and can provide
additional assistance with emotional, legal and financial matters.
Woman 18: We're going to help you find the best people in the community, the best education,
the best resources that you can get. Woman 19: We were concerned about blending
our two families, which involved each of us having a young girl from a prior marriage.
We spent time in step parenting classes with Work/Life, learning how to best approach that
so that we could be prepared for the challenges that we figured we would run into.
Man 6: We learned a lot through some of the workplace seminars regarding how to pick colleges,
apply to colleges, what colleges look for, what I should be thinking about in terms of
parenting a child that's going to college. Woman 20: We used the adoption services. I
have an 18 month old daughter, my husband and I do. I had gone previously prior to adopting
to open house events on adoption, and they had several agencies in the North Carolina
there. That was very helpful and helped me make my decision on which agency to use, actually.
My daughter was eight days old when they handed her to me, and it was the most wonderful experience.
Now she's 18 months old, and I can't believe it.
Woman 21: When somebody's really stressed, one of the first casualties is their innovation.
Creativity goes right out the window. Of course, at a software company like SAS, we need to
be innovative. We need to be creative. Woman 22: My interactions with Work/Life have
really helped me here at SAS, because when I needed somebody to talk to, number one,
it was convenient. I didn't have to go somewhere else to find someone to talk to about it.
Number two, it was just very quality assistance. Woman 23: A lot of people realize how lucky
we are to have it. It just seems like it's a great investment for the company.
Woman 24: Work/Life is priceless in the sense that it provides security of knowing that
I have experts here at my disposal that will help me find the resources that I need within
the community, or outside of the community, that can help me better feel secure in the
decisions that I'm making saving money, saving time, not being stressed or having another
outlet to find, so that I don't have to search the papers, search the Internet and wonder
what is best. Man 7: I think it's probably one of the best
benefits that we have at this company. I actually mean that. It's been a tremendous asset to
me throughout my career here. I don't know what I would have done without it. [music]
Laura: That's our little video that we show sometimes during orientation and things. Just
quickly, I want to say before I get into this ridiculously long list. I'm not going to read
it to you, don't worry. The Caring Closet, the thing that they were referring to in there,
that's just something that came about because somebody wanted to donate some family equipment,
a wheelchair, a walker and something else. I can't remember what it was. They said, "Can't
somebody else use it?" Probably 30 percent of our best programs,
maybe even 40 or 50, come from employees. I said, "That's a pretty cool idea. Yeah,
actually, we've got some storage space. Why don't we go ahead and do that and see what
else we can drum up?" We use our employee LISTSERVs. We have existing
LISTSERVs. They are for performance, alliance, sales and who knows what all. We said, why
not have a LISTSERV for elder care? Why not have a LISTSERV for parenting? Why not have
a LISTSERV for divorce/separation? Or just for what's going on in the community.
We started piggy backing on the LISTSERVs and stuff, and that's where one of those ideas
came from, the Caring Closet. Now, we have this huge closet full of walkers, wheelchairs
and canes. We have liability covered with a disclaimer that we work on through legal.
People come. Their parents fly in from such and such or they have an operation and their
spouse is aging and gets a hip replacement. They can come and use our equipment and borrow
it. They don't want to buy it or they don't even need it long term. So they just borrow
it. "Is it better to use a walker or a four pronged cane? Mom wants to try it out." Well,
bring her in. Let's see. Or retirees, or whatever it is. They use it through our library system.
They check out the equipment the same way you check out a library book.
It's almost 100 percent donations. We do buy a couple of extra wheelchairs, because some
of the wheelchairs we were getting were pretty rickety. So we didn't want to keep those around.
In the Work Life program area, you will see here 22 areas. All of these areas are areas
in which we have books, resources, support groups, classes. One of the Work Life staff
is tied to some of these programs. Everyone has their pocket of expertise. But we can
all back each other up. All of these might look like different things.
