Reprinted from the St. Louis Business Journal

Work vs. Life: Bottom-line Issues for Working Parents

By Margie Manning

Brad Shepard and other workers seek benefits that help them better balance work and family

Brad Shepard is a business executive by day and juggler by night.

Shepard is a 32-year-old single father. He has custody of his 7-year-old son, Ian, and his 4-year-old daughter, Hanleigh, three days a week and every other weekend. He also is an account manager at The IMPACT Group, a job that has him on the road traveling every three weeks.

"When I go home at night, I cook dinner. Then, I might be able to focus on some family business by 9:30 or 10 p.m.—if I don’t have any other business to take care of," Shepard said.

So, when Shepard had to find a new school for Ian, he didn’t have time to spend hours on the phone doing research. He took advantage of a research service offered as an employee benefit by The IMPACT Group. Within two days, Shepard had an inch-high pile of documents filled with information on the Kirkwood, Webster Groves and Clayton school districts.

Shepard said he also used the research to find child care information and to find support groups when his father was diagnosed with cancer. He plans to draw on the service in the near future to look for places where he can pursue a master’s degree.

"If I had to take time out of my work day to do that, it would cost the company a lot of money," Shepard said.

Resource and referral services are benefit offered by only a small number of St. Louis companies, according to a new survey by The IMPACT Group, a consulting firm. Although more than two-thirds of the 89 firms that responded to the survey offered employee assistance programs, flextime or pretax spending accounts for dependent care, fewer than one in 10 offered resource and referral services for schools or summer camps, or legal aid programs.

Peggy Greenwood, project coordinator at The IMPACT Group and the author of the survey, said St. Louis companies generally offered "average" benefits, not necessarily those likely to have a significant effect on employee satisfaction or performance.

But that could change as the St. Louis Regional Commerce & Growth Association launches an initiative to increase the focus by local firms on so-called work/life issues—organization benefits that help employees succeed at balancing their work and family lives.

Richard Fleming, the RCGA’s president and chief executive, and Ronnie Bryant, senior vice president of economic development, will call on top executives of the 50 largest firms in the area to talk to them about how work/life benefits can help businesses attract and retain top talent, as part of their annual visits to the firms.

"We’ve always said St. Louis is a family town. This will give us an opportunity to highlight that," said Margaret Kenyon, director of work force development for the RCGA.

There’s more than image at stake, said Laura Herring, founder and president of The IMPACT Group. She said companies that fail to offer benefits such as job sharing or telecommuting would lose talented employees, especially those who are part of a two-career couple and younger "Generation X" workers.

"The X-ers just don’t think these benefits would be a nice thing to have; it’s a bottom-line issue for them. They’re saying, ‘I am not coming to work for you unless these benefits are offered," Herring said.

Resource and referral was the top benefit the companies responding to the survey said they wanted to add.

Herring said it made financial sense.

She said it takes a worker, on average 17 hours to research a question about child care or elder care, for example, and most of those answers can be obtained only during the day, when the worker is on the job. For a worker who is paid $30 an hour (including benefits), that’s $510 each time the worker is trying to line up a resource to help his or her personal life.

If 60 percent of the work force at a company of 10,000 employees spends time on the job lining up personal resources, it costs the company $3 million, Herring said.

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Career Management Benefits Increase in Popularity

Workers in St. Louis are three times more likely to receive help from their employers with career management than they are to receive benefits that help them balance their work and family lives.

That’s the conclusion of a survey of 89 area firms by the consulting firm The IMPACT Group. Peggy Greenwood, project coordinator at The IMPACT Group and the author of the survey, said career management benefits for employees sell themselves to top executives.

"For the company to get the loyalty they need and the productivity they need, they know they no longer can offer job security within the company itself. Everyone knows that," Greenwood said.

"What can they offer them? They can offer personal career security, and that’s where the career management benefits are coming from."

Her observations are enforced by a new study from The Gallup Organization. The poll, which focused on workers in their 20s and early 30s who make up the so-called Generation X, found:

70 percent of those who didn’t receive job training were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 84 percent of those who received at least six days of training.

80 percent said the availability of company-sponsored training programs was a factor in deciding whether to accept a new job or stick with a current one.

58 percent of workers 32 years old or younger said training was useful in preparing for higher-level jobs; 42 percent of workers older than that had the same opinion.

The IMPACT Group survey found the most popular career management benefit available at local companies is external seminars, offered by 97 percent of those surveyed. Tuition reimbursement was available at 88 percent of the companies surveyed, and in-house training and development were offered at 86 percent of the firms.

Benefits offered by the fewest firms were: external individual career counseling, 9 percent; formal skill and interest assessments, 26 percent; and formal mentoring systems, 34 percent.