Studying "working fathers": comparing fathers' and mothers' work-family sonflict, fit, and adaptive strategies in a global high-tech company

Fathering, Oct, 2003 by E. Jeffrey Hill, Alan J. Hawkins, Vjollca Martinson, Maria Ferris

Because the sample is drawn from a single corporation, it may be useful to briefly review IBM's work and family policies and recent initiatives. During the past two decades, IBM has implemented numerous policies to enable its employees to better harmonize their personal and family needs with the needs of the business. Some of these policies include child and elder care referral services, financial support for near-site dependent care facilities, personal and parental leave policies, online and call-in parenting assistance, permanent part-time job opportunities for professionals and managers, and domestic partner benefits.

More recently, aggressive policies to enhance flexibility in the timing and location of work have been adopted. For example, individualized work schedules give employees the flexibility to start work up to two hours before or after the normal start time at their location with stop times adjusted accordingly. Meal-break flexibility enables employees to take a minimum of 30 minutes or up to a maximum of two hours for a meal break. Compressed workweeks make it possible for employees to work their 40-hour week in fewer than five workdays (e.g., four 10-hour days). Beginning in the mid-1990s, IBM began to supply many sales and service employees with the portable means to work from a variety of work locations. About 100,000 IBM employees worldwide no longer had individual company-provided office space (Hill, Ferris, & Martinson, 2003). Using this virtual office, IBM employees have the flexibility to work whenever and wherever it makes sense. Other recent programs enable substantial numbers of IBM employees to be home-based telecommuters. In 2000, IBM established the Global Workforce Flexibility Project Office to see that flexible work policies were encouraged and established throughout the world.

For this study, a sub-sample of working fathers (n = 7,692) with children under age 18 living at home with them at least 50% of the time was selected. For comparison, a sub-sample of working mothers (n = 4,768) was also selected. Because so many employees were invited to take the survey, IBM required that the number of questions be limited, to minimize the amount of time respondents spent away from their jobs. Also, the questions had to be approved by human resources management in each part of the world. Because of legal and cultural circumstances, some questions were not asked in all geographic locations.

The survey was administered on the Internet. IBM has conducted online surveys since 1986, and survey data indicate a high degree of confidence in the confidentiality and anonymity of the data. To preserve confidence in anonymity even further, the survey was conducted by a third party, Clear Picture Corporation, which did not communicate any personally identifying information about survey respondents to the IBM survey administrator. Depending on country participation rates, electronic reminder notes encouraging participation were sent two to four times to all survey invitees in their local language. Compared to the pencil-and-paper method, online survey administration at IBM has yielded higher participation rates, more and longer write-in comments on open-ended survey items, quicker data analysis, and faster implementation of new policies based on the data.