Conclusion


The dual agenda makes it possible to increase productivity and effectiveness in the business, while enabling employees to better integrate their work and personal lives. But it is not easy to achieve. Connecting these issues is not the typical response. Faced with the business issues in our examples, most managers would try to reengineer work processes, throw more time at the problem, or reduce the workforce to cut costs. Faced with the personal life issues, most human resource personnel would ask for additional benefits—like bringing in evening meals or giving extra vouchers for child care—to help people cope. These accommodations might leave both the workplace and families and communities worse off. When firms develop family-friendly policies and benefits that leave existing work practices and cultural assumptions about work and good workers intact, the conflict between the demands of the new workplace and the needs of families and communities is exacerbated. Only by connecting work and personal lives through a dual agenda can companies reframe the conflict into an opportunity for innovation and change.

How can an organization determine if it would benefit from a dual agenda approach? First and most obvious is to find out whether people are having difficulty juggling their work and personal lives. Signs of stress and fatigue, complaints about work demands and time, and dissatisfaction with work and family policies may emerge in satisfaction surveys, exit interviews, and off-line retreats. More critical may be the loss of valued employees or the sudden change in the performance of people who seemed to have great potential.

Such indicators may suggest that a company is ready for the dual agenda approach. They may explain why creative ideas are coming only from the top of the organization, or why repeated new initiatives show great promise but then disappoint. If companies undertake new initiatives to increase productivity, revenues, and general performance without looking at them through the lens of personal life, the very goals of the initiatives may be undermined.

Our work has identified some typical work practices and assumptions that are dysfunctional for both business and personal goals, for example, more time necessarily leads to greater productivity; time is an unlimited resource; the most committed workers are those who work the longest hours; individual competition and heroics are the best way to get the most out of people. When work is performed in an atmosphere of continual crisis or when the response to problems is to do the same thing, only harder, there are clear opportunities for innovation and change that can meet the criteria of the dual agenda.

Linking personal lives with strategic issues is an unexpected connection. But if we continue to deal with each area separately, in the long run, both individuals and organizations—if not society—will suffer. What we have outlined, however, is not a one-time fix. Rather, it describes a process of continually looking at the intersection of work and personal lives and using the connection as a lever to challenge work practices on an ongoing basis. The solution to one set of issues raises other issues that a company can subject to the same analysis and experimentation. Such an ongoing process results in changed mindsets and, ultimately, in the culture change that most companies seek but find so difficult to achieve.

This unexpected connection can revitalize your business.

Acknowledgments

This chapter is reprinted with permission from Sloan Management Review 38, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 11–20. It is based on a research project supported by the Ford Foundation. For a full report, see Rapoport, Bailyn, Kolb, Fletcher, et al. (1996). Others involved in the research project were Susan Eaton, Maureen Harvey, Robin Johnson, and Leslie Perlow. Rhona Rapoport was the consultant to the project. The Ford Foundation, in conjunction with the Xerox Corporation and Working Mother magazine, hosted a CEO Summit in New York on 15 September 1997 to discuss this research. This project, in conjunction with many others, is described and analyzed in Rhona Rappaport, Joyce K. Fletcher, Bettye H. Pruitt, and Lotte Bailyn, eds., Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance (San Francisco: Jossey Bass) 2001.

Our names are listed in alphabetical order. This article was a fully collaborative effort, as was, with other team members, the project itself.




Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century
Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century
ISBN: 026263273X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 214

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