The massive entry of women into the labor force has forced both spouses to assume the dual role of parent and professional, creating a new state of affairs in society at large and in the workplace. The consequences - rising divorce rates, low birth rate, parents and children spending little time together, children being brought up by grandparents, neighbors, nannies and teachers - have changed people´s personal values. When work and family clash, it is often work that wins the battle. The structures of labor are more rigid, and its rewards - remuneration, success and prestige - more attractive. As a result, time spent with the family is increasingly seen as an opportunity to recover from the stress of work in order to prepare for... another day at work. Meanwhile, for the same reasons, companies are finding it difficult to transfer staff to other cities, rotate jobs or hire key employees, while absenteeism is on the rise.
In their paper "Políticas de conciliación trabajo-familia en 150 empresas españolas" (Work-Family Conciliation Policy in 150 Spanish Companies), IESE Professors Nuria Chinchilla and Steven Poelmans and Research Assistant Consuelo León analyze the practices, policies and programs currently in place in Spanish companies in various different industries in 2002 to help their employees reconcile family and professional life. The study is peppered with illustrative examples from companies such as Caja Madrid, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Vodafone and Louis Vuitton.
The study reveals that 7% of Spanish companies with more than 100 employees have in place a program to balance the demands of work and family, while 19% have recently started up or are considering starting up such a program. The factors inducing companies to implement work/family harmonization programs are: size of the company; percentage of women employed; competitiveness of the labor market; and concern for recruiting and retaining employees.
Family responsible policies include: time flexibility (adaptable schedule, part-time work, etc); leaves of absence (to cover family needs, or for study); workplace flexibility (working from home, videoconferencing, etc); help in obtaining services outside the company to reconcile work and family (payment of or information on day-care services for babies or older family members, fitness club subscriptions, etc.); job adaptation (temporarily modified tasks and responsibilities and job rotation); courses designed to combat stress (time management, antenatal and parenting, coping with stress, conflict management, etc); other types of benefits (insurance, pension plan, company car, etc).
Some companies justify not adopting these kinds of policies on the grounds of cost. Yet studies confirm that there is a strong connection between a company´s efforts to cultivate a family responsible culture and company performance (product quality, innovation, capacity to attract and retain key employees, customer and employee satisfaction, growth in sales, profits and market share), although a strict cause-effect relationship cannot be established.