Flextime: The right thing to do

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Sep 30, 1998 by Leigh Jones

Last tax season, accountant Christi Haley was balancing a six- month-old on her hip while juggling the demands of a new career with Deloitte & Touche.

Working two years for the big-sixer straight out of college, Haley was ready to start a family and was just hitting her stride as a tax accountant. But meeting the obligations of family and firm made for one unhappy bean counter.

"I didn't have a baby so that I could work 75 hours a week and not see her," Haley says. "I tell you, it was tough for me during the busy season."

So she took a cue from co-worker Linda Havrilla and decided to look into Deloitte & Touche's Initiative for the Retention and Advancement of Women.

Launched in 1993, the program is aimed at keeping the firm's women accountants -- who often flee to less-demanding jobs -- after the wee ones arrive.

Deloitte & Touche started the initiative in part as a bottom-line decision to reap the rewards of training and recruiting young accountants. But the program also is grounded in public policy, or "the right thing to do," as the company calls it, for employees' families.

Whatever the reason, Haley likes the results. Not a reduced schedule, her workweek includes four 9-hour days, with Wednesdays off. She makes up time in the evenings or on her day off while little Peyton naps. That one free day in the middle of the week provides a big difference.

"I use the day that I'm at home to get everything around the house taken care of, so that we can just play on the weekends," she says. "I'm a much happier person."

In 1992, Deloitte & Touche noticed a trend in increased turnover rates for women in the male-dominated field of accounting. Some 80 percent of company professionals in 1992 said they wanted greater flexibility in terms of where and when they worked.

Linda Havrilla was well aware of her job's demands as a young accountant with the firm in 1988. She elected to leave the company when her daughter was born. But Havrilla's former boss wanted to be on the front end of the company's pending change in policy, so he asked her to return to work on a reduced workload.

She arranged to work about 25 hours per week, sometimes working at home and -- on rare occasions -- taking her daughter along when in the field auditing. Havrilla says she couldn't have returned to the firm, otherwise.

Now that Caitlin is nearly 11, Havrilla has upped her hours to about 35 per week, with full benefits and a paycheck equaling roughly 85 percent of compensation typical for her position.

"I don't miss out on the `let's go fly a kite day' at school," Havrilla says. "I may have been out there in heels and hose and a suit, but I was flying kites."

Deloitte & Touche's program is not just for women. It's also available for men wanting to make those soccer games or school plays. Too, alternative schedules help relieve accountants who travel and must balance work, home and office demands. Its 3,4,5 program includes Friday, Saturday and Sunday at home, Monday through Thursday in traveling and Friday in the office.

To ensure fairness, companies wanting to implement flexible schedules need written policies, says LeeAnn Sheehan, president of WorkLife Connections, a Eugene, Ore.-based consulting firm.

"Put it in writing so that everybody understands," she says.

A company should include what reasons it will consider valid for flextime, in addition to what positions are appropriate for alternative schedules. Employers need to recognize that some positions aren't conducive to flextime, Sheehan notes.

"For some jobs it's just not applicable," she says. "If you're running a customer service counter from 9-5, you just can't let people come and go as they choose."

Sheehan says that some employers run into trouble if reduced workloads or alternative schedules are available for some departments and not for others. "It can create morale problems," she says.

Crucial to the success of flextime is management's commitment to working with employees in formulating a mutually beneficial plan. Both Haley and Havrilla say that Deloitte & Touche's program works because the firm pays more than lip-service to the concept.

"They just don't say it's a good idea. They say it, and they do it," Havrilla maintains.