Launching the workplace flexibility movement: work family research and a program of social change

Abstract

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program was established in 1994 and ended in 2011. Over the course of its 17-year lifespan, this program – through its vision, commitment and unique, pragmatic grant-making strategies – pioneered the interdisciplinary field of work–family research and spearheaded a national movement to create more flexible workplaces that effectively meet the needs of employees and employers. The program's first strategic phase supported high-quality, multidisciplinary research to examine what was happening within working families at all stages of their lives, both at home and at work. Results from these investigations highlighted the structural mismatch between the needs of this diverse workforce – comprised increasingly of working parents and older workers – and the demands of a rigidly structured workplace requiring full-time, full-year work, with little to no flexibility in how, when, or where work gets done. After a decade of scholarly research documenting that the challenges facing American families were not private, individual problems but public, societal concerns, the Sloan Foundation designed and launched in 2003 the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. Its goals were twofold: to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and to establish it as a standard of the American workplace. As a result of the collective efforts of Sloan-supported organizations and people, the stage is now set for a social movement to realign the structure of the American workplace to the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. Lessons for subsequent research-driven social movements close the article.

El programa Workplace, Work Force & Working Families de la fundación Alfred P. Sloan se fundó en 1994 y concluyó en 2011. Durante estos 17 años, este programa – a través de su visión, dedicación y sus estrategias únicas y pragmáticas para ganar becas – lideraron el campo interdisciplinar de las investigaciones sobre trabajo y familia, e iniciaron un movimiento nacional destinado a crear lugares de trabajo más flexibles que satisfagan de manera eficaz las necesidades de empleados y empleadores. La primera fase estratégica del programa apoyó investigaciones de alta calidad y carácter multidisciplinar dedicadas a examinar lo que estaba ocurriendo en el seno de las familias trabajadoras en todos los ámbitos de su vida, tanto en casa como en el trabajo. Los resultados de estas investigaciones subrayan la discordancia estructural entre las necesidades de una fuerza laboral diversa – compuesta cada vez más por padres y madres trabajadores y empleados mayores – y las demandas de un lugar de trabajo rígidamente estructurado que requiere trabajo de tiempo completo, año completo, con poco a nada de flexibilidad en torno a cómo, cuándo o dónde se hace el trabajo. Después de una década de investigación mostrando que los desafíos a los que se enfrentan las familias estadounidenses no son un problema individual y privado, sino que se trata de un asunto público y social, la Fundación Sloan diseñó y lanzó en 2003 la National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. El objetivo era doble: convertir la flexibilidad del lugar del trabajo en parte de la agenda nacional, y establecerlo como norma en el lugar del trabajo estadounidense. Como resultado de los esfuerzos colectivos de organizaciones y personal apoyados por Sloan, la etapa ya está lista para un movimiento social que realinee la estructura del lugar del trabajo estadounidense con las necesidades de la fuerza del trabajo del siglo XXI. El artículo termina con ejemplos para próximos movimientos sociales basados en la investigación.

Keywords:

• work–family
• workplace flexibility
• flexible work arrangements
• history of work–family
• working parents
• women and work
• work–life balance

Palabras claves:

• familia-trabajo
• flexibilidad en el trabajo
• acuerdos laborales flexibles
• historial de familia-trabajo
• padres trabajadores
• mujeres trabajadoras
• equilibrio entre la vida y el trabajo

Introduction to workplace flexibility

Since the 1970s, the structure of the American family has significantly changed due to the rise of two-parent, dual-earner households, as well as single-parent, single-earner households, and older couples facing joint retirements. These changes have altered the family's relationship to work in the USA. The twenty-first century workforce is increasingly dual-centric, with responsibilities for both work and family at the core of workers’ lives. Yet this twenty-first century workforce continues to labor in twentieth century workplaces, governed by employment laws forged in the late 1930s, as well as by rigid expectations on when and where work is done – expectations more in keeping with the old, industrial ‘presenteeism’ model of work than with today's performance-based economy.

By the early 1990s, we, as a society, were living through this massive societal change that was going relatively unexamined by scholars. In 1994, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation undertook a grant-making program to examine this change, unparalleled at that time within the funding worlds of either the federal government or private philanthropy.

The resulting Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program pursued a unique, four-pronged strategic approach to uncover, address, and attempt to solve the challenges of meeting work and family obligations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The strategies included: (a) supporting rigorous, multidisciplinary research on working families and in so doing produce the next generation of scholars; (b) developing and promoting work–family initiatives in the field of higher education; (c) building public–private partnerships to promote workplace flexibility; and (d) increasing public discussions of the challenges facing today's working families and employers.

This is a first-person account, as I was the person who founded, designed, and directed the Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program. In that role, I was responsible for articulating the vision that guided its development and implementation, resulting in more than 400 grants – exceeding $130,000,000. Much of what is recounted draws upon an independent evaluation of the program and its impacts that was completed by NORC, the independent research organization at the University of Chicago, in 2010 (McDonald, Brown, Hanis-Martin, Sachs, & Keating, 2011). But neither the NORC evaluation nor what I will now recount can in any way be seen as an exhaustive accounting of all the work that Sloan supported. Rather, I will provide a broad sketch of the strategies and examples of our grant making in order to provide an overview of how our efforts informed research; started a national conversation in higher education about the work–family challenges facing the professoriate; forged a national campaign on workplace flexibility; and built partnerships with Congress, the White House, and the private sector to advance more flexible workplaces.

Program background

In 1994 I was a tenured, full professor of psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York conducting research on working mothers and their marginalization in the American workplace as contingent workers or self-employed, solo business owners working out of their homes. Most of these women were working under these conditions because of the lack of viable opportunities in conventional workplaces that would allow them to effectively meet their work and family responsibilities (Christensen, 1988a, 1988b, 1989; Christensen & Staines, 1990). At the time, I was also the mother of two young daughters, aged five and three.

In the summer of that year, I received a call from Sloan's soon-to-be Vice President, Hirsh Cohen, saying that Sloan's President, Ralph Gomory, wanted me to come into their New York offices to talk about starting a new program on work and family. I thanked him, but demurred, saying that my daughters and I were at our beach house, and our girls’ caregiver was on vacation, so I could not make it. His immediate response was to suggest that I bring the girls into the office. At that point, I figured that any workplace where a 60-plus-year-old man would suggest bringing my children was a place that interested me.