In any given month, there might be a couple of support groups, a couple of classes. There
might be some experts coming in and doing talks. But here's what I really want to emphasize
for today. I'm going to try to get through this pretty quickly, because I do want to
hear your questions. The issues that I have listed up here are
what we call the non intuitive issues. Flexible scheduling is in place at SAS. We have lots
of great leave programs and flexible scheduling. But any of these things are the issues that
we tend to see require more flexibility, more leave time and are more stressful.
Why? Because they are not intuitive. These are some issues that come up with parenting,
in particular special needs parenting, parenting of teens, parenting of children with mental
health issues or any of those kinds of parenting issues and adoption and infertility issues.
They are all non intuitive. We don't have rehearsals for them.
Or there are things that we don't necessarily want to bring up in that crowd. We can all
talk about our three year old being kind of a handful. But really, when it comes to trauma
or grief or elder care giving, getting a divorce or having a relationship amok or any of those
kinds of things, they are not things that we publicly share very well.
You can have all the flexibility in the world to deal with those things and maybe even take
a leave of absence. But what we know, from working at SAS now for 13 years, is that people
don't know what to do once they have that flexibility.
We did a survey a couple of years ago. I recommend trying this. What is it that we can do for
you? What would be helpful in this situation? If you have ever used a Work Life consultation
or service before, how much time would you estimate it saved you per hour? We were blown
away. 87 percent of the respondents to our survey,
and there were way more people than we ever thought would even respond to that survey,
said we saved them 35 plus hours. That was my bad, because that was the top category,
35 plus. I was like, "Darn. I wish I had put in 90 or 100 to see what was going on."
But the return on investment right there is huge. So, in terms of making the case, one
hour with us is a bargain. An FMLA leave or somebody who requires flexibility, because
things are going wrong in their lives, these are the cliff issues. These are the issues
that will push them right over the cliff. These aren't the, "Let's play Frisbee and
do yoga and prevent or maintain our wellness." These are, "I'm already not well." These are,
"My life just got hijacked. My parents just died. I don't know what to do. Dad just fell
down the stairs. He just broke a hip. Mom has got memory issues. She can't drive. They
are in Ohio." I can give you flexibility. But how is that
going to help you, when you get to Ohio? You come to us and you bring that issue to us,
and what we have when you get to Ohio is respite care, Meals On Wheels. We have mom being able
to get shuttled back and forth to go see dad at rehab. We have a home visitor for mom.
We have mom being shuttled to and from her doctor's appointments.
We have that figured out for you, because if you call the toll free number in our EAP,
and our EAP's good, but if you call that EAP, they'll say, "Here are three rehab centers."
You call back. "Here's the Meals On Wheels phone number." Anyone who's pretty good with
Google can figure that out if you know where to look, but you have to keep calling back,
"Well, how does this work with Medicare?" And, "Dad was a veteran, now what?" Well,
I don't even know to ask those questions. It's not intuitive. This is my first experience
with dad falling down the stairs and mom having memory issues, who doesn't drive.
I'm telling you, I don't care about that meeting tomorrow. I don't care about that report that's
due next week, because I am all about my parents right now. They're in a crisis. So, one hour
with us can save you that 25 hours in Ohio. You don't have to take FMLA, maybe. Maybe
you can go there and make sure all those things are in place, have a visit, attend to everything,
get it all set up, because we've got it all lined up for you, and come back a couple days
later. Maybe that's going to work out well for you.
It doesn't matter if they're in Ohio or in Raleigh, which is five miles up the road.
We don't know what to do in those situations. "My child has been recently diagnosed with
autism. Do I keep him public school? Don't I? Is there insurance that covers this? What
kind of tutoring do they need?" One phone call is not going to help me with that.
Flexibility isn't necessarily going to help me with that, so I'm not saying anything about
teleworking, flexibility. Those are all brilliant, important things, but I'm telling you that
people need that one point of entry before they hit that resource or go out to use that
flexible scheduling. If you don't know what to do once you get there, you're going to
take more time. You need it because you're just swimming upstream.
