Work-Life Balance: The Productivity of Perks

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Drew Schiller, right, co-founder and CEO of the health care software company Validic, shares a beer with staff at their office in The Chesterfield downtown.
Drew Schiller, right, co-founder and CEO of the health care software company Validic, shares a beer with staff at their office in The Chesterfield downtown. Photography by Beth Mann

Robbie Allen and his team at Infinia ML, who spend their days teaching machines how to learn, are pioneers of the “future of work” – the widely accepted idea that workforce paradigms are shifting and that businesses will have to adapt to stay relevant.

Artificial intelligence is certainly one of the disruptors driving these shifts, Allen said. But he thinks Infinia, a data science company that helps businesses incorporate AI technology, is aiding the transition in another crucial way – one that is quintessentially human.

Allen, the company’s CEO, said that Infinia offers its 38 employees a convivial atmosphere. It provides a purpose and free coffee. And it insists its workers take time off to recharge. The future of work is also the future of perks.

The 2016 National Study of Employers, a nearly 20-year study of the “practices, policies, programs and benefits provided by U.S. employers,” found that employees measure an effective workplace across several categories, including learning opportunities, job autonomy and flexibility. The final category is among the most popular, especially with working parents with a sick kid at home. It is also fundamental to a younger generation who sees work-life balance as less of a perk, and more of an entitlement.

The findings, however, also suggest a national workforce caught between the future and business as usual.

From 2012 to 2016, the study showed, the percentage of companies allowing employees to work from home on a regular basis rose from 33% to 40%. But, the percentage of employers allowing workers to take time during the day to attend to family needs fell from 87% to 81%.

Most notably, the percentage of companies showing “support for flexible work arrangements,” fell from 31% in 2005 to 14% in 2016, a “surprising finding” the researchers wrote, “given how much talk [there has been in the media over the last decade] about the need to increase flexibility.”

But these are national numbers across disparate industries, some of which are far less receptive to change. In Durham, the momentum is well on its way.

A ready pool of highly skilled talent here is a chief reason why Durham was largely spared the worst parts of the 2008 recession, which the study says likely dampened the work-life balance momentum nationwide. That pool is deep, and it’s young.

As unemployment rates stay low and many potential workers can afford to wait for the right offer, businesses both in Durham and nationwide are having to show more interest in providing better work-life balance.

Pam Higdon, the co-owner and president of the Durham/Raleigh franchises of Express Employment Professionals, a national employment agency, said that “On any given day,” in Raleigh and Durham, “we have several hundred people out working in different companies.” Several of those companies, she added, often rely on her clients to fill full-time positions. A lot of workers “come to us with flexibility in mind,” she said, and the employers know it.

“Almost every company has to be thinking of these things to stay competitive,” she said.

But the drive toward balance is about more than supplying worker demand, Allen and many other business leaders here say. It’s good for the bottom line.

“Earlier in my career,” Allen said, “I was more of a brute-force, put-in-whatever-hours-it-took-to-be-successful kind of person. Now, with two kids and a family, I try to be more efficient with my time.”

For that reason, Infinia has a strict time-off policy.

“Our PTO policy is 25 days a year, but we enforce and track that everybody uses every day throughout the year,” Allen said.

Some employees “are so conscious about their work,” he said, “that their time away is not something they prioritize, and they may take only five days off the whole year.”

It is the company’s responsibility, he said, “to make sure people are taking the necessary time to recharge their batteries.”

If that sounds like altruism, think again.

“It’s not altruistic at all,” Allen said. “It’s actually what creates the best situation. You become better if you spend some time away.” 

Studies support his thesis. The numbers also show many workers are still not taking all the vacation afforded to them.

According to a 2017 study by the U.S. Travel Association, “each year, more than half of Americans leave vacation time on the table, accumulating to 705 million days in 2017.” Of those surveyed who did not take all their days, 61% cited a fear of looking replaceable, and 56% cited workloads too heavy to leave to colleagues.

The solution then, local leaders say, starts with the work culture.

Validic, a software company in The Chesterfield building, helps corral data from wearable devices and other health monitoring sources so that health care providers can have complete access to a patient’s health information. The mission is clear, and all on board see that their work helps make people’s lives better.

Drew Schiller, the CEO and co-founder of Validic, still wants them to take care of themselves.

“None of us have a work life and a personal life,” Schiller said, “all of us have one life.”

“It is important to talk about things like rest, getting sleep, putting the phone down on the weekends, concentrating on dinner and the kids,” he said. “We don’t want the expectation to be that if you get an email from your boss at 7 p.m. you have to respond in 25 minutes.”

