The quintessential hero of the Forbes magazine profile doesn’t only run an efficient business; he or she plays the flute, paints, explores, performs in a rock band with an ironic middle-aged name like Prostate Pretenders. . . . Mutual fund managers are depicted as cerebral superstars, memorizing baseball statistics, perfecting their piano technique, jetting off to bridge tournaments and philosophy symposia.
—David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise
Picture the offices of a venerated law firm. Oil portraits of the all-male founders hang on the wood-paneled walls in rooms furnished with antiques. Senior partners bring in the work that gets delegated to lesser-ranked partners and associates; associates minister over paralegals, assistants, and librarians, who then, in turn, manage the messengers, technicians, and computers that do the most menial tasks.
Axiom Legal is an entity determined to replace that old-fashioned, hierarchical model with something entirely new. Whether you’re looking to hire a lawyer or to work for Axiom, your first encounter with the firm is likely to be through a visit to their Web site, where photos of diverse-looking lawyers have replaced the oil paintings of yore. By eliminating layers of fat (Axiom lawyers work from home or on site at a client and do not have their own assistants), Axiom says it can deliver legal services more cheaply to its clients while providing a more gratifying work experience for its lawyers. Think of it as a talent agency for free-agent lawyers. Cool free-agent lawyers.
I visited Axiom’s office in New York’s Soho neighborhood one steamy summer afternoon as part of my quest to find the sort of employer that embraces the slash lifestyle. The elevator to their open floor plan offices was crowded with the architects and interior designers who inhabit the other floors of this building, across from the hipster haunt Balthazar on bustling Spring Street. The doors opened into a loft space with hardwood floors and an egalitarian vibe (no office even for Mark Harris, the founder and president). Here at corporate headquarters, the dress code is more bohemian than business casual (when lawyers meet with clients they follow the client’s lead on attire).
At Axiom, white-collar professionals don’t have to be bashful about having other dimensions to their lives. How could they when the interview includes questions like, “How many hours would you like to work?” and “Where would you like to work from?” Lawyers at Axiom not only admit that they want a life outside the law, they are applauded for it.
Craig Zolan, Axiom’s Vice President for Business Development, and Courtney Bowerman, the head of marketing, were prepared for me. They placed three attorney bios on the table. “Would you like to meet with the lawyer/filmmaker, the lawyer/race car driver, or the lawyer who’s spending the month of August in a villa in France while she works remotely for two Axiom clients?” They also suggested a number of lawyers working part-time while caring for young children. Lawyers tell Axiom the number of hours they want to work per week and the length of time they are available to work, and Axiom then tries to match them with a client project that best fits the lawyer’s availability. Some lawyers work the equivalent of a full-time job for a while and then take a number of months off to immerse in another commitment. Others work a regular three-day-a-week schedule for months at a time. There is no standard.
As was the case with so many people I interviewed about their company’s flexible policies, Zolan ended the meeting by telling me about a slash period in his own life before he came to work full-time at Axiom. Zolan and his wife founded an online T-shirt company, www.cherrytree.com, while he was working as a contract lawyer for Axiom himself. Since joining Axiom’s management, Zolan’s wife has taken over most of the responsibilities for the business.
Axiom is but one example of a new-era workplace perfectly suited to the millions of people who seek to work in nontraditional ways. But these companies are not just doing it to please a changing workforce; they’re doing it because keeping overhead low makes good business sense.
Resources Global Professionals is an accounting firm that uses a somewhat similar model. Visit their home page, www.resourcesglobal.com, and click on “Becoming Project Professional” to find the following enticing copy:
Resources Global Professionals is an elite group of individuals who have achieved a new balance between their personal and professional lives. Each of our Associates has at least 10 years of experience in their respective fields, with a proven track record of accomplishment. They’re free to work where they want, on a project-by-project basis. All while enjoying the benefits that come with working full time. As a result, they’re able to enjoy life on their terms.1
For creative professionals, working freelance or as a consultant has long been a reality of working life. But in the virtual age, a copywriter or graphic artist in Iowa can market herself as easily as someone in New York City. The Creative Group, based in Menlo Park, California, caters both to companies seeking ad hoc creative services and professionals interested in freelance assignments. Sign up on www.creativegroup.com and you can work like a freelancer and enjoy group rates on health insurance; some of their consultants even work full-time, moving from project to project all the while racking up time toward vacation pay and collecting a bonus, without worrying where the next job will come from. Not a bad gig—many of the benefits of an office without the hassle, and very slash-friendly. The Creative Group is owned by Robert Half International, the staffing giant that has similar companies for finance, legal, and technology professionals of all levels (see www.rhi.com for descriptions of all of these).