"What do I do? They're going to discharge mom from the hospital on Friday." That is
the most common thing we hear. "They're discharging mom or dad from the hospital on Friday. It's
Thursday. They're going to put them in whatever place has a Medicare badge or a Medicaid badge.
I don't know anything about these places." Well, we can tell you how to stall it for
48 hours, and we can tell you which homes have complaints against them right now.
There are things like that I really want to emphasize. The things that we do at SAS that
make the culture, trust, the regard so high, those are the things that say, "I see you,
and I see you, and our diversity is, we've got 5,000 people plus in the United States.
That's our diversity." We have 5,000 diversity programs, because there's 5,000 different
needs out there. We have 5,000 different ages, and stages,
and marriages, and divorces, and kids, and not kids, and step kids, and adoption. All
of those things, those are not intuitive things that people know how to deal with. I'm telling
you, I know all this stuff. I'm a trained grief counselor. I'm a trained mediator. My
mother passed away two years ago. I couldn't tell you which way north, south, east, or
west was. I didn't know where my car was or if I had driven it.
I know what it means to have your frontal lobe severed from your amygdala, your impulse
control. When you're in an emotional state like that, it doesn't matter what else is
going on, so you need help. Those resources were there for me too, and I knew to go tap
them, because I knew I didn't know what I was doing at that moment.
That's something that I think is really something that matters, and if your organization looks
like anything like SAS, here it is. This is in 2010. 51 percent of our employees are over
45. 14 percent of our employees are over 55. When those stressors hit those of us who are
over 45, it hurts a little more. It affects our bodies a little bit more. We're a little
bit more sick from stress. It impacts us a little bit more. We can't sleep as well. We
can't think as well. We might get more sick. Our immune system
might go down, and if you're a Sandwich generation person, like me, and you've got elders and
teens, and stress, and, "I don't have help and I don't know where to turn," then I'm
not a good employee anymore, and I used to be. That's just the bottom line. That's how
we all roll. What Veronica was saying earlier was important.
I think it was Vernica. I think it was you that was saying, "At different times, different
people need different..." It might be extended day. It might have been Cristina.
Anyway, at different times of our lives, we need different things, and we're setting our
metric space on that 25 year old who has that endless energy, and good hips, and they can
sit and look at a computer monitor all day. If that's our metric for success, then we're
missing out on some really good employees who have a lot to offer.
We've got to be flexible through the ages, and that flexibility might mean, "You need
specific resources for you? I'm going to bring you back in, because I want you to succeed."
Remember that message, "I want you to succeed." We want our people to feel great about where
they work. This all isn't costing a lot of money, and that seems counter intuitive, but
it's not, because we have tons... You guys have so much in your community in
Washington, DC. I'll show you a list my intern made in a second, but there are so many resources
available around here that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. When these things happen,
and illness is going up, and absenteeism is going up, and tardiness is going up, and high
conflict relationships are happening because people get pretty snippy when they're tense,
I mean, I do. I don't know if you all do. I do. If we got the presenteeism, because
guess what the hours are for that nursing home, or for that hospital? They're the same
hours we're working. Presenteeism isn't just dilly dallying, playing solitaire on your
computer, it's also going like, "Can you help? My dad, I think, was a veteran, and I don't
know if he's got benefits or not. He just fell down the stairs. He's in Ohio. Oh, wrong
number? OK, who should I call? OK." "Hi, this is..." It goes on, and on, and on,
because you don't know where to ask. That presenteeism is also a real problem because
some of it is just not knowing what to do. So, come to us. We might flip you to the EAP.
We might flip you to a community resource. We might flip you to the community area agency
on aging. We might bring you to the social security office.
We might tell you, "Here are some resources down the street," but we can do it all across
the country, and it's just worth it. So, you kind of know what we do now. We do consultations.
We do a lot of research, learning at the lending library.
We also do a lot of management education, and part of the reason that's supported at
SAS is because managers are just human beings, so when their employee has a recent diagnosis
of breast cancer, and they start to try to do the right thing, and they're saying, "Take
whatever time you need..." Now you've got an employee who's taking whatever time she
needs, and that's great for a week or two. What does that look like on week three?
