Favoring Flexibility

Not long after the plan was put in place, a young employee had an unusual request. “He said, ‘My family has owned a farm for 150 years,’” Schilling recalls. “‘I’m the fourth generation, and I’ve been so worried about what I’m going to do. My first love is farming, but my second love is business, and I don’t want to give either of them up. Could I work six months a year at LarsonAllen and use the other six months to take care of the family farm?’”

The answer was a resounding yes, Schilling says. “We know that in order to keep great people, we need to allow for a lot of different types of flexibility.”

Many other valuable employees are also faced with choices between family and work. “We need all the great talent we can get, male or female,” Schilling says. “But I think this is particularly going to appeal to women who want to work. They want to be leaders in an organization, and they want to have a great career, but they’re saying, ‘I just can’t work these hours.’”

Not every company can be as flexible as LarsonAllen. In manufacturing, for example, it’s a no-go. But many professional services firms are employing an in-between strategy called “core hours” to give employees a little bit of play in their schedules.

“The notion is that during some specified period of the day, say from 9:00 until 3:00, everyone has to physically be there,” says Denise Dross, president of Human Resource Guidance, a Minneapolis HR management consulting firm. “If you wanted to start at 7:00 so you could leave at 3:30, you could do that. Or if you wanted to start at 9:00 so you’d have more time in the morning to get your children off to school, you could do that, too. It has been very effective for organizations for whom a rigid structure isn’t critical.”

Human resources experts say telecommuting can help you keep a valued employee under even the most unlikely circumstances. “I have a client, a CPA firm, where an employee’s spouse got transferred out of state,” Dross says. “They were able to experiment and implement a situation where the employee telecommuted while she was elsewhere. They tried it on a temporary basis, and they have extended it into an ongoing situation. The individual makes a personal appearance at the office on some kind of regular basis.”

The biggest criterion for an arrangement of this type, Dross says, is whether the job can be configured for an out-of-office worker—which often is the case, thanks to the Internet. Beyond that, she says, management has to have faith in the employee’s work ethic and communication skills.