Prior to joining Sloan, Ralph Gomory was IBM's Senior Vice President of Science and Technology and had witnessed firsthand what he viewed as a troubling loss of human capital, as so many women dropped out of the workforce once they had children. He thought if the Foundation could develop a practical model for part-time careers through its grant making, we could help stem the tide of lost human capital. We agreed that part-time careers would be one piece of a larger program I would develop. So, I decided to join Sloan, initially as a part-time consultant while keeping my faculty position, then as a full-time program officer on a 2-year academic leave, until I finally relinquished my tenured line. Hard as it was to leave my faculty position, I felt that I was being offered once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address many of the challenges facing Americans who were trying to meet the dual demands of work and family.

Challenges in 1994

At the time I joined Sloan, the USA, as well as most of the industrialized West, was living through a major societal sea change. Mothers were staying in the workforce after the birth of their children, or re-entering when the children were young. Increases in mothers’ labor force participation rates had important implications for family structure and how children were cared for, and raised questions about the rigid ways that work was structured in time and space. But while we were living through this massive social change, neither the public nor the scholarly community was paying much attention to it. While Arlie Hochschild and Machung's The Second Shift (1989) had brought some scholarly and public attention to these issues, research attention was scant, given the scope of the changes underway. At that time, it was clear to me that both academia and the public saw these societal changes as private issues requiring private, individual solutions and not as public ones requiring national attention. The challenges facing dual-earner households were not yet a part of the public consciousness. Moreover, in 1994 the field of work–family research did not exist.

Individual studies, usually conducted by psychologists or sociologists, focused on women and employment, specifically maternal employment, with some emphasis on the effects of maternal employment on children.¹ Significantly, less research existed in the 1980s and early 1990s that dealt with how the conditions and structure of work affected working parents and their families (Bohen & Viveros-Long 1981; Christensen, 1988a, 1988b, Christensen & Staines, 1990; Repetti, 1989; Staines & Pleck, 1983). Moreover, most of the research that did exist reflected what Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) referred to as ‘separate spheres’, resulting in the bifurcation of research into either the work sphere or the family sphere, but not focused on the intersection of the two.

The research community did not have the necessary infrastructure to incent scholars to examine that intersection. No networks, conferences, or journals focused on the intersection of work and family. And the Internet, which would eventually increase the opportunities for scholarly interconnectivity, was just coming onto the academic scene.

Corporations were ahead of the academy in addressing what they referred to as ‘work–life issues’. Through the efforts of nonprofit organizations such as New Ways to Work, Catalyst, The Conference Board, Families & Work Institute, Boston University Center for Work & Family (later Boston College Center for Work & Family), and many major corporations such as IBM, John Hancock, and Johnson & Johnson, the private sector was administering surveys to track employees work–family needs, adopting resource and referral services for child care, and to a lesser extent, implementing flexible schedules to help employees ‘balance’ work and family. For purposes of equity, these firms referred to their efforts as ‘work–life’ – not ‘work–family’ – policies and programs because they said all employees should be eligible for these benefits and, while everyone has a life, not everyone has a family. Despite these efforts in the private sector, there were virtually no attempts to bridge the gap between private-sector practice and university-based scholarship.

The time was ripe to develop a scholarly field focused on work–family issues.

Early grants, 1994–1995

Several disparate grants in these first 2 years led to a strategy focused around building a multidisciplinary network of scholars and increasing public understanding. In late 1994, I began funding a series of multidisciplinary studies that collectively examined the extent to which different professions, including law, medicine, accounting, computer programming, technical writing, and management, different sectors and different types of organizations such as corporations and partnerships, allowed part-time careers for educated women without penalty or jeopardizing future career success.² The resulting body of empirical research provided initial evidence showing how the lives of working families had become increasingly complicated; that the challenges were not isolated to families with young children – but in fact were issues for workers of all ages –; and that any attempts to understand what was happening within families required deeper understanding of work conditions, which in turn required bringing diverse scholars together.

In 1994, we at Sloan awarded Arlie Hochschild a grant to write a book based on research she was conducting at a Fortune 500 manufacturing plant. What resulted was her 1997 New York Times Notable Book, The time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work.

If an interdisciplinary community of scholars was going to emerge, however, it needed to be nudged and supported. In 1995, I asked three scholars – labor economist Eileen Appelbaum, industrial relations scholar Rose Batt, and social worker Brad Googins – to build a multidisciplinary team of researchers. These scholars formed the ‘Network on Work Restructuring and Work/Family Research’, a face-to-face network of labor economists and social scientists that met regularly over 2 years and provided seed grants for interdisciplinary research. The express goal of the Network was to examine ‘how work organization and human resource practices can be restructured to improve firm performance and employee well-being’. This network was the first time that economists teamed with sociologists and psychologists to research work and family issues.

This initial wave of grants made it clear to me that if we were to seed the foundations of a scholarly research field, we needed to scale up, in order to create legitimacy within the social sciences and to attract leading scholars to these research efforts. In scaling up, however, several key decisions had to be made: On which side of the work–family hyphen would we initially focus attention? What would we call our efforts? And, who would we engage?

The Alfred P. Sloan Centers on Working Families

While we ultimately wanted to support research that focused on the intersection of the two spheres of work and family, most social scientists were focused more on families than work. By choosing to refer to our efforts as ‘working families’ (a term at that time used only by organized labor), we were establishing our intent to study families in which all adults worked. In those early days, we emphasized middle-class working families for three reasons: most academic research focused on those in poverty or identified as the ‘working poor’; the major demographic transition involved middle-class mothers staying in the labor force, as working-class women had always had a history of labor-force participation; and, perhaps most importantly, the middle class represented the unmarked referent group, by which the norms and activities of other income groups were compared. (It must be noted that over time our focus on the middle class broadened to include all income groups.)

In 1996, we began to establish university-based research centers on working families. The goals of the centers were twofold: to produce both the next generation of work–family scholarship and the next generation of academics studying the issues. Several principles guided this process. Sloan-centers had to be problem-focused and multidisciplinary by structure and intent. Each had to draw on a robust set of methods and focus on the family as the unit of analysis. Located at major US research universities and directed by leading scholars, the centers would have latitude in determining focus, but would be seen as scholarly interventions with a maximum of 9 years at approximately 1 million dollars a year.

Six Sloan Centers on Working Families were established between 1996 and 2000: Cornell University's Employment and Family Careers Institute (Phyllis Moen); University of California, Berkeley's Center on Working Families (Arlie Hochschild and Barrie Thorne); University of Chicago's Center on Parents, Children and Work (Barbara Schneider and Linda Waite); University of Michigan's Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life (Tom Fricke); Emory University's Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL; Bradd Shore); and University of California, Los Angeles’ Center on Everyday Lives of Families (Elinor Ochs).