What it looks like is the rest of the group is getting a little PO'd. They're wondering,
"When's she coming back? What's wrong with her anyway? Why are you being so nice, and
why am I doing her work? Because what you don't know about me is I'm getting a divorce,
and my kid's in trouble with the law, and I haven't brought that to work, and now I'm
doing her work." You've got the silent sufferers who start
to seethe, and they get angry, because that manager did the wrong thing with the best
heart. They said, "Hey, take the time you need." It comes right from the heart. We do
a lot of management education on how to preempt that, so that you don't have an issue where
there's all sorts of unbalance and low morale, and also maybe even that they needed an accommodation
after all, or they need an FMLA. Here's how I think you guys could do some
things. If this might be useful to you, you're welcome to have these slides. If this is useful,
I can send you stuff. You can contact me, I promise you. laura.wallace@sas.com. You
can email me and I will email you back, or have somebody email you back if I'm swamped.
When you look at the needs of your employees, and I'm talking about not at the policy level,
I'm talking about that regard level, figure out how are you going to determine the needs.
Maybe it's a survey. Maybe you pull together a representative sample of a bunch of different
people. Maybe you have a hotline or a suggestion box.
You just start to get some input. "What do you need, guys? What's going on? How can we
help you? What would be useful, within the budget of zero?" [laughs] "Within the budget
of three SAS people, one staff person." You start to set up some realistic parameters
and you ask, "What do you need? Who needs it? Where's the pain?" How do you know it's
painful? How do you know this is a problem? Are you sure it's a problem?
It might be a problem for me, but it might not be a problem for you all, so I better
ask. I'm going to pull together a group of employees. I'm going to survey them, whatever
it is. It might be managers I start with, and I start with their stress. What's going
on in their lives? Because, how do you hook a person? You get
buy in by making it relate to them. If your managers are stressed, and they're out of
whack, and they're out of balance, and they've got a care giving issue, and you start to
talk about that with managers, how to manage when you're stressed is a great thing to pull
in managers and talk about what's going on with them.
All of a sudden you get them, "Oh yeah, that's an issue for me, too. I didn't know that resource
was available." Please, don't ask a question, or offer something if you can't do it. You
will have lower morale than when you started. There's a large software company, not us,
that came to visit us about ten years ago. They were very little then, they're very big
now, and they said that they took all their employees skiing every year. Their work life
balance is that they all went skiing. Well, it's fine if you're 300 25 year olds. Is that
sustainable? No way. My question for them was just, "Do you have any intention of growing?"
"Yes." "Is that an expectation you want to set?" "No." Don't ask something when you can't
fulfill. Prioritizing, if you can do one thing...When
I first started at SAS, I was the lone ranger. My job was to expand. We had child care. We
had one part time elder care person. My job was to do everything between, and beyond,
and beyond. "Yeah, no problem." Prioritizing. What I started to do was just look around
in the community. I knew I had parents of teens that were freaking out, so I looked
at the high school. They were doing a college fair.
I said, "Hey, can we buy cookies and make your banner, and call it a SAS college fair,
too?" They said, "Yeah, we need cookies." All of a sudden we have a college fair. I
started to look at, "What's going on? What's happening? Who do we need to get to the table?
Who can we get buy in from?" I looked outside of the walls of SAS, because I was the lone
ranger at that point. Now we have 10 people in our department.
What I recommend is the first thing you do, low cost, high splash. Figure out what that
is. Get your stakeholders together and figure out something that's splashy to get that conversation
started. Identifying resources. It's really important
to look within your own company at what already exists. If you've got an adoption policy,
and you've got a parenting leave policy, and you happen to know that there are some employees
here who have adopted children, I'm seeing an adoption program forming here. You put
this all in one web page. You say, "Hey, employees who have adopted
children before. We'd like three of you to be on a panel. And hey, employees who are
thinking about adopting somebody, come and hear this panel and we'll record it." We're
going to have 10 of our favorite titles about adoption. We're going to have a book group.