Matt Dougherty and Emily Hales work at Validic.
Schiller said Validic, which streamlines vital health data, provides a sense of mission for its workers, including Matt Dougherty and Emily Hales.

He added: “Motivation is not usually the issue. It’s about finding a sustainable pace.”

This thinking extends from the pace of the work to how the work is done, and, in another shift from historical models, is about seeing employees as more than just  replaceable cogs.

These are not the lonely whisperings of small startups in isolated markets. Even financial behemoths have taken note.

Andrea Hough is the head of talent management for Fidelity, which is based in Boston but has a large, state-of-the-art, pingpong-table-and-open-workspace-filled headquarters in Research Triangle Park. Her chief job, she said, is “understanding the hopes and the dreams and the aspirations of our associates.” By doing so, she adds, she can help them devise work environments that let them “be the best version of themselves so that they can deliver [that version] to our customers.”

Fidelity has more than 40,000 employees worldwide, and 3,600 in Durham. It serves 30 million clients, and has $2.6 trillion in managed assets. And yet, she said, the company has had to adapt.

Fidelity aims to “be there for the moments that matter in our customers’ lives,” she said, “but we deliver that through our associates.” So, she added, “that has really caused us to rethink the employee experience, making sure that we help them thrive inside and outside” the office.

As part of that effort, Fidelity tries to create choice for its employees, including options for working from home, collaborative work spaces and quiet spaces.

“So if I’m working on something where I need to be heads down, then maybe I’m at home. If I need to be really creative and innovative, maybe I go to one of our collaborative spaces because I get energy from the people around me,” she said.

They also offer family care, short-term leave, long-term leave and emergency child care. All of it, Hough said, feeds into the idea that workers have a work-provided safety net when life, as it is known to do, gets more complicated.

Companies have spent time and money thinking about these things, she said, but there are some challenges.

“It is not a one-size-fits-all balance,” Allen said. “People like to think of productivity as a flat line, a linear relationship, and you need to be at the same level or you should be fired. But, in my experience [productivity] is more of a sine curve (a continuous wave). There are times when people are going through tough periods, they have personal issues or they are overworked, and does that mean you should fire them because they are going through a valley? If you appreciate them when they are at their peak, then you have to work with them when they are going through the troughs, too.”

Even the word balance is unhelpful, Hough said, and can cause frustration when good-intentioned initiatives fall short of the target. 

“Balance suggests you’ve nailed it perfectly,” Hough said. “‘Nobody move, everything’s going fine, nothing is falling at work, nothing is falling at home, finances are good, health is good.’ It implies some level of perfection. It’s unrealistic to think we’ll ever obtain a perfect balance.”

However, it is reasonable, she said, to assume that employer and employee can find a sustainable rhythm built on mutual trust, hard work and rising to the occasion.

“The work is changing, the way we work is changing, the workforce is changing,” she said. “And it is prudent and responsible to be pivoting with those changes.”

Even with these life-friendly work policies, Schiller said, the grind is still hard, and companies still expect a lot from their employees. A work-life balance has nothing to do with coddling. “Not everyone can work in this culture,” he said.

“There is more than enough work to do,” Schiller said. “You could work 24-7, and there would just be more. And it’s partially because we have 72 people and a grand vision and world-class health care organizations as clients. There’s just a lot there. And so for individuals who are achievement oriented, highly motivated, it is really easy to pour everything into the company, and that does lead to burnout.”

He continued: “The last thing we want is burnout. It’s awful for everyone. Nobody functions like they want to, they are not as creative as they want to be. And that creativity loss is huge. And they are going to start feeling resentful, they are going to get chippy with fellow employees. It’s really important that the managers recognize when that happens.”

Just as important, he said, is to get out of the way.

“We have a ‘get stuff done’ policy,” Schiller said, and “don’t want to be a company that micromanages how and when people get things done.

“If you can get your stuff done and meet the commitment you said you’d meet, and you want to work remotely part time to do that, that is perfectly fine. That was something that was important to us – treating our employees like adults, trusting them to make the right decisions.”

Hough agrees.

“We are all very clear about our roles and responsibilities, and how I get my job done is up to me. I choose where I work. And if I need to take my child to the doctor, I do that. But, I still get my job done. It’s prudent that we recognize that we are hiring adults.”

She added: “Now, if workers don’t get their work done? Well, that’s a performance issue. And that’s a different conversation.” 

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Michael McElroy

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