Several years later, we funded the establishment of three additional centers that broadened the scope of research for understanding working families. These included centers focused on the structure of the workplace, caregiving bias in the workplace, and the aging of the workforce: the MIT Workplace Center (Lotte Bailyn and Thomas Kochan); the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings College of the Law (Joan Williams); and the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College (Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes). With multiyear funding, all nine Centers became distinct regional and national laboratories for the study of the American working family and the workplace.

In addition, 200 other grants funded a wide range of research. Much of this research revolved around the notion of time: work time, family time, and the struggle to have enough of each.

Expanding the research

By the mid-1990s, public concern about long work hours and the pressure on dual-earner families was growing, due in part to Juliet Schor's 1992 book, The overworked American: Unexpected decline of leisure. Common thinking at the time failed to factor family responsibilities into considerations of why Americans had less time for leisure. Instead, the argument was simply that individuals worked longer hours. To bring family back into the equation, Ralph Gomory and I developed the counterargument that the time squeeze experienced by middle-class Americans was more the result of the changing arithmetic of the American family than it was the result of an increase in the number of hours that individual adults in a family were working (Christensen & Gomory, 1999). We advanced the notion of the ‘3/2 family’.

Our premise was that while the traditional family had two jobs – breadwinner and homemaker – and two adults, the same family in the 1990s was now shouldering three jobs – two breadwinning and one homemaking – with no one person taking full responsibility for the domestic care work. The demands on adults in the ‘3 jobs/2 adults’ families outstrip their resources. Even if the three jobs are split evenly between the adults, each is overloaded, with 1.5 jobs per adult. In other words, while the number of adults in the family unit stayed constant, the amount of work grew dramatically. The situation was even worse for the single-parent family, with at least two jobs and only one adult.

In 1997, we funded Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson (2004) to research the total number of hours of paid work by both partners in dual-earner families. Their foundational research resulted in their groundbreaking book, The time divide: Work family and gender inequality. Also in 1997, the Foundation awarded a grant to Suzanne Bianchi and John Robinson, who designed a study that used time diaries to assess ‘a week in the life of dual earner families’. This study yielded rich insights into the web of overlaid activities that compete for family members’ time, and resulted in Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2007). Additional research grants resulted in more than 100 scholarly and commercial books, including: Part-time paradox: Time norms, professional life, family and gender (Epstein, Seron, Oglensky, & Sauté, 1999); Putting work in its place: A quiet revolution (Meiksins & Whalley, 2002); It's about time: Couples and careers (Moen, 2003) The career mystique: Cracks in the American dream (Moen & Roehling, 2005); Being together, working apart: Dual-career families and the work-life balance (Schneider & Waite, 2005); Busier than ever!: Why American families can't slow down (Darrah, Freeman, & English-Lueck, 2007); Family talk: Discourse and identity in four American families (Tannen, Kendall, & Gordon, 2007); Opting out?: Why women really quit careers and head home (Stone, 2007); Life at home in the twenty-first century: 32 families open their doors (Arnold, Graesch, Ragazzini, & Ochs, 2012); Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life (Lareau, 2011), and Longing and belonging: Parents, children, and consumer culture (Pugh, 2009).

What made the Sloan Foundation-funded research unique was that these multidisciplinary investigations employed a wide range of methodologies. Study data were collected from an array of sources, including biological markers, legal briefs, human resources records, interviews, observations, time diaries, surveys, and video analyses. Some of the studies followed individuals over time, some compared results with large national representative samples, and others conducted quasi-experiments that examined changes in employee satisfaction on the basis of workplace flexibility options.

What the research revealed

In the early 2000s, I systematically began to review the extensive body of emerging from the Centers and the individual research projects. The research revealed numerous ways in which the structure of the workplace was misaligned with the needs of US workers across the life course. It became clear to me that the various findings highlighted a mismatch between the structure of full-time, full-year work patterns, as well as traditional, linear career paths and the changing care-giving demands workers encounter over their life course (Christensen & Schneider, 2010, 2011).

The research revealed that the lives of working families are increasingly complicated because of the following reasons:

• Many employed parents enjoy their work and tend to work collectively 58 or more hours a week.³ Couples with children work, on average, a combined 91 hours a week (Galinsky, Bond, & Hill, 2004). Many parents, however, experience a time famine, stressed from the combination of overwork and family responsibilities, and seek new jobs because of these work–life conflicts (Moen & Huang, 2010).

• Work appears to have the strongest influence on the social interactions mothers and fathers have with each other and with their children. These relationships can be particularly negative if the parents spend long hours at jobs that do not have flexible work arrangements (Adam, 2005; Koh, 2005; Marchena, 2005; Matjasko & Feldman, 2005; Nielsen, 2005).

• Family dinner hours are disappearing; mothers, fathers, and children report eating alone in the company of a smart phone or computer screen, signaling an ominous future for family cohesion and well-being (Ochs, Shohet, Campos, & Beck, 2010).

• Educated, talented mothers leave the workforce because they cannot find career-continuous, part-time arrangements (Hewlett & Luce, 2005; Stone, 2007).

• The work–life imbalance increases stress at both work and home, leading to decreased psychological well-being. Dual-earner parents, in the struggle to meet work and family commitments, report feeling stressed, emotionally and psychologically drained, and in danger of burnout (Offer & Schneider, 2011).

  • Nearly one-third of US workers consider work–life balance and flexibility to be the most important factor in considering job offers (A Better Balance, 2008).

  • Parents want more flexibility to care for family needs. In the early 2000s, Families and Work Institute's (FWI) National Study of the Changing Workforce found that nearly 80% of employees said that they would like to have more flexible work options and would use them if there were no negative consequences at work.

Flexibility – the ability to have more control and predictability over when and where hours are worked – becomes, in the views of many Americans, a viable way to realign the structure of the workplace so that employees can better meet the needs of family and jobs.

Impact of Sloan grant making on academic research

By providing sustained funding to a diverse set of researchers in sociology, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, economics, education, geography, industrial relations, labor economics, and law and public policy, the Foundation played a pivotal role in developing the work–family field.

Some of the grant recipients – such as Lotte Bailyn, Rosalind Barnett, and Phyllis Moen – were established leaders in work–family issues. Others expanded their primary areas of interest, bringing new ideas and methodologies to this field. Bradd Shore, who established the Center on MARIAL at Emory University, was planning to return to Samoa to conduct research when I convinced him that he had a unique opportunity to study myths and rituals in American middle-class families. Another anthropologist, Tom Fricke, who later founded the University of Michigan Center, was intent on returning to Nepal to continue his investigations of Nepalese families undergoing economic and social transitions. He reversed geographic course to examine American families in the farmland of North Dakota, as well as in Detroit's automotive plants.

