Keeping Work and Life in Balance

Training & Development, Jul 2004 by Powers, Vicki

Many organizations understand how critical it is to provide work-life balance for retaining employees, encoairaging job satisfaction, and improving productivity. Flexibility will soon be business as usual rather than an employee perk. Learn how Lancaster Laboratories and Ernst & Young tailor their programs to meet employees' changing needs.

Flexibility is not a working mother's issue as some people seem to think. Rather, it relates to "how and when work gets done and how Families and Work Institute. Everyone has the need for flexibility in the workplacewhether it's to care for an elderly parent, take college classes, take a sick child to the doctor, or get a haircut. More and more, work is "interfering" (as some people would say) with life and is creating overscheduled, stressed people.

"Flexibility isn't going to be an option in the future," says hois Backon, co-director of When Work Works, a Families and Work Institute project on workplace effectiveness and workplace flexibility. "It's just going to be the way good, competitive businesses operate." Fortunately, many large and small organizations have adopted and perfected innovative programs and opportunities that encourage employees to better balance their work days with their home and family life.

Lancaster Laboratories: lntergenerational

Young children and older adults smiling and laughing during "Show & Tell." Children blowing kisses to mom from the playground while she works in her office window. Parents sharing lunch with their kids in the middle of the workday. Those are some of the opportunities that Lancaster Laboratories offers its employees and their families through on-site, intergenerational child and adult daycare centers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

"Founder Earl Hess always believed that if you take care of your people, the bottom line will always take care of itself," says Margaret Stoltzfus, manager, human resources and safety, at Lancaster Laboratories. "He would often state that a decision he made with his heart was one of the best business decisions he ever made."

With annual sales of approximately US$50 million, Lancaster Laboratories-a provider of chemical and biological laboratory services in the environmental and pharmaceutical industries-has grown since its beginnings in 1961, when Hess, his wife, and a technician started the company on the family farm with the Hess children right in the workplace. Even as the organization has grown to more than 700 employees, it still operates with a people-first approach.

By the mid-1980s, Lancaster Labs recognized a need for its young workforce, made up of more than 60 percent women. Twenty-five percent of its 100 employees surveyed at the time said they expected to start a family within five years. Lancaster realized that it needed to do something quickly to ensure retention of those employees and not risk losing the chemists and biologists it had relocated, employed, and trained. Employees expressed an interest in on-site child care, which at the time was pioneering and bold.

"Certainly, a lot of companies questioned what we were doing when we started [on-site child care], based on concerns about liability and keeping employees focused on work with their kids here," Stoltzfus says. "Those same companies several years later were calling us."

Lancaster Laboratories provided the space and partnered winS an external provider that ran other child-care centers. Lancaster renovated the front part of its original building for the center and moved the president, vice president, and other administrative offices to another area. Lancaster Laboratories Child Care Center opened in August 1986, with a license for 29 children. Early on, the community filled most of the spots, but that gradually changed as employees started their own families. Stoltzfus says Lancaster Laboratories was the third company in the United States to provide on-site child care. Now, it offers a licensed program for 161 children from infants to school age, along with a full-day kindergarten program and summer daycare. Employees receive a discount averaging 25 percent. Lancaster Labs subsidizes the center each year and paid approximately $141,000 in cash and in-kind services in 2003.

Lancaster Laboratories made another pioneering decision, in the late 1980s, by surveying employees about the issue of adult daycare. Though there wasn't an immediate need, there was a planned need. With adult daycare, Stoltzfus notes, many people find out they need it and then that they need it immediately.

Lancaster Generations Adult Day Care Center opened in late 1991, with space for up to 40 individuals. This center has served more of the community population enrollment rather than employees, but it is providing a necessary niche and partners with the child-care center in several activities and events. "It's neat for those in the adult daycare center because they look forward to the kids coming over," Stoltzfus says. "Their eyes light up when these kids come in and do activities with them. That's an unbelievable benefit for both."