Who’d have thought companies would be vying to offer you ways to work less? While this trend is not entirely sweeping the nation, there are other signs that companies have realized that flexibility can be smart business.
Slashes who want to find a part-time gig would do well to learn from working mothers, who have been the pioneers of workplace flexibility. If flex-time policies, telecommuting, and other alternative work arrangements exist to attract and retain working parents, often they are also available to nonparents who can use the time away from the office for something else that requires large chunks of time.
That’s what sculptor Wendy Hirschberg, forty-nine, has been doing for more than twenty-five years, first at Catalyst, which researches and advises on issues around women and work, and then at Ernst & Young’s Center for a New Workforce. Both of her corporate jobs involved making the corporate world more flex-time friendly, but she fell into the field entirely by chance. “I was working in a lot of art-related jobs and a friend was worried I was going to starve to death,” she explained. “She worked at Catalyst and recommended me for a part-time job. I was interested in feminism so I knew I’d be interested in the subject matter.”
After a few years working in what she calls “corporate feminism,” the job she took to forestall starvation blossomed into a satisfying career. Hirschberg didn’t have children until she was in her early forties, but she had been using her shortened workweek—in the office three days a week and in her studio on the others—to pursue her sculpture long before she added parenting to the mix.
Hirschberg says she has had plenty of struggles along the way—mostly in being taken seriously by both her corporate colleagues and in artistic circles—but she says that honoring her part-time schedule while advancing in her corporate career hasn’t been one of them.
Ernst & Young is at the forefront of the flex-time movement, and Hirschberg is convinced that her company’s welcoming attitude toward flexible arrangement helps it attract and retain talented professionals. She admits that it’s mostly women who take advantage of flexible arrangements, but such arrangements are open to anyone. To reinforce that openness, Hirschberg— who is involved with spreading the word about the company’s policies—says her firm has intentionally showcased men, like one who went part-time to become a minister, when talking to the media about their programs.
So how would you go about finding one of these slash-friendly work environments? You can begin by doing some research. Various entities (including Catalyst, where Hirschberg started out) put out annual “best employer,” “best company,” or “most family-friendly” lists highlighting companies with the most progressive policies. Each organization judges companies by different criteria, and all of them publish those criteria along with the winners for the year. Generally, the lists will include Web sites for the companies so that you can see where they have offices and other details. These are good places to start, even though on the surface some may have a different focus than what you’re after.
Companies that rate high with the “mature workforce” are also worth a look. These companies recognize the value of a fully trained employee who wants to work fewer hours but does not want to give up work completely. Flexible schedules, job sharing, pension plans, and healthcare for part-time workers are the prime perks in this camp. AARP does an excellent job of tracking these in its annual survey of “Best Employers for Workers Over 50,” which is available at www.AARP.org.
Note that variations on these “best employer” monikers have become the must-have accessory among so-called enlightened companies, and that means that the companies on these lists usually post the policies that earned them recognition. That’s good news for you—reading through the charts that accompany these surveys or visiting a company’s Web site can give you a lot of information formerly only available to someone who has gone through the interview process. After all, “How little can I work and still qualify for health insurance?” isn’t generally the best question for a first interview. Every business magazine (Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, etc.) has a variation of these lists, and even the ones that are focused more on profitability and growth than working conditions can shed light onto corporate culture. If you’re compiling a list of target companies, don’t forget that these awards have been going on for years, so check a magazine’s archives. Of course, these lists should be a starting point, giving you an idea of companies you might want to research. Remember, written policies are just that; you’ll also need to network in your industry and find out what companies are really doing as opposed to what their public relations machines are doing. High performers can often strike deals that are outside the confines of what a written policy seems to provide (similarly, employees who aren’t considered valuable will have a much harder time negotiating alternative work arrangements even when a policy exists).
If you’re looking at smaller companies, you’ll have to do this sussing out on your own. This is where you’ll need to listen to word of mouth within your industry and community. While smaller companies may not have comprehensive written policies, they are often able to be more creative because they don’t have rigid policies and because they have the freedom not to treat everyone exactly the same.
Sometimes you can learn something about the culture of a small company by the attitude of its leadership. Anne Taintor, who runs the successful greeting card company in New Mexico that bears her name, is a great example of this. Taintor, fifty-three, started her company while she was raising her daughter as a single mother. When I spoke to her, she said that the culture she created for her company grew out of her own experience of needing to have a work situation that recognized the realities of the rest of her life. “Life comes first, and your job comes second,” she told me, and the work arrangements of her small staff reflect that. Her business manager usually works four days a week so that she can have time with her horses. One woman takes time off for classes. Another is starting her own business on the side—at least for now it’s on the side, said Taintor.