You can get any book that's out there for half price if you order 10 or more copies
from most publishers. Have a book group. We have the employees pay for it themselves,
payroll deduct. So, all of a sudden, we've got an adoption
program forming. We've got the agency. That woman who was talking about the fair that
we had where all those agencies came in and she adopted her beautiful little baby who's
now five. That woman, she came to that fair. What we did is we gave them a room like this.
We invited everybody we knew who had anything to do with adoption. Gave them eight foot
tables and gave them some crackers. [laughs] Here's a Pepsi. Have at it. We invited everybody
on campus to come to the adoption fair. 75 people showed up. We were amazed.
I'd go, "Wow, we're voting with our feet here." We know that this is an important need. It
was a big splash, and all of a sudden we had an adoption program. We had a bunch of adoptive
parents who volunteered to be mentors right away. We put them in a database. They're mentors
now. Our database is really an Excel spreadsheet, to be honest, but people take a look at it
and see it was doing well. OK, this is just a list of things that existed
at SAS. Communication vehicles that existed already at SAS that we have piggybacked into.
I am a shameless vulture. I will come into your department and find out that you're doing
a certain kind of new webcast for sales and I'll say, "Hey, how would you feel about filming
four or five work/life seminars? Oh, great. You would? Could you make us some music to
start so it's really kind of professional sounding? You would?"
A lot of people really like what we do and they want to contribute. It makes them feel
better, too. So we're happy. These people we can piggyback with, they are happy to let
us piggyback. So, we've got websites, newsletters, listservs, social media. We have the thing
called the Hub, which is just the reincarnation of Facebook but it's inside of SAS.
Look at those kinds of things. But even if you can't do that, Yahoo has discussion groups.
Form your own. Make a Facebook page for federal adoptive families. See how that works.
I know I'm going through fast through this, but I do want to talk. So, community partnerships
really leverage what's going on in your community, really look at what's happening around, whether
there's community professionals. I tell you, we can't keep lawyers away from
SAS. Elder law attorneys, there's a national alliance of elder law attorneys. They want
to do estate planning, wills, and manage estates. We have a vendor agreement that says you have
to have five years of experience, you have to have no charges against you, blah blah
blah blah, you have to meet all of our ESC standards. Fill that out.
Oh, they fill those things out so fast and we just give them a little office. Come get
your will done. Do we touch the money? No. We made the mistake
of actually setting up the appointments for a while, and we thought "Why are we doing
that?" So, we have that law office that's coming in to do divorce consultations or to
do wills or to do estate planning, whatever it is, advance directives, organ donation.
We have their secretary set up the appointments. We provide the office and the advertising.
We had 300 employees the first five months we did this, 300 employees did their wills.
Do you think those lawyers want to come back? You bet. You bet they wanted to come back.
That is, they didn't have to advertise, and in exchange we got five seminars from them.
Come do seminars about wills, advanced structures, whatever.
So, look in your community. Bring in the experts. Don't reinvent the wheel. Link employees to
agencies that already exist. Place links from community calendars.
We have something called Carolina Parent. I don't know if you have something like that
here. But it's like DC Parent or whatever you've got. They have a calendar for all activities
going on in the community for kids. Did they let us link to their calendar? You bet they
did, and they gave us a free subscription, and we have it in our lobby.
So, here's what's happening this weekend in our community for kids. That is as easy as
placing a link on a listservs. All of these things are things employees can name that
make them feel regarded. This paints a list right here. Again, if you
want me to, I'll email you this, or you might be able to get it from somebody here. These
are agencies in your community that are federal agencies that all have outreach as part of
a mandate. Some of them might be you guys. My student did this. My pre intern.
Let me show you this. Schools of social work in Washington DC area. Free interns. All schools
of social work, students have to do an internship. They have to do a field placement. So if you
can get somebody to come in and do that, and you direct their learning...