In order to more formally evaluate the impacts of Sloan grant making on academia, in 2010 we awarded a grant to NORC at the University of Chicago to assess the nature and extent of Sloan's research contributions to developing the work–family field using traditional academic markers (citation to report McDonald et al., 2011). The evaluation yielded impressive results.

Foundation support led to the publication of more than 900 peer-reviewed articles, 100 scholarly and commercial books, and 100 chapters in edited volumes. The NORC (2011) evaluation notes that, ‘While the sheer volume of evidence generated by the program is striking, its continuing influence in the scholarly community is even more so. One method of judging the relative impact of research is the extent to which others rely on these sources of evidence to inform their own investigations’.

Sloan-funded research studies found in the Web of Science, one of the leading academic journal databases, are cited more frequently than the average social science article. The Sloan articles most frequently cited by leading academic journals correspond to the program's areas of interest: time use, work–family balance, and job satisfaction. These results suggest that the Foundation's efforts to produce high-quality scholarship related to work and family issues were met. More importantly, it also signals a growing awareness among the academic community regarding the significance of these topics and the seriousness with which they are being treated in the leading academic journals (A Better Balance, 2008).

Sloan funding has, as I had originally intended, supported the development of the next generation of work–family scholars. Since the program's inception, at least 194 PhD's and 77 postdoctoral scholars completed their education in association with one of the six Alfred P. Sloan Centers or individual research grants. Today, nearly 60% of these scholars hold tenure-track positions or tenured lines, ensuring subsequent generations of researchers. In addition, 10 junior faculty members received Sloan Work–Family Early Career Development Grants to support their work during their critical pre-tenure years and 50 Early Career Scholars have been mentored through a program established by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network (see http://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/content/wfc).

Impact of Sloan grant making on community building

In 1994, virtually no infrastructure existed to support what I hoped would develop into a vibrant, interdisciplinary community of scholars focused on working families. I sought to identify and support various types of community infrastructures that would enable scholars across disciplines to come together; that would support face-to-face conferences among scholars from around the world; and that would bridge the gap between private-sector practices, public policy, and academic scholarship.

From 1995 to 1997, Sloan funded four networks. One of these grantees was the Network on Work Restructuring and Work/Family Research, which, as I described earlier, brought labor economists together with social scientists. The Foundation also provided support to Purdue University to establish the Midwestern Work Family Resource Center, and to FWI to launch a network of small- and medium-sized firms concerned with work–family issues.

Among our most significant contribution to network building was support provided to Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes in 1997 to launch what would become the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. Over the years, it gained recognition in the USA and Europe as a one-of-a-kind source for the resources, research, and teaching tools needed by scholars engaged in work–family research. The Network produced an extensive database of annotated citations, as well as a series of resources for work and family faculty members, including the Work–family encyclopedia, suggestions for teaching, lists of recommended readings, and the work family glossary. From 2006 until 2010, the Network received more than 459,000 website visits, and was recognized as one of the premier online destinations for information about work and family (Pitt-Catsouphes, 2006), including recognition as one of the top 100 websites for women by the Harvard Business Review and Forbes (Casserly & Goudreau, 2010).

In 2011, the Sloan Network for Work and Family Research evolved, with Sloan support, into a self-sustaining, professional membership organization comprised of work–family scholars – the Work Family Researchers Network (WFRN). The WFRN represents a new and unique model for professional societies as it includes an innovative open access Web platform that provides a new level of community in which scholars can share their work and ideas – at all stages of development. Led by Jerry A. Jacobs, more than 200 scholars signed on as founding sponsors and, at their first conference in June 2012, more than 750 people from over 30 countries participated.

Over the years, Sloan supported more than 20 conferences, most associated with one of the Sloan centers, enabling scholars from different disciplines to build relationships and share their work. At its peak, the annual Sloan Center Conference hosted close to 300 people. In addition to nurturing the community of Sloan grantees through Center conferences, we supported several peer-reviewed conferences open to the broader community of work–family researchers worldwide. In 1998, 2000, and 2002, Sloan cofunded a series of conferences with the Business and Professional Women's Foundation. The papers from the first two conferences resulted in well-received edited volumes covering existing research to date: Working families: The transformation of the American home (Hertz & Marshall, 2001) and Families at work: Expanding the boundaries (Gerstel, Clawson, & Sussman, 2002).

I knew that Sloan funding would not continue forever, so I sought to work with other funders to ensure that work–family research would continue to be resourced. Through the research that Sloan supported on the work–family challenges faced by faculty in higher education (Drago et al., 2006; Wolf-Wendel & Ward, 2006; Mason & Goulden, 2004), the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE program expanded to direct resources to support work–family practices at their grantee institutions. In the early 2000s, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development developed their very successful Work, Family, Health and Well Being Initiative (https://www.nichd.nih.gov/research/supported/Pages/workhealthinit.aspx#Overview), drawing on Sloan-supported pilot work at the Pennsylvania State University about hotel workplaces, at the University of Minnesota about Best Buy, as well as the work of many other grantees.

For over a decade, Sloan's fundamental grant making strategy was to support the next generation of work–family scholarship and the next generation of work–family scholars. The resulting academic field of work–family research that we know today was shaped in large part through the funding that Sloan provided to hundreds of scholars to produce quality research and to build a vibrant community of researchers. The efforts of these scholars also contributed significantly to enhancing public understanding of the issues faced by today's working families.

Public understanding of working families

From books (see http://www.sloan.org/major-program-areas/recently-completed-programs/workplace-workforce-and-working-families/books-publications/) to bloggers, a wide spectrum of communications tactics was employed to increase and improve the public's understanding of working families and the challenges they face.

Our first grant in the area of education and outreach was provided in 1995 to National Public Radio (NPR) to establish its first work–family desk. Veteran NPR reporter David Molpus was assigned to this new work–family desk with the intent of feeding stories to Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Subsequently, in 1996, after conversations with WNYC President Laura Walker, who was also living these issues, Sloan supported WNYC to develop a series of radio documentaries. These documentaries were unique as they focused on work–family issues across the life course and were not just limited to working parents with young children.

