Flextime, compressed work week, telecommuting, benefit dollars, take home meals, parenting rap sessions, on-site child care, summer camp, and bonuses for having babies: with women entering the work force at a rate twice that of men, and with 65 percent of American mothers working either full-or part-time outside the home, changes in personnel policies, benefits, and child-care options are ushering in a "family-friendly" era in the workplace.
Companies of diverse sizes and from a variety of industries are experimenting with work/family programs in an attempt to fit corporate and family needs together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For employed parents - in classrooms or on construction sites, in operating rooms or in front of computer screens - the bottom line is making the balancing act between family and job succeed.
Children's Hospital at Stanford
Department of Labor and U.S. Chamber of Commerce statistics indicate that the West Coast is one of the more progressive areas of the country in terms of flexible workplace and benefits. Research also indicates that hospitals are on the cutting edge of change nationwide. A critical shortage of nurses is costing some health care facilities in the range of forty thousand dollars to fill each staff nursing vacancy.
Children's Hospital at Stanford is a diminutive, sixty-bed facility in the competitive shadow of the Stanford health-care complex in Palo Alto. Nearby medical centers in San Francisco also complete for the area's pool of skilled nurse real estate prices - with a three-bedroom home in the $300,000 range - compound the recruiting dilemma for the Bay Area hospitals. Yet Children's enjoys a nursing staff vacancy of less than 2 percent, which compares favorably to the 10-15 percent range on the national level.
Why the low level of vacancy? "They've developed a huge pool of flexibly scheduled nurses," says Paul Rupert of the San Francisco-base New Ways to work, a firm devoted to helping companies "adapt to the new realities of work." The pool, Rupert continues, was "set up by a wise woman, now retired, who understood that they couldn't compete with money but could with time and flexibility."
Jill Taylor, who as the hospital's director of patient care oversees the nursing staff, explains that there are two plans for the 150 nurses. "In the first program our regular employees get a schedule every six weeks" rather than working a static shift. "The second pool plans their own schedules each week, working as few as six shifts every six months. It's flextime based on their personal needs," says Taylor, who as an administrator works a traditional five-day week.
More than 90 percent of Children's nurses also opt to work part-time. The diverse timetables and personalized scheduling heave surprisingly provided the balance needed to cover day, evening, and midnight shifts.
Taylor says their program was unique when it first started but that hospitals in many parts of the country have now begun using flex schedules for their nursing staffs. And not just hospitals. Using Bureau of Labor statistics, the Families and Work Institute in New York City reports that 12.3 percent of the
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