They have to learn. We all know those standards. The fair labor, right? You can't just have
them to all the stuff that you would be having a paid employee to do.
But one of the beautiful things about creating new programs is, you wouldn't be doing it
without the help. It wouldn't be something you would normally be doing.
I have an intern that loves assistive technology. That's her thing. It floats her boat. She's
a social work intern. Assistive technology. She's found every group on campus that has
anything to do with assistive technology, or that's using assistive technology.
She's created an assistive technology fair that's happening next month, that it has high
level people from our political world and our technology world, all in the community
coming in. She did that. Because that's her baby. She loves assistive technology.
Was it a gap in our services? Sure. We didn't know anything about assistive...We know some.
So, social work students. Now, there's interns everywhere, and all these
agencies here might have interns. They might have social workers on staff that are supervising
interns. Try and see if you can borrow one to create an outreach program for federal
employees around area agency on aging. The area agency on aging is in every community.
Child care resources and referrals is in every community in the United States. They have
a mandate for outreach. AARP. They love to talk. Bring them in. See
who's got resources that you can tap into. This you can do in an afternoon one month.
You spend two hours in a month doing this. Or you have a student do it. Or you have somebody
who's a temp come in and do it if you have the funds for it, which we don't usually do
because they don't budget it. You'll see Social Security Administration
down there at the bottom. Anyone here from Social Security Administration? We use and
abuse our Social Security Administration rep in Raleigh. They come in and they do presentations
all the time on Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid. They answer questions and do consultations.
We bring in people's parents and children and retirees to talk about this.
These are all low cost, no cost things you can do tomorrow. That's what I really wanted
to say, because when it all comes down to it, this is our turnover rate. We have a four
percent turnover rate. The industry average in the same kind of technology industry is
20 percent. That costs millions of dollars, that turnover.
So you want people to think you're going to succeed. We want you to. We care about you.
We regard you. That's it, so thank you. I know that you guys are trying to go home and
get some work/life balance. [applause]
Laura: Thank you. I welcome questions. I'd love to hear questions or comments. I really
would. I'm sorry, I tried to do that as fast as I could. Is there anything that anyone
would like to know or that didn't make sense or you're thinking, what was she talking about?
That would never work. I got no ego in this, bring it on.
Anyone have anything, you're thinking pie in the sky, it's not?
Flexibility is a great, great thing. Teleworking is a great, great thing. But I do say, if
you can spend some time crafting those resources, get the people in your community to help you
craft resources for those non intuitive life events, that's a great start. People will
feel cared about and regarded. It makes a big difference in terms of trust
and your culture, which is what I really wanted to emphasize today is creating that culture,
because those policies are only as good as if people use them. And they feel safe to
use them. So, nothing? You all want to go home, don't
you? I've got to get on a plane, too. But I'm happy to answer anything. Nothing? All
right. [applause]
Laura: Have a good afternoon. Go enjoy that hot weather, that hot summer weather.
Veronica: So, I have to tell you all, with the new executive order on no fluff, we can't
even give gifts anymore. But our applause for Laura should really be our gift to her.
[applause] Veronica: You all know the executive order,
right? No swag, so. What I did want to tell you all is that we will have the presentations
on the diversity and inclusion web page on the OPM website and along with the video of
the symposium. What I can promise is that we will put that up on the MAX website quickly.
It's much easier to get it up on the MAX website than it is on the OPM one, because we're redoing
it to make it friendly. And that brings me, really, to my closing
thought. We are here to serve you. I know there was a time when the joke was it's NOPM.
They told you all the things you couldn't do. Well, we want to be yes OPM and we want
to be here and give you what you need to do your jobs.
So, as you have needs, let us know. Go on MAX, check out all the resources there. And
also, join the community of practice. I promise you that'll be up there tomorrow, the one
that is specifically for work life flexibilities. And, with that, thank you for making your
workplaces more inclusive. Keep up the good work.
[applause] Transcription by CastingWords