In addition to funding NPR's work–family desk, WNYC's radio documentaries, and National Public Media's popular radio program, Marketplace, to cover workplace flexibility as a regular part of its business reporting, the media regularly reported on Sloan-funded research documenting the struggle faced by Americans who want and need more flexibility. Major daily newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post frequently interviewed Foundation grantees and published front-page stories featuring Sloan-funded research. Major television networks including NBC, ABC, and CNN regularly featured Sloan-funded research. PBS aired Sloan-supported documentaries, including Smith Hedrick Productions, Inc.'s (2001) Juggling Work and Family and Persephone Productions’ 9 to 5 No Longer (2008), and also provided extensive coverage of working families on its program To the Contrary. While we made a decision early on to forgo formal PR measurement across grants, one grantee alone, FWI, averaged five news articles a day in 2010, and additional anecdotal evidence demonstrated widespread and increasing interest in the issues facing working families.

Need for flexibility

While the Foundation's primary goal in its first decade of funding was to build a substantial and high-quality body of research and a community of scholars, the research also revealed a solution: that flexibility could make a significant difference in people's lives. Research revealed the value of three types of flexibility, including day-to-day flexible schedules, time off in the form of short- and long-term leaves, and career flexibility, with multiple points of entry, exit, and reentry, for providing more control over work.

The research made a strong case that workplace flexibility improves the lives of employees and their families. Employees with access to flexible workplace arrangements (FWAs) exhibit significantly better mental health than other employees, and low-income workers experience this positive effect even more strongly than higher earners (see http://familiesandwork.org/site/work/workforce/2002nscw.html). Employees who have access to workplace flexibility engage in more healthy behaviors (see http://www.wfd.com/publications/fws/html). Flexible work hours that allow employees to pick up their children from school – or simply check on their children's safety after school – can alleviate employee stress. An estimated one-third of the workforce experiences such stress about their children's after-school time, leading to decreased productivity and increased absenteeism that can add up to $1984 in costs per employee per year (Barnett & Gareis, 2006; McGuire, Kenny, & Brashler, 2006).

While there is a high demand for flexibility in its various forms, both mothers and fathers are concerned that their careers will be damaged by partaking in what are perceived as family-friendly workplace flexibility options (Moen & Spencer, 2004).

In addition to the increasing percentage of working parents needing penalty-free flexibility, retirement-eligible workers increasingly want or need to continue working but at reduced hours and with more flexible schedules (Haider & Loughran, 2010). The majority of people getting ready to retire (52%) show an interest in flexible scheduling and working reduced hours (Hutchens & Dentinger, 2003). Yet, formal phased-retirement policies, involving working work part time for a defined period before complete withdrawal from the labor force, are practically nonexistent and, where they do exist they are often inconsistent with workers’ expectations and desires for when and how to retire from their careers (Moen & Huang, 2010). But the health effects of phased retirement are significant. Men over the age of 70 who phase into retirement have lower rates of mortality and morbidity than men who do not (Moen, 2003). Older workers who leave the labor market and later wish to return on reduced schedules are more constrained in their opportunities than those who continue to work without stopping (Haider & Loughran, 2010). Hopefully, this is changing as employers are beginning to focus on the age and generation of workers, as well as their desires for flexible work, in examining talent resources and needs (see http://www.bc.edy/research/agingandwork/).

In summary, access to workplace flexibility enables workers of all ages and life circumstances to meet the often-competing demands of work and personal life. Flexibility has been shown to: improve health and wellness for workers; increase parental involvement in children's lives; support gender equity by allowing men and women to participate in caregiving; and increase the ability of older workers to remain engaged in the workplace. These findings laid the groundwork for the Sloan National Workplace Flexibility Initiative.

The Sloan National Workplace Flexibility Initiative

After a decade of scholarly research, it was clear that the structure of the workplace was making it hard for people to meet the dual demands of work and family and that flexibility was a viable way to change that structure and ease their difficulties. Nonetheless, no institutional infrastructure existed to bring about workplace change or to create the momentum necessary to advance workplace flexibility. An entity was needed that would translate the work of academics for business and policy audiences and that would inspire researchers, employers, unions, relevant stakeholders, and the government to work together to mobilize public- and private-sector support for workplace flexibility.

After 2 years of planning, in 2003, the Sloan Foundation conceived of and launched the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. The Initiative had two goals: make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and a standard of the American workplace. Four core principles underpinned the Initiative's efforts: flexibility had to benefit both employers and employees; it needed to be available to all employees, regardless of industry, occupation, earnings, or stage in life; it could not result in penalties to employees, in terms of lost earnings or opportunities for advancement; and for it to be achieved, diverse stakeholders had to find pragmatic, post-partisan, consensus-based solutions.

In designing the Initiative, the Foundation undertook a pragmatic, nonpartisan, collaborative grant-making effort that brought together researchers, business and labor leaders, lawyers, public policy analysts, and key stakeholders to devise and support private-sector and public solutions to the pressing social and economic challenges posed by twenty-first century work–life challenges. Unlike most foundation efforts, which focus only on public policy strategies, I was convinced we needed to pursue two parallel and complementary funding strategies if this initiative was to be successful. We needed to fund activities that would increase voluntary employer adoption of workplace flexibility and that would define workplace flexibility as a compelling public policy issue in Washington, DC.

We also needed to find the right language. The Foundation and its grantees collectively coined the term ‘workplace flexibility’ as a nondeviant arrangement, setting it apart from more conventional language, such as ‘alternative work arrangements’ that imply working in this way deviates from the norm. Workplace flexibility proved to be a complicated communications challenge, however, given that distinct audiences, from employees and unit managers to C-suite executives and public policy leaders, all respond differently to the concept. For example, when talking to a corporate executive, workplace flexibility may only be about return on investment and increased profits. On the other hand, a public-policy audience is more often interested in understanding how workplace flexibility can improve lives. And, if one studies the headlines – ‘When You Can't Be There, How to Explain to Your Kids?’ and ‘Is the Car the New Dining Room?’– one finds that the general public clearly have a sustained desire for information and direction on managing their day-to-day lives.

Responding to this diverse landscape, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's National Workplace Flexibility Initiative worked collaboratively in 2006 to develop a series of formal key messages based strictly on research and to reframe flexibility from being seen as a ‘perk’ or individual accommodation to being understood as a strategic business tool. The goal was to develop messages that could be woven together with specific company anecdotes and surprising business statistics to create a compelling argument. Among the key messages: ‘Workplace flexibility is a twenty-first century response to the one-size-fits-all way of working’ and ‘Workplace flexibility can make companies more profitable and improve lives’. Through the process, a reframing emerged that defined workplace flexibility as a strategic business tool, not a perk, and a new way of communicating about workplace flexibility surfaced.