Taintor is very public about these views. Her company’s Web site tells the story of her founding the company as a single parent. Though her company has only five employees, she has garnered a good bit of press attention, and nearly every article mentions her background as a single mom. Anyone who goes to such lengths to make her views about work/life known is probably the kind of boss who understands that her employees also have outside commitments.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ignition Ventures, an incubator for science-oriented startup companies, has a similar ring. Ignition operates with only six full-time employees, but it uses a stable of several hundred independent contractors, all with MBAs and Ph.D.s. Founders Amy Salzhauer and Maureen Stancik Boyce both came from rigorous corporate and academic backgrounds, and when they started their company, their mission was to create a business that would allow them and their employees to have lives outside of the office. A visit to the company’s Web site is an immediate tip-off to a flex-friendly work environment. On the “About Us” page sits this paragraph:
WORK/LIFE BALANCE
One of the goals of our company is to provide interesting work for highly qualified managers and researchers. Accordingly, while some of our consultants dedicate all of their professional time to Ignition Ventures projects, others maintain outside interests in academic research, journalism, medicine, investment management, or raising wonderful children.3
Salzhauer says that acknowledging the outside-of-the-office lives of everyone involved with Ignition is of paramount importance to her. When an associate in the office was getting married, for example, Salzhauer closed the office for the morning so that all the female employees could join her for a shopping excursion to the Filene’s bridal sale. “Of course, if a client needed something, we would have left someone behind,” she explained.
Salzhauer, thirty-six, was home on maternity leave with her five-week-old daughter when I interviewed her. While she agreed to talk to me for this book, she said she is prepared to set boundaries between work and home, even as an entrepreneur. (She told me she refused to take a call from an investor while she was in the hospital days after her daughter was born.) “I’ve given up very lucrative projects because they don’t fit in with the values of the firm or the lifestyle we promise to the people who work for us,” she explained. “For example, if no one wants to fly to Windsor, Ontario, for a consulting project, we won’t take that project even if it made economic sense to do it. We’re privately held so we can make those choices.”
Among those who work flexibly for Ignition are plenty of working parents, a video artist who splits her time between Ignition and a university, a woman working part-time to care for an ailing mother, and “three people who have been on Zen Buddhist paths,” said Salzhauer. “The Zen Buddhists make really great consultants,” she added. “Every little detail is important to them.”
Of course, Ignition does not hire these folks solely based on their wonderful slash resumes. It hires them because they have the requisite skills to do a particular project. And using a fleet of highly skilled part-time consultants is a smart business model—it allows the company to assemble the teams it needs on a project-by-project basis without the overhead of a full-time staff.
Whether you’re going corporate or working out a deal with a tiny firm, the key to any customized work plan is that your boss be on board. I learned this firsthand when I negotiated a part-time schedule in the legal department of Reader’s Digest. I had just moved to Hong Kong and I wanted to work three days a week so that I’d have extra time to travel. It was the first time any lawyer had requested to go part-time in that department; at that time, no one had even modified a schedule to care for a child.
My manager in New York agreed to my request almost immediately. She knew that I was valuable because I was fully trained and enmeshed in the corporate culture. She knew I was also willing to work in a pretty unusual way, making myself available for middle-of-the-night phone calls with clients on occasion because of the twelve-hour time difference. She didn’t care what I did with my time off as long as I met my responsibilities to our clients.
But sometimes, moving from full-time to part-time in a context where you’ve proved yourself can have the opposite effect. When Donna McDonald was transitioning from a career in financial services marketing to her own interior design business, she planned to work part-time in marketing to fund her new business. Initially, she thought the best way to do this was to stay at the company where she had worked for several years. They knew her talents. They respected her. And she had no trouble negotiating a reduced-hours schedule.
When McDonald reduced her hours, however, she found that colleagues kept demanding more of her than she wanted to give. Soon she realized that the only way to make part-time work for her was to go somewhere where she wasn’t seen as “McDonald, the Marketing Professional,” but rather as an entrepreneur who consulted on the side. She needed a relationship with boundaries.
That’s when she was introduced to Sarah Hammann, the chief marketing officer for Posit Science, a San Francisco–based company that develops and markets brain health programs. Hammann was looking to hire a consultant for two days a week and one of her employees recommended McDonald, describing her as an experienced marketer who was consulting on the side while she built her own business as an interior designer. The two met and it was an immediate connection. Hammann, a design aficionado, was intrigued to hear about McDonald’s design work and was impressed with her business skills. There was no confusion about how much of McDonald’s time was available, and since Posit Science only needed a certain number of hours, there was also little chance of McDonald being sucked in.
