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 Essential Reading for Leaders Wanting to Improve Business Outcomes
"Off-Ramps and On-Ramps" takes us on an enlightening journey that goes beyond the standard business case for workplace flexibility. Sylvia Ann Howlett adds new insight to traditional models by reporting new data and best practices of company initiatives designed to keep talented women. Howlett lays the groundwork in the first half of the book and dedicates the second half to providing solutions. Each solution is presented in a brief "Toolkit" format. Take a glance into each toolkit and you will find a condensed outline that includes the scenario, business case, critical elements for success and best of all, an outline of how to get started to achieve business outcomes.
Howlett's solutions include:
1) Establishing Flexible Work Arrangements
Flexible work arrangements dominate women's wish lists. Solutions include flexible start and stop times, seasonal flextime, reduced-hour options, telecommuting, and job sharing.
2) Creating Arc of Career Flexibility
This new concept expands flexible work arrangements a step further to take into account the span of a woman's work life acknowledging its nonlinearity and discontinuities. Companies that are successful with providing solutions have senior executives driving these new policies who are beginning to conceptualize work in different ways.
3) Reimagining Work Life
Employees with responsibilities that go beyond biological children have needs that differ in time span and frequency. Solutions include elder care and employee assistance programs.
4) Claiming and Sustaining Ambition
Sustaining ambition can be a problematic issue for women. Reasons include the difficulty of recovering from off-ramps and that the glass ceiling continues to limit and constrain the career prospects of women. A key solution includes employer-sponsored women's networks, which can be extremely effective in helping women claim and sustain ambition.
5) Tapping into Altruism
For women, deriving meaning and purpose from work and giving back to society are more powerful drivers than money. Solutions include companies recognizing and supporting community volunteer activity for employees.
6) Combating Stigma and Stereotypes
Flexible work arrangements can create the unspoken negative aura that attaches to nonstandard work arrangements, virtual workplaces, etc. Solutions include tackling microinequities.
My favorite quote from the book is from Maury Hanigan who expressed surprise that there is so little awareness of the costs of losing talented employees. "If a $2,000 desktop computer disappears from an employee's desk, I guarantee that there'll be an investigation, a big to-do. But if a $100,000-a-year executive with all kinds of client relationships gets poached by a competitor - or quits to stay home with the kids - there's no investigation. No one is called on the carpet for it."
This is an essential book for leaders of companies searching for effective ways to significantly improve business outcomes. Although the research in this book is representative of large employers, the concepts can be modified to fit the culture of mid and small size companies to attract, retain, and re-enter a talented work force.
 Not a lot new
I had higher hopes for this book! Alas, not all were realized.
We all know (and the author does fine background, in case we don't) that women are fairly easily derailed from career paths by family crises, discrimination, and just the logistics of daily life in America. So far, so good.
The proposed "solution" is sad: Companies need to wake up and change their dated ways to retain talented women. The author seems to believe they (1) want to keep talented women and (2) will actually change to do so.
As if.
Some really great data for career women and the companies they work for
If you're interested in looking at the data behind women and careers, this is the book for you. Hewlett has summarized a number of really interesting data. For example, 37% of women take time off at some point in their careers. 30% of women take advantage of part-time or other flexible programs. Hewlett's data illustrates a number of important reasons companies should care about gender diversity. After building the business case for women, she talks about how companies have created programs to make it work. One of the nice elements of this book is that she illustrates the data with personal stories. One of my favorite quotes underscores the importance of finding meaning in your job. A working mom comments, "when I walk out the door in the morning leaving my 2-yaer-old with the nanny, there's usually a bit of a scene. Tommy clings, pouts, and whips up the guilt. Now, I know it's not serious--most of the time he likes his nanny. But it sure makes me think about why I go to work--and why I put in a ten hour day. It's as though every day I make the following calculation: do the satisfactions I derive from my job (efficacy, recognition--a sense of stretching my mind) justify leaving Tommy? Some days it's a close run. One thing I do know. It couldn't just be the money. I need a whole lot of things to be happening for me to work."
Practical strategies for addressing workplace gender and racial inequities.
Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett does an excellent job of outlining both subtle and bold barriers that relegate many talented women (and minorities) to the lower end of promotions and pay scales. Using ample documentation, she outlines the financial costs that corporations suffer when they operate with outdated career models designed for white male professionals. Hewlett also lines up practical solutions with real-life examples from top corporations. Though the book is marred by repetition and various examples are recycled in different chapters, overall, we consider this essential reading for senior corporate officials and staff members.
Hits the Mark Perfectly!
This book honestly and openly explores what I believe thousands of professional women are facing today - the deep challenge of creating a successful professional life of meaning, fulfillment, and balance, in today's current dominant work model. As one who works with hundreds of professional women each year, I see over and over the ill-effects of professional women striving to fit into a model that no longer reflects our needs, priorities, and values. Hewlett's book goes a long way toward presenting beneficial new thinking and programs that, when adopted, will certainly bring about beneficial and urgently-needed change.
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(based on 11 reviews)