It is important to underscore that it is not just the volume, but also the content of media coverage that changed as a consequence of Sloan's communication funding. Previously, individual stories of how people – primarily women – managed their work lives typically appeared in the Style or Lifestyle sections of newspapers. Today, a pressing case for flexibility as a strategic tool to achieve business outcomes is often found on the Business page. News headlines reflect the shift. For example, The Dallas Morning News reported, ‘Ready (or not) Boomers are hitting retirement-and companies must rethink jobs’, and the Seattle Times wrote, ‘Who says 9 to 5 is normal? Local companies redefine the workplace’.

What was once viewed as an individual, personal work–family problem has now been redefined as a social problem affecting families, employers, and the nation's economy. The societal need for workplace flexibility was now a part of the public consciousness.

Increasing voluntary employer adoption

In order to move voluntary adoption of flexibility forward, I recognized that employers would need additional evidence to be convinced that flexibility benefits the bottom line. The evidence would come from a number of sources, including: research on flexibility; recognition of and awards for exemplary best practices; and identification of executive-level business champions.

Data from multiple sources began accumulating, demonstrating that flexible work arrangements not only engaged workers to feel more satisfied and committed to their jobs but also maximized company productivity. This research was conducted by businesses themselves, academic scholars, and independent organizations such as FWI and Corporate Voices for Working Families (CVWF).

CVWF analyzed previously collected proprietary data from 28 major US corporations and found strong evidence linking flexibility with positive business outcomes, across occupations (Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2005). They found that not only does workplace flexibility have substantial benefits to individuals but also to businesses of all sizes (Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2005) and across diverse types of workplaces: corporate, nonprofit, and governmental.

Companies began to recognize that workplace flexibility and business productivity are intertwined. They started using it to enhance efficiency and performance – and support the development of a stronger, healthier, more resilient workforce. Effective companies large and small began enacting flexible workplace policies that met the needs of the employee and the employer alike, improved bottom-line business measures (Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2005), and helped strengthen the economy (Executive Office of the President Council of Economic Advisers, 2010).

Today, the evidence for the business case for flexibility is strong. Workplace flexibility is one of the most effective means of reducing unplanned absences from work. In one study, 63% of workers using flexible work arrangements said they were absent less often from work thanks to these arrangements (McGuire et al., 2006). Workplace flexibility initiatives for hourly employees are as successful as those designed for professional staff. Businesses that offer hourly employees flexible work options find that they are critical management tools that enhance recruitment, retention, engagement, cost control, productivity, and financial performance (Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2009). Flexible work arrangements can directly impact financial performance and both operational and business outcomes. One insurance company that implemented FWAs in its Claim Services Department experienced increases in the number and efficiency of claim files processed without a decrease in quality, as well as reductions in unscheduled paid time off and overtime hours (Chubb Group Press Release, 2005). Whether cost-neutral or having fixed costs, workplace flexibility is an effective tool for attracting and retaining employees and increasing productivity (Executive Office of the President Council of Economic Advisers, 2010).

Evidence of the business case, while necessary, is not sufficient to increase voluntary adoption of workplace flexibility. Another compelling way to accomplish this, as FWI has effectively found, is through a community-based engagement campaign centered on an awards program to recognize exemplary flexibility practices.

In 2003, as part of the National Initiative, we funded Ellen Galinsky and the FWI to design and launch an awards program with the intent of recognizing organizations that have been early adopters of workplace flexibility practices, thereby building community support for flexibility and encouraging other firms to follow their lead. Through a rigorous multistage application process, The Sloan Awards for Excellence in Workplace Effectiveness and Flexibility recognizes companies with exemplary workplace flexibility practices. This awards program is part of When Work Works, a collaborative effort – initially among the FWI, the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for a Competitive Workforce, and the Twiga Foundation. In 2011, the collaboration successfully transitioned to FWI and the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) http://www.whenworkworks.org/. [The Galinsky, Matos, and Sakai–O'Neill (2013) piece in this issue discusses this effort in more detail.]

Increasing voluntary adoption of faculty career flexibility in higher education

The Sloan Foundation has paid particular interest to higher education, an industry historically challenged by inflexible career structures such as tenure tracks. Beginning in late 1990s, Sloan supported extensive research on the challenges that faculty face in trying to balance family and career demands (Drago et al., 2006; Goulden, 2004). Based on that research, in 2003 Sloan funded the American Council on Education (ACE) to bring together university presidents to address this issue, resulting in the report, ‘An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers’(2005). We then funded ACE to establish an awards program, modeled on FWI's, to recognize colleges and universities that are undertaking necessary structural and cultural changes to make academic career paths more compatible with family care giving, for faculty at all stages of their careers. Whereas many workers need flexibility on a day-to-day basis because of the rigid career paths academics need more flexibility over the arc of their career, leading me in the early 2000s to coin the notion of career flexibility.

Since 2005, ACE has presented the Sloan Awards for Faculty Career Flexibility to a total of 18 colleges and universities and 5 medical schools. Each received $200,000–$250,000 in accelerator grants to expand flexibility programs. Six other colleges and universities received smaller grants in recognition of their innovative career flexibility practices (see http://www.acnet.edu/leadership/programs/pages/Alfred-P-Sloan-Projects-for-Faculty-Career-Flexibility.aspx).

In addition to the research and awards program, Sloan made substantial grants beginning in 2002 to the University of California, Berkeley – under the leadership of Mary Ann Mason, Angelica Stacey, Marc Goulden, and Carol Hoffman – to take the lead in academia in addressing faculty work–family needs. As they note, ‘Research has shown that men and women Ph.D.'s experience career progression and family formation quite differently … Women with children are less likely to receive their degrees or enter tenure track positions and earn tenure than males who are single or married with children in all the sciences including the social sciences’ (University of California, Berkeley, 2007). The effects of Berkeley's efforts to create a family-friendly campus have been dramatic. Over 6 years from 2003 through 2009, junior faculty members, particularly women, were significantly more likely to have children (University of California, Berkeley, 2011).

Building the case in Washington, DC

Central to the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative's success was creating opportunities to introduce workplace flexibility and have a meaningful bipartisan conversation in Washington, DC. This included further developing a public policy agenda on workplace flexibility and expanding the range of policy-makers, constituency groups, and community leaders who recognize workplace flexibility as a nationally compelling public policy issue. To achieve this goal, the Sloan Foundation initiated a process to bring politically diverse groups together, facilitate reasonable conversations on the need for workplace flexibility, identify areas of policy agreement, and expand the range and number of policy ideas.