They set up a two-day-a-week schedule with an agreement to swap days if either McDonald’s business or Posit Science had a pressing deadline. Because McDonald is able to be open about her design business, she told me she wouldn’t be surprised if she got a client referral from someone at the company. A few months after my first interview with McDonald, I e-mailed her to ask if she’d gotten any design clients from her Posit Science relationship. She replied that she’d already landed two—one of them is Hammann.
This negotiation could be lifted from the pages of Cali Williams Yost’s book, Work + Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right For You (New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2005), a blueprint for figuring out your work/life mix and negotiating with an employer for an arrangement to achieve that. Yost works both with employers and employees as a sort of couples therapist, helping them through the ins and outs of customized work arrangements. Companies hire her to help retain and recruit talent; individuals find her when they’re at the end of their rope. Yost recommends committing the deal to writing once it’s negotiated, in an agreement that bears some resemblance to a pre-nup.
After reading Yost’s book, I asked her to work with me on a top-ten list of things to keep in mind when negotiating a customized work arrangement. Here’s what we came up with.
1. If you’re good at what you do (and this is a very important piece), an employer will likely choose some of your time rather than none of your time.
2. It’s your responsibility (not the employer’s) to come up with a plan that works for you and for the business.
3. Formal policies are less important than a mutually beneficial arrangement between you and your manager. According to Yost, many large companies have formal policies that are rarely used. On the flip side, because employers want to keep valuable employees, often you can negotiate a unique arrangement that doesn’t fit neatly into the standardized parameters set by the policy writers.
4. If you’ve already been at your job for some time, it costs a company significantly more to lose you and hire someone else than to come up with a mutually beneficial plan that has you working fewer hours or in a different way. Depending on the type of job you have, experts estimate the cost of turnover as high as 1.5 times your annual salary.
5. Having employees who write plays, spend time with their families, or take sabbaticals is not only good for public relations and recruiting, it can also benefit the bottom line by creating contented employees, enhancing retention, and reducing stress and illness. Make it clear that you’re happy to be a poster child for flexibility.
6. If your manager is enlightened enough to consider a flexible schedule, he or she will likely not penalize you for what you want to do with your time (unless, of course, it’s something contrary to the company’s interests). Your employer’s main concern will be how the work is going to get done under your proposed plan and how it will benefit the business.
7. Often employees walk before seeing if it’s possible to get a customized work arrangement. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you present your proposal? It will be refused. You have nothing to lose, especially if you are willing to leave to find the arrangement you want somewhere else. Chances are, if you’re a good employee and you’ve presented a well-thought-out proposal, your manager will approve some version of your plan for a six-month period. If the answer is no, then your choices are clear— you can stay or you can leave. If you do decide to stay, either for the long haul or as a temporary measure, make sure to diffuse any potential questions about your ongoing commitment by continuing to perform at your previous level.
8. If there is technology that will help you work more effectively, ask for it. You should be prepared to show how the cost of the technology will be offset by some benefit to the company. For example, if you ask for a laptop computer so that you can access the company’s computer network from home, perhaps you can show that you are saving the company money because your assistant is free to work for someone else on the days you are not in the office. Of course, you can also offer to pay for such equipment on your own or contribute to its cost if it’s something you need anyway.
9. Believe that it’s possible. To succeed in creating, negotiating, and implementing a unique arrangement, you must first believe it’s possible. This may require replacing outdated “work happens in the office/during business hours/Monday–Friday” paradigms with the possibilities that exist if you think creatively.
10. Once you’ve negotiated a customized work arrangement or your manager has agreed to a trial period for your plan, the onus is on you to communicate effectively and to make sure that adjustments are made if you see things falling through the cracks. It’s also your job to live up to the agreement and to prove to your employer that that you bring value under the new terms of your employment.
All of this assumes that you are having this conversation with a manager and in a company open to the idea of people working in nontraditional ways. Surely there will be instances when that’s not true. Geoff, the lawyer/actor-director from chapter 3, worked as a temp lawyer for several different law firms before settling into his position at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Once he got there, he worked for a few different partners in the firm before finding those who both valued his brief-writing skills and were comfortable with his being out of the office much of the time. “I wasn’t going to be a good fit for someone who wanted to meet frequently with a team for spur-of-the-moment strategy meetings,” he told me. For a partner who just wanted well-reasoned and well-researched legal briefs, Geoff was the man.
