“100 Best Companies” for how long?

Image by terren in Virginia via Flickr

I know you’ve all been waiting for this moment with baited breath. Drum-roll, please. Presenting, the 24^th annual Working Mother magazine’s “100 Best Companies” list! Huzzah! Please try to contain your excitement while scanning the all-smiles-diversity-is-awesome-and-so-are-babies website.

Though the “Best Companies” list is hardly comprehensive (companies sign-up voluntarily to participate in a self-reported survey), it does give us an idea of what’s out there in terms of flexibility and benefits at top companies. Don’t be scared off by the whole maternal focus either—if a company is flexible and generous with benefits for mothers, it’s likely flexible and generous with benefits for all employees. (Though not necessarily; and that’s one of the problems with focusing only on working mothers when it comes to work/life issues in the workplace). This year, 100 percent of the “Best Companies” offer telecommuting and flextime schedules to employees, 98 percent offer job-sharing, and 94 percent offer compressed workweeks.

Basically, the list serves as good PR for workplace flexibility in general. Companies with good work/life policies get recognition and free publicity for their effort. Ideally, this pushes their competitors to offer good work/life policies as well in order to compete for top talent.

The question is: if companies don’t need to compete for top talent—thanks recession!—will they still invest in flexible policies? Or, as Lisa Belkin put it on her blog, are generous work/life policies “just a relic of better days?”

Belkin brings up the example of Eli Lilly, a long-time leader in flexible work arrangments that recently announced plans to eliminate their compressed work week option (working 40 hours in four days instead of five). Not a good sign.

I’ve always held firm to the belief that flexible policies are good for the bottom-line because they increase employee retention, productivity, and morale. I’ve seen several studies and plenty of anecdotal evidence to that effect. But if companies are ditching their flexibile work/life policies due to the recession, it does make you wonder. Are companies just being short-sighted—trying to save a few bucks now, but hurting themselves in the long-run? Or does a cost-benefit analysis render flexible policies unwise for companies?

The current state of work/life policies in the US is so hodgepodge that the answer seems nearly impossible to quantify. The Families and Work Institute just released a nationally representative study of the impact of the recession on employers that found that the vast majority of employers are not cutting back on flexibility: 81% are maintaining flexibility, 13% increasing it, and 6% cutting back. The same study, however, found that almost a third of employers instituted involuntary reductions in hours—not exactly award-worthy flexibility. And the cost-benefit question remains.

None of this is to say that employees shouldn’t be pushing for flexible policies no matter what. Even during the recession, some companies have announced record profits and there is plenty of fat-trimming and re-distributing that can be done (hello, outrageous executive pay). Employees, however, have proven, in the words of Dancing with the Stars phenome Kelly Osborne, rather “crap” at standing up for ourselves. Until we get it together, Working Mother magazine lists  and the like are all we’ve got, I’m afraid.

– Liz