Flextime Proves Boon for Xerox

When Xerox Corp. employees tried flextime at their Dallas customer service center, the results seemed almost too good to be true.

Work got finished quicker, absenteeism dropped 30%, customers were better served, and a key project came in under budget, the company said.

How employees scheduled their working hours was left up to them, said Patricia Nazemetz, Xerox’s human resources director.

“They were told, ‘You’ve got to do these things. You come back and tell us what’s the best way to get this done,’ ” Nazemetz said. “Instead of everybody . . . here from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., they worked out schedules where some people worked early and some stayed later.”

The result was “some people worked 7 to 3, and some started at 10 and left at 7,” Nazemetz said. “We had more coverage for longer hours, rather than nobody being there at 5:30 p.m. when a customer might call.

“It isn’t just somebody coming in and saying, ‘I’m going to work a four-day week,’ ” she added. “They sat down as a team and said: ‘How do we do that as a team?’ and created their own set of schedules that required everybody to pull his or her own weight.”

One supervisor found that, for the first time in her 10 years at Xerox, she returned from vacation to find a clean desk: a work team had covered for her.

Flexibility is the one component workers “consistently identified as critical to creating balance between work and family,” writes social psychologist Deborah Lee in her new book “Having It All, Having Enough” (Amacom).

“Currently, workplace flexibility is still more in demand than available,” she writes.

“But management culture and practice can change, particularly if it is in the employer’s self-interest to do so.”

Flextime can assume many workplace guises, including job sharing, telecommuting, regular part-time work, phased or partial retirement and the compressed work week.

The change at the Dallas center is one of a number of such initiatives adopted by Xerox. Tandem Computers, of Cupertino, Calif., and Corning Inc., in Corning, N.Y., took similar steps as part of a “collaborative action research” project sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

Employees also tried telecommuting, a compressed workweek, part-time work and simply hanging “Quiet Time” signs on office doors. Results are detailed in the Ford Foundation report “Relinking Life and Work: Toward a Better Future.”

“Managers send negative signals that using family-friendly benefits is a problem for them and the company as a whole,” the Foundation’s June Zeitlin said, explaining why the initiatives were adopted.

“If you look at who’s moving up and who’s being rewarded, it is the person who works the longest hours and never takes a day off and is always available for travel, so the benefits may be just on paper,” Zeitlin said.

Before the experiment, a team leader at one of the participating companies was punished for adopting a four-day workweek to spend more time with her children.

Other team members took over her work on her day off, and by all measures, productivity included, “the group was thriving,” the report said.

It was not long, though, before the manager was “stripped of her supervisory duties” and given a low performance rating when opposition to her flextime approach surfaced, the Ford study found.

There are employees who can’t even leave work early for a bona fide reason without telling a white lie about it.

“They feel that attending a community board or civic meeting is not likely to brand them as uncommitted, while taking a child for a physical [exam] might,” the report said, citing interviews with company employees.

“Some secretly take children on business trips. Others leave their computers on while picking up children from sporting events, hoping that colleagues passing by will think they are in a meeting,” the report continued.

“As corporations restructure and reinvent themselves,” the Ford Foundation report said, “our findings suggest that linking such change efforts to work-family concerns greatly enhances their chances for success.”