At the same time that we funded FWI to establish an awards program, we also provided funding to Chai Feldblum to establish Georgetown University Law Center's Workplace Flexibility 2010. Designed as a time-limited intervention, Workplace Flexibility 2010, working with the New American Foundation, developed a fundamental principle of the initiative: to draw together very diverse stakeholders from business, labor, trade associations, and advocacy organizations in order to identify workplace flexibility policy solutions that can work for employees and employers. Workplace Flexibility 2010 focused on three areas: analyzing existing law on workplace flexibility and developing commonsense solutions; creating new forums for meaningful bipartisan dialog on workplace flexibility; and engaging diverse stakeholders.

Through in-depth research and analysis, Workplace Flexibility 2010 created a research library to provide comprehensive information about how current law and practice impacts flexibility (Workplace Flexibility 2010). This research library (see http://www.workplaceflexibilit201.org/) is permanently archived at Georgetown University's Law Center and includes briefs on the Family and Medical Leave Act, the California Paid Leave Law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, ERISA, and the Internal Revenue Code, among others (Workplace Flexibility 2010).

Workplace Flexibility 2010 (2009) released a comprehensive set of policy recommendations on how to increase access to Flexible Work Arrangements in the American workplace (see http://workplaceflexibility2010.org/images/uplaods/reports_1.pdf).

Workplace Flexibility 2010 and the New America Foundation created opportunities for education and open dialog in Congress through sponsoring nine bipartisan briefings and supporting the US Senate Workplace Flexibility Study Group (Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown Law, 2010).

Workplace Flexibility 2010 also facilitated meaningful conversation between politically diverse groups – representing both the employee and employer perspective – through its Legal Working Group, National Advisory Commission on Workplace Flexibility (see http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article = 1000&context = pub_rep), and Collaborative on Flexible Work Arrangements (see http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/labor_law/meetings/2011/eeo/019.authcheckdam.pdf; Workplace Flexibility 2010). A consensus statement signed by members of the National Advisory Commission on Workplace Flexibility accompanied Workplace Flexibility's 2010 Policy Platform on Flexible Work Arrangements (see http://lwp/georgetown.edu/).

In the course of Workplace Flexibility 2010's work, many partners, including AARP, SHRM, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Partnership for Women and Families, disability groups, and faith-based organizations have started to work together on federal workplace flexibility policy options (Workplace Flexibility 2010, Events, surpa n. 4).

The impact of the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative

At the time that the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative was funded in 2003, the term ‘workplace flexibility’ was not in common use. The Foundation and its grantees sought to develop an umbrella term that would encompass multiple types of flexibility, including flexible work arrangements, time off, and career flexibility. ‘Workplace flexibility’ is now the flagship term, signaling a deep and growing recognition worldwide of the significance of flexibility to workers and its value to employers. But the Initiative has done much more than change language.

The Sloan-supported National Workplace Flexibility Initiative, through the committed and creative efforts of many organizations, worked to highlight and build upon innovative business practices and helped to launch a national conversation on the need for meaningful policy solutions. The Initiative has made a deep and lasting impact in both the business and public policy arenas. Indeed, it has spurred a movement to make flexibility a standard of the American workplace through achieving three major objectives.

Setting the stage for a national dialog on workplace flexibility

Workplace flexibility is now recognized as a compelling national issue, and meaningful dialog is happening at the highest levels. In March 2010, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama convened a White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility that was built on the messaging and principles of the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative – to bring together diverse stakeholders to address flexibility as an issue relevant to both employees and employers and to look for ways to find pragmatic, post-partisan, consensus-based solutions. At the Forum, President Obama said, ‘Workplace flexibility isn't just a women's issue. It's an issue that affects the well-being of our families and the success of our businesses. It affects the strength of our economy – whether we'll create the workplaces and jobs of the future we need to compete in today's global economy’.

Reframing workplace flexibility as a strategic economic imperative

Workplace flexibility was at one time seen as an individual problem each employee or family must face alone. Today, as the president expressed at the White House Forum, workplace flexibility has become an economic imperative that impacts business success and determines how our nation competes globally.

The business community now recognizes flexibility as a strategic business tool that can support the bottom line. CVWF’ Business Impacts of Flexibility: An Imperative for Expansion examined the positive impact flexibility had on the bottom line measures for 29 major firms and its subsequent report, Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers examined how flexibility provides the same benefits for hourly and low-wage workers and their employers.

Voluntary employer adoption of workplace flexibility is increasing, as evidenced by the rising applications for the Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Effectiveness and Flexibility and results of the National Study of Employers (see Galinsky, et al., 2013).

Capturing the state of play, the SHRM issued its ‘Principles for a 21st Century Workplace Flexibility Policy’ and has been supportive of a range of efforts to expand access to flexible work arrangements. As they state in a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, ‘With the demands of work as complex as the lives of employees, a flexible workplace is the next business imperative. HR professionals are helping business redefine where, when, and how people do their best work. From innovative environments that focus on results rather than hours worked, to flexible schedules that encourage greater autonomy, SHRM is helping employers and employees achieve greater success, productivity, and balance’ (20 October 2010).

As part of the 2010 White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, the Council of Economic Advisors issued a report on the ‘Economic Case for Workplace Flexibility’, citing the significance of efforts by Workplace Flexibility 2010 and the work of other Sloan grantees, including the National Study of Employers by the FWI

Finally, the US Department of Labor (2012) included workplace flexibility as part of its definition of a good job.

Broadening the stakeholder base and investment in the issue

A range of new stakeholders is now committed to expanding access to workplace flexibility and understanding flexibility's critical impact on all working Americans, across professions, industries, ages, and gender.

A unique collaboration of business, employee and consumer representatives is now working together to build awareness of the need for increased access to workplace flexibility. Organizations involved in those efforts include: the American Association of People with Disabilities, AARP, CVWF, FamilyValues@Work Consortium, National Military Family Association, National Partnership for Women and Families, SHRM, and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

There is particular interest in and commitment to flexibility among disability organizations. Within the federal government, the Office of Disability Employment Policy at the US Department of Labor (2012) is now working to expand and promote the use of flexible workplace strategies, and the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published a request for input on how to increase the employment of people with disabilities by federal contractors.

Other constituencies are involved as well. Faith-based organizations, advocates for low-wage and hourly workers, labor unions, and organizations interested in health and aging all now view workplace flexibility as central to their mission. Indeed, flexibility's impact has been linked to improving the health and wellness of workers in all jobs and at all income levels; to reducing traffic congestion and environmental pollution; and to providing necessary support to those who wish to attend religious services or volunteer in their community.

As a result of the Initiative's efforts, numerous new stakeholders understand how flexibility offers critical support to their constituencies.

The future of workplace flexibility

The need for the Sloan National Workplace Flexibility Initiative was based on years of rigorous academic research documenting the pressures that American families experience and the ways in which flexibility could help eliminate some of them, particularly those related to scarcity of time in handling competing demands. It was built on the premise that developing meaningful solutions would require the perspectives of a diverse and unusual set of actors drawn from the private sector, public sector, and advocacy communities.

The efforts of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and its diverse partners have helped create a social movement for establishing new standards for work in the USA. The stage is now set for the conclusion of that movement. To reach that conclusion will require several key actors to work together further. My recommendations are as follows:

The White House needs to appoint a national commission comprised of corporate CEOs and leaders of key stakeholder groups to identify legislative possibilities that meet the needs of employers, employees, and the public good.

Middle managers and front-line supervisors are the keys to achieving success in flexibility. Efforts must be made to reach them, learn from them, and where appropriate train them on how to manage a performance-based team through flexibility.

Flexibility has to be tied to a broader framing that defines the future of work and the essence of good management. We are rapidly moving away from an industrial model of face-time to one of performance. Good managers are needed to be able to address the needs of employees working globally across time zones. The kinds of flexibility Sloan has worked on is only a piece of a broader transformation of where, when, and how work is done.

Lessons learned

It was quite an experience to take this effort from inception to execution. I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to do this and for having the pleasure of working with so many smart, creative people in the process. And I also have learned a great deal about the ingredients of success in such an effort.

In articulating any lessons from the foregoing history of research, advocacy, and social change, it must be borne in mind that the results that were achieved involved time, money, and leadership continuity. This effort strategically evolved over the course of 17 years, had sustained funding that ultimately exceeded $130,000,000, and had the same person directing the transition from research to advocacy. Change in leadership would have likely brought other successes, but the disruption in leadership could have also disrupted some of the successes that were achieved. Having said that let me note several specific lessons:

1. Research is essential as it provides evidence-based cases for change. But the research has to be independent and meet high standards. There are many advocacy groups inside and outside Washington, DC, which produce findings that are solid, but predictable given their starting assumptions and stated end goals. In the long run, their policy-focused research is not as credible in some circles as is more independent academic research.

2. Let the research guide the plan for action. When I started funding the Centers and the independent research projects, it was unclear what would be the ‘solution’ that could address the problems and challenges faced by working parents. And there was no commitment to launching a program of social change or to lay groundwork for a social movement.

3. Translate the research so that it effectively communicates with specific target audiences. Find trusted translators. Georgetown's Workplace Flexibility 2010 was comprised of skilled lawyers and policy-makers who knew how to do the translation from research findings to policy points, and they knew how to train the academics to make effective arguments that were compelling and persuasive.

4. Recognize when academic research and researchers are not enough. Somewhere in the early 2000s, I realized that as much as many academics wanted their work to make a difference, they themselves were not necessarily good or effective change agents. We needed to identify and bring together a set of other professionals who were versed in making change.

5. Do not just go to the default of public policy as the solution. Most academics immediately turn to policy solutions. But legislation is a very blunt instrument. With the issues we were facing – trying to make flexibility a workplace standard – we needed also to work with the private sector to enhance nuanced voluntary adoption of flexibility.

6. Ensure that diverse stakeholders are brought to the table. Strength is in numbers and each of these stakeholder groups are important and potentially very effective emissaries for mobilizing diverse and complementary communities committed to change.

7. Find a way for the leaders of the campaign to not see their efforts as a zero sum game. Commitment must be made to collaboration, whereby the participants see that their individual success hinges on the success of others and the success of the whole hinges on the success of all the participating groups.

8. Collectively develop messages and have facts from each stakeholder group that support the messages. Working collaboratively on message development was essential to ensuring that media coverage was focused and clear.

9. Carefully lay the groundwork and capitalize on opportunities. BUT create opportunities by asking people how you can help them. I met with White House staff in January 2010, told them we had tons of research, successful public and private sector partnerships, and message development, and we would give it all to them if the White House was interested in pursuing efforts focused on working families and their need for flexibility. Two months later, on 31 March 2010, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama convened the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility and released the Council of Economic Advisors’ report, Work Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility.

10. Be strategic. Always keep your eye on the goal. Realize that no one strategy will reach it.

Notes on contributor

Kathleen Christensen, PhD, founded and directed the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Workforce, & Working Families Program and currently directs its Working Longer Program. Under her leadership, the foundation has been credited with pioneering the field of work–family research and catalyzing a national movement to create more flexible workplaces that effectively meet the needs of employees and employers, while also strengthening the economy. Dr. Christensen planned and participated in the 2010 White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility. Dr. Christensen has published extensively on the changing nature of work and family. Her books include Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th Century Jobs for a 21st Century Workforce (edited, with Barbara Schneider, 2010); Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition (with Christensen & Barker, 1998); Women and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract (1988); and The New Era of Home-based Work: Directions and Policies (1988). Prior to Sloan, Dr. Christensen was a professor of psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all of the grantees of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program. It is through their impressive efforts that so much was accomplished. Special thanks to Barbara Schneider for the incredible work she did in overseeing the evaluation of this grantmaking program and to Jerry Jacobs for encouraging me to write the history of this program and for providing valuable insights during the editing stage.

Notes

1. Research on women and work during the 1970s tended to provide broad overviews of women in the economy (Kreps, 1976; Yohalem, 1979), occasionally focusing on working mothers (Hoffman & Nye, 1974). During the 1980s, researchers refined this general focus to emphasize maternal employment, role differentiation and the effects on an individual woman's psychological well-being (Barnett & Baruch, 1985; Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985; Repetti & Crosby, 1984).

2. More details about the research that was funded from 1994–2011 and the articles, books and reports that were generated can be found in the online version of this article: http://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/search/apachesolr_search/Launching%20the%20Workplace%20Flexibility%Movement

3. While many working parents work full-time, the preferred arrangement by mothers is for part-time work. In the 500 Family Study, the majority of mothers working full-time desired to hold part-time jobs (Schneider & Waite, 2005). However, it is important to note that now and in the not so distant past, a number of part-time workers, especially those who receive low wages, would prefer to work full-time (Galinsky, Bond, & Hill, 2004). Part-time work typically has its own penalties, including lack of health insurance and lower compensation compared to full-time work in the same jobs. It is important when discussing issues of workplace flexibility to recognize the differences between voluntary and involuntary part-time work and the problems that exist for both.