An increasing number of the most elite and hard-driving work cultures are realizing that even high achievers have passions outside of the workplace. According to a recent Fortune magazine article, “As companies learn to accommodate a range of time commitments from top talent, organizations will look less like a pyramid and more like a puzzle.”5 In the world of puzzle workplaces, customized work schedules will no doubt be far more common.
After twenty years as a consultant managing complex Enrontype forensic accounting investigations, Karl Hampe, forty-two, realized that he was missing out on too much of life by working ten-to-fourteen-hour days, often through holidays and weekends. The signs were there earlier. At twenty-seven, he was hospitalized for a sudden heart condition after which he vowed to slow down and become more well-rounded. The overachiever in him, however, stepped in and soon he fell into the same patterns, letting work expand to fill all his available time. He was so burned out that he barely had time to look at the book he bought to help him figure out how to find his North Star.
Hampe had an inkling of what he would do with some free time if he could get it—mostly, he wanted to return to his study of cartooning, something he excelled at in college. But before he could even contemplate that, he had to cut the hours he was working. With the same precision he would use on a case, he put together a detailed proposal for the reduced-hours/reducedsalary schedule he sought. His plan covered everything from how to transition workload on existing cases to allocating many of his functions to other personnel so that his skills were put to their highest and best use.
Hampe has a great relationship with his boss, who was supportive of his request from the start; but throughout the negotiation he recognized that his boss had to wear two hats—that of a friend who cared about Hampe’s well-being, and that of a manager protecting the company’s bottom line. At the same time, Hampe said he had to prove that he was ready to leave if his proposal was not granted, so he put feelers out in the industry and made sure that he had opportunities if he didn’t get what he wanted. He made sure his boss knew he was doing this.
His proposal was granted exactly as he presented it, but only after several months of his working full-time while his request made its way through the necessary levels of hierarchy. Hampe’s negotiation was successful for several reasons. First, with twenty years of experience, he knew he was valuable enough that his firm would try to keep him. Second, he had tested the waters outside and was willing to leave if his proposal wasn’t accepted (both he and his manager knew this, and both pieces are important). And third, he did the necessary work to build the case that the business wouldn’t suffer by his altering his schedule. “Companies are realizing that it is in their own enlightened self-interest to keep talented people by accommodating the needs of the whole person,” he told me. A junior-level employee with a spotty record of achievement would likely not have been able to accomplish what Hampe did. But at any level, being good at your job is a key ingredient to having this kind of leverage.
When I met with Hampe, he had been on his new schedule for just over a year and was as exuberant as a puppy. He was studying art and cartooning and researching options for syndication and self-publishing. But just as often, he was using his “off” days to sketch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sit at cafes, go to the gym, or visit with friends, things that never had a place in his old life. “I just needed some time to recharge and find my equilibrium,” he said.
His attitude toward consulting has improved as well. “It feels different because I put less pressure on myself to do everything that everyone could possibly expect of me since it simply is not physically possible in the more limited time,” he explained. “I wind up working very hard and managing a lot of delegation, but I feel more relaxed because I know that others believe I am meeting and exceeding their expectations of what a part-time employee can accomplish. Being valued as an individual with a special arrangement is good for my self-esteem and I wind up performing better because of that.”
Any work done in shifts—including medical professionals in hospitals—can be ideal for ramping up or down to accommodate other pursuits. For Sanjay Gupta, the CNN correspondent who was a neurosurgeon before becoming a television correspondent, making room for his CNN job meant taking on half the number of new patients and giving up his research responsibilities at his hospital.
Blue-collar work often has a double advantage—it’s done in shifts and it rarely requires you to take it home. Joe van Blunk, the longshoreman/documentary filmmaker, says his work on the docks is especially accommodating to his filmmaking. “I can work ten-hour shifts three days in a row and then take a few days off to be on the set,” he explained.
Whether or not you’re out in the open about your various slashes, it’s a good idea to think about whether your employer could have a reason to object to any other work that you do. Start by consulting any written employee policies or by checking with the human resources department of your company, requesting confidentiality. If your employer doesn’t have an H.R. department, talk with someone you trust in management. These policies may not use the word “moonlighting” specifically; if moonlighting doesn’t appear anywhere, look for phrases like “conflicts of interest,” “outside employment,” or “use of company resources.” If you work for a public company, you should also talk to someone in the legal department as you might have to report outside activities to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
When moonlighting policies exist, it’s generally because employers are worried that your other work could present conflicts of interests, abuse company resources, or bring notoriety to the company. These policies tend to have common elements:
