Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1575

The Three-and-a-Half-Day Job

Many people seem to feel that if the market can't offer them a brilliant job, there's not much point looking.

But you don't need a perfect job. Every job is a compromise between what you want to get out of life and what an employer wants to get out of you. Keeping this reality in mind will help you challenge perfection-focused thinking and increase your options.

Remember, all roles — the great and the not-so-great alike — include some uninspiring tasks. While jobs that are a poor match often provide fewer opportunities for autonomy and growth, even they usually reveal some positives. Work is rarely as monochrome as we like to make it.

Even if the perfect job existed, searching for one would be a fool's errand. Detailed reviews with hundreds of clients have convinced me that you don't need a job you love five days a week. Three-and-a-half days out of 5 seems to do the trick. It's enough space to thrive, learn, and feel you're making a contribution. The rest of the working week may be paperwork or dull meetings, but you can live with that.

Career management in tough times is also about calibrating expectations. Your next role probably won't tick all your boxes, but that doesn't mean you can't shape it in your direction more than a little — at the point of accepting the offer, and maybe 12 to 18 months down the line when you've proved yourself. Knowing what's good enough is about creatively accepting compromise.

Take a job that only meets half your wish list, perhaps, but make sure it's a stepping stone towards 7 out of 10. Which is enough for anyone.

So how do you find your three-and-a-half-day job? It takes more than diligence. Today's market needs cunning. That's a very old Norse word, which before the Middle Ages didn't mean deceitful guile, but special knowledge and skills — the ability to track down what you need in unfavourable conditions when everyone else is hungry.

Applying cunning to the market often means new thinking, new strategies. Jobs are far more hidden away than they were a decade ago, and filled by complex routes, so it makes sense to look carefully at what's working in any job search process, and how much your picture of the market is getting in the way of discovering what's really out there.

Those who have made big step towards a life-enhancing role nearly always tell you about the conversations which made that journey possible. Ask them what they could have done to get quicker results, and they're likely to say something along the lines of, "I should have talked to the right people earlier." This isn't networking, but simply learning, planning, absorbing.

So, talk to people who have found roles they feel are worth getting up for in the morning. Ask how they turned the odds in their favour; you'll discover the toughest step wasn't applying for the job or getting selected. It was a long way further back when they took their first exploratory step. This step is nearly always a conversation, usually with someone who will inspire as well as inform. Reach out to someone who already does what you'd love to do. Then do it again. And again.

You can also put energy into transforming your current job. Fixing the role you're in rather than rushing to the job market to solve career problems. Moving on should be about the attraction of the new outweighing the repulsion of the old — actively going to, not just wanting to get out.

When people do start to build their job in half day increments they start to gain control. They learn how to coax hidden aspects of their job into the daylight. They learn smart but diplomatic ways of saying to an employer "here's how to get better value out of me...."

Holding out for the perfect job is a brilliant avoidance strategy when jobs are thin on the ground. Playing "100% or nothing" is a great way of giving yourself permission to do absolutely nothing. Don't get caught in this trap and suspend belief in your future.

Avoid the temptation to rush down corridors, always trying to find the next level, but ignoring the half-open doors along the way. Sometimes you simply need a quiet faith that behind some doors is a person who will take you seriously, and that, with some effort, you can be quite happy with three-and-a-half good days.

We've All Probably Eaten Counterfeit Food

An estimated 10% of food that consumers buy in the developed world is adulterated in some way by counterfeit ingredients, Shaun Kennedy of the University of Minnesota says in a report by The New York Times. Perpetrators of this fraud are trying to make money, rather than cause harm to consumers, but in some cases the ingredients they add can be dangerous. A company in the UK that made fake Glen's vodka added bleach as well as methanol, which can cause blindness, the Times says.

Don't Let Your Best-Connected People Become Bottlenecks

By now, most HBR readers should understand the informal influence that stems from being central to an organization's network. Well-connected people have enormous power to drive change, as this recent article from Julie Battilana of Harvard Business School and Tiziana Casciaro of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, makes clear. But, when a company has only a few network-central players, they can become significant points of weakness.

Consider the situation faced by a leading provider of outsourcing and information technology consulting services with approximately $1.5 billion in revenues and 10,000 employees spread across more than 70 offices globally. The company wanted to move to a matrixed structure, with globally integrated business lines and vertical practices working in conjunction with regional sales groups. The idea was to increase the focus on clients, improve flexibility and scalability, eliminate redundancy and excess costs, accelerate growth and profitability, and improve career opportunities.

But network analysis revealed that the company had a long way to go. Information flowed through hierarchies; geographies and functions operated in silos; most people weren't aware of expertise elsewhere in the company; and few were collaborating to transfer best practices and help clients. The 5% most central people — despite working to their limits — had in various ways become bottlenecks, unable to fully participate in projects, sales efforts and decisions. And if you took them out of the network, the number of relationships in the company would drop by 29%!

Management responded by launching a number of connectivity-improving initiatives. First, they developed an expertise locator to help people find resources across the organization instead of passing requests up the hierarchy. Second, they offered educational sessions on topics such as service offerings, delivery experience, and rules of engagement between regions and business units. Third, they established global teams of subject matter experts. Finally, they emphasized a new culture of responsiveness by encouraging employees to return calls and e-mails within 24 hours regardless of the information-seeker's title or position. Rather than further overloading the small set of people in the center of their network, leaders worked to lessen their load. They pushed decision-making responsibilities down to other levels and prompted other employees to become more central.

That freed up those who were already highly networked to help steer change. For example, the head of client services began to draw on the people that network analysis showed to be central in each region, which helped her understand who knew what much more effectively than meetings with those higher in the formal hierarchy could.

Six months later, the results were impressive. Network connectivity was much more evenly distributed and the most central people were much more responsive. There was 17% increase in ties to and from people in the periphery, many of them client-facing, which improved service and account penetration. And the ratio of employee ties external to their functions to all connections increased by 13%. Sales collaborations up to $500,000 increased by 27%; those between $500,000 and $2 million were up 15%; and those in the $2 million to $10 million range got a 9% boost.

The lesson? People central to your organization' network can help you. But you need to make sure they're not hurting you first.

Leading Like Nelson Mandela

Linda Hill, Harvard Business School professor, shares her memories of meeting the leaders of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, and what she learned from them.

One Difference Between a Great Recession and a Great Depression: Jobs

On Friday we learned that the U.S. added another 195,000 (seasonally adjusted) non-farm jobs in June. That was a bit better than expected, and another sign that the economic recovery may be, ever so tentatively, gaining speed. But it will take 12 more months like June just to get non-farm employment back to the level of November 2007.

That's when employment peaked before the onset of the Great Recession at more than 139 million non-farm jobs; the fact that it's going to take close to seven years, if all goes well over the next year, just to get us back to that level is an indication of how bad the recession was and how weak the recovery has been. And getting back to the 2007 level isn't getting back to normal; the U.S. will have added about 17 million inhabitants between 2007 and 2014, a healthy labor market thus requires millions more jobs.

No other U.S. recession since World War II has been nearly this devastating to employment, as Calculated Risk's Bill McBride documents every month with the chart that Business Insider dubs "The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever."

But just because the Bureau of Labor Statistics' official employment numbers only go back to 1947 doesn't mean there isn't data available from before then. In the National Bureau of Economic Research's Macrohistory Database, one can find a series of monthly non-farm employment numbers running from 1929 to 1939, compiled by the BLS. And guess what: they make for a much scarier jobs chart than the current recession:

What lessons can one draw from this? Basically, if you think this downturn was comparable in origin and inherent severity to the other recessions since World War II, then we've been the victims of economic-policy bungling of epic proportions. If, on the other hand, you think the proper comparison is the Great Depression, the last U.S. downturn brought on by a severe financial crisis, you'd have to say the White House, Congress, and most of all the Federal Reserve have done an absolutely brilliant job relative to their early-1930s counterparts. I'd lean toward explanation No. 2 — we did actually learn something from the Great Depression, although probably not enough.

A note on methodology: There are a few caveats about that 1930s data, the main one being that back then much more of the workforce was still on the farm, so the same percentage decline in non-farm employment might not have had quite the same impact on the economy. When I made versions of this chart during the Great Recession, I sometimes attempted to account for this, but it doesn't seem worth the effort here. Also, because the numbers from the 1930s weren't seasonally adjusted, I've used unadjusted jobs numbers for recent years, too, which explains why the chart is a little jumpy (without seasonal adjustments the June jobs gain was 422,000, for example).

Why Comcast Would Rather Be Feared Than Loved

When Machiavelli wrote that it is better to be feared than loved, what he had in mind was the nature of commitment and obligation. Allegiances built on good feelings evaporate when times get tough, he reasoned. Those sealed by fear are more durable:

[M]en have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

It may not surprise you to learn that what got me to look up Chapter 17 of The Prince was a recent experience trying to give my cable box and modem back to Comcast, America's biggest cable TV provider. Cable executives think a lot about the feared-vs.-loved tradeoff, I wager. Subscription television services and internet service providers, both dominated in the U.S. by the cable industry, make up two of the three lowest-scoring categories in the American Customer Service Index (the other is airlines). And while this is to a certain extent just a byproduct of their semi-monopoly status, I'm now convinced there's calculation and strategy behind it as well.

Yes, the cable companies do make occasional superficial attempts to be better-liked. And the services they provide do keep improving (along with the prices, of course, but that's mainly sports fans' fault). But the companies continue to keep one crucial element of the customer experience as difficult and frightening as possible. That would be the experience of disconnecting.

My disconnection was of the most benign sort — I was simply moving out of Comcast's service area. A little checking on the company's website revealed that while I could make pretty much any possible change to my service online, I couldn't disconnect; I had to call and talk to an actual human being. So I did. I waited on hold for only a minute or so, and after I'd told the customer service rep that I was moving out of Comcastland, meaning that he didn't have to run through the usual epic customer-retention script, he was hilariously effusive about how wonderful it had been to have me as a customer these past three years and perfectly efficient about making the necessary arrangements. All that was left to do, he told me, was to "drop off" my cable box and modem at a local service center.

I've had to do this before, with RCN, Time Warner, NTL, and others (probably including Comcast). Maybe the passage of time has dulled my memory of what it was really like, or maybe the wonderfulness of the phone rep led me to believe that this was a different sort of operation. So I really thought I was going to be able to just drop the equipment off, and decided to do so as my final errand on the way out of town on a Friday afternoon.

When I got to the Comcast service center in Cambridge, though, the door was locked. A sign said the office was closed from 2 to 2:30, and that they were sorry for the inconvenience. It was inconvenient, and kind of ridiculous, but I dutifully returned 20 minutes later. I passed through the now-unlocked door into a scene from pre-1989 Eastern Europe. There were four or five service windows in the grim little office; all but one had "closed" signs. The one window that was staffed had seven or eight oppressed-looking people waiting in line, and wasn't moving at all. I stood there for a while, wavering between waiting and heading back to the car where my wife, the dog, and the goldfish awaited me.

Then a guy breezed in with a box containing his cable equipment, and called out from the back of the line, "Hey, can I just leave this here? I already settled everything over the phone." The woman behind the counter responded that he wouldn't get a receipt, and she couldn't guarantee that another customer wouldn't take his cable box (as if anyone waiting in that office would want to take a cable box). He walked to one of the closed service windows and said, "How about if I just leave it here?" I followed him, and said I wanted to do the same.

At that point the woman behind the counter started yelling that we couldn't do that. The other guy backed off, but I kind of snapped — moving is the third-most-stressful life event, after all — and went ahead and shoved the box containing my cable equipment through the service window. She shoved back, and said she was going to call the police. I pushed it back in through the window, and walked out.

I knew right then that this was probably an expensive move, but in my somewhat desperate state I figured that getting out of metropolitan Boston an hour or so earlier on a summer Friday afternoon, and not having to go back into that horrible service center, was worth a couple hundred bucks. After the weekend I called Comcast to get the price tag. The (perfectly nice) guy on the phone said there was no evidence in the system that my equipment had been returned, but that he'd put in an "equipment research ticket" to see if it could be located in the Cambridge service center. If it couldn't, I'd owe $250 for the cable box and $110 for the modem.

I had actually feared worse. Still, there's no way a three-year-old cable box and modem are worth $360 — not to mention that I've already probably paid that much in "rent" on the devices (I can't say for sure, because my files are in storage and the online access to my statements has been cut off). In the world of consumer electronics, three years is an awfully long time. My initial suspicion was that, upon getting my cable equipment, Comcast would just throw it away. So far I haven't been able to get Comcast's PR people to tell me what the odds of that are, but I did find a 2012 article from Multichannel News that said cable boxes have "an effective life of seven years," and that there are lots of things in them that can be repurposed after that. So some sort of deposit may make sense to keep the things out of landfills.

If the need to reuse the machines really was what was driving the cable companies' return policies, though, they would make returns easy. Comcast will send a prepaid shipping box to return your cable equipment in, but only to the address you're moving from. And while libraries, video rental stores, and banks long ago perfected systems that allow people to drop off books, DVDs, and deposits without waiting in line or talking to anybody — in the process both serving their customers and reducing labor costs — the cable companies have instead chosen to stick with their inefficient, labor-intensive, maddening equipment-return ritual.

The most plausible explanation for this state of affairs is the simplest one: The equipment-return rigamarole is a customer retention strategy. Customers who can't conceivably be retained, like me, are just collateral damage in the effort to scare potential cable defectors into staying put. If that's right, the cable operators will only get more aggressive about this as the years go by. Their market penetration has probably peaked, as younger consumers (among them many of my colleagues at HBR) increasingly opt for cheaper workarounds via their Internet connections. So the clearest path to continued profit is to lock in existing customers, and find ways to charge them more. Some of the cable industry's lock-in strategies actually deliver value in exchange for tying customers up — think of the "triple-play" plans that bundle cable, Internet, and phone service into one bill, or the increasing use by cable networks such as ESPN and HBO of apps that allow cable subscribers (and only cable subscribers) to view their programming on smartphones and tablets. But the equipment-return thing is pure coercion. Machiavelli would have been impressed.

He would also have been impressed with the cable industry's ability to maintain its equipment advantage in the face of political opposition. Making money off customers' laziness and fear of conflict is a common and perfectly legitimate, if less-than-inspiring, business practice. But the cable industry is a heavily regulated creature of government policy, and the U.S. Congress actually tried to end cable-box tyranny with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. An entire section of that landmark law (Section 304) is devoted to "Competitive Availability of Navigation Devices," with the idea that if customers could get their cable boxes from someone other than the cable company, switching providers would be much easier and true competition would ensue.

The result, after years of wrangling between the Federal Communications Commission and a foot-dragging cable industry, was something called CableCARD, which allows access to digital TV channels without the use of a cable box. The first CableCARDs came out in 2004; since then the FCC has issued repeated rules changes aimed at getting the things to catch on. But they've been a bust — in large part, one suspects, because the cable industry wanted them to be a bust.

Or maybe that's being too generous to the customers like me who chose not to embrace CableCARD (or Tru2way, a successor technology pushed by consumer-electronics manufactors that hasn't gotten caught on either). As I was reminded when I tweeted about my Comcast experience last week, raging against the cable machine is a national pastime. But actually doing something about it, well, that's too scary.

Would You Wear That Company's T-Shirt in Public?

A client recently told me that he knew it was time to leave his previous job when he was no longer proud to wear the company's T-shirt in public. His comment is telling. The seemingly simple and innocuous act of wearing a company's T-shirt is actually a very personal and public endorsement that carries a degree of social risk.

My client's T-shirt problem reminded me of the time when I was working for Reebok's ad agency in the early 1990s.

During this time Reebok and Nike were blood rivals and neck and neck for the number one position in the market. A few years earlier, Reebok had come out of nowhere to outsell Nike with a soft, glove-leather shoe called the Freestyle. With the Freestyle, Reebok had identified a market that Nike had completely missed — women's aerobics. Sales really took off when Cybill Shepherd wore a pair to the 1985 Emmys. But by the early 90s, Reebok was having a tough time building on top of this success, and they began looking for their next hit.

Back at the No.2 spot, Rebook tried to develop a credible rival to Nike's "air" technology — the Energy Return System, a group of shock-absorbent tubes under the midsole of its shoes, and The Pump, an inflation device that provided personalized fit and cushioning. While each technology bumped sales, something was still missing. Reebok was doing a poor job of articulating a higher-order mission, a story that would help people understand what its brand meant, a story that set itself apart from Nike.

Nike had a rich and authentic connection to high performance athletics, which began when legendary running coach Bill Bowerman made his first experimental soles using the waffle iron in his kitchen and CEO Phil Knight sold shoes at local track meets out of the trunk of his car. Nike was a company of, by, and for athletes. Because of this rich heritage, people knew what Nike meant, in addition to what Nike made.

The average consumer's relationship with Reebok was much shallower. Sure, Reebok had a story (Cybill Shepherd wore them to the Emmys!), but that story didn't amount to anything substantial or meaningful. Despite its strong sales, the Reebok brand lacked meaning.

To get that story point across to Reebok, we devised a simple test that we called "The T-shirt Test." We put two stacks of identical gray T-shirts on a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk. The only difference between the two stacks was the logo on the shirts: the Nike logo was on one stack, Reebok the other. We put a sign on the table, "Free T-shirts, One Per Customer," and retreated to a safe distance to film the result. One by one, as pedestrians saw the sign, stopped, and examined the T-shirts, they went for the Nike stack. When those were all gone, the Reebok shirts went, too.

People didn't hate Reebok. But when given a choice, they were quick to show their allegiance to Nike because its story was clearer, and therefore more useful for helping people express themselves and their beliefs. A Nike T-shirt signaled membership in the Nike tribe — a tribe that believed in something bigger than shoes or apparel. Nike was fast becoming a religion. Reebok was just a shoe company.

This lesson has never been more relevant. Today, we are awash in customer data of all kinds, but first-hand observations of real people in the real world (outside of a focus group room and outside of social media) are more important than ever; they can be an invaluable reminder of how clear and compelling (or confusing and boring) your story actually is.

The most important data you need to pay attention to is how well your customers understand your story and how they are using your story to advance their own. The story of your business can be as vital to your customers as air or water. It can help them navigate the complexities of their social world (and their social-media world). All the data in the world won't help you if you don't have a clear understanding of the story you are telling.

Know your story.

Who New CEOs Fire First

New research by RHR international shows which executives incoming CEOs are likely to replace, and highlights some differences between first-time CEOs and more seasoned chief executives. I interviewed Dr. David Astorino, Global Practice Leader for Senior Team Effectiveness, about the findings. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Your survey showed that as much as CEOs had shaken up their senior team, looking back on it they wished they'd moved even faster. Why?

When they look back, and you ask them what you would have done differently, they almost always say, "I knew in my gut that was not going to work with that individual, and I wish I had trusted that gut feeling and made that decision faster." By delaying the transformation of a particular function or business unit, they're now six months behind. That's often were that comment comes from. There are some other factors, but that's the main one.

What are some of those other factors?

A lot of it relates to organizational knowledge. They hesitate because they don't feel like they know enough about what's going on. You'll also see a real difference between first-time CEOs and people who've been a CEO before, especially if that first-time CEOs is coming from outside the company. They don't trust themselves as much, and they tend to not be as suspicious, frankly, as CEOs who have been there, done that before. They tend to wait too long. CEOs who've been around the block a bit more say, "I'd rather risk losing institutional knowledge and get someone in there I trust."

HBR has published research suggesting that insider CEOs are more effective than outsiders. Could part of the reason be that outsiders replace so much of their staff with other outsiders, lacking that institutional knowledge?

It could be. But why do you hire an outsider? Either you couldn't develop an insider, or the external environment has shifted enough that you need someone who can come in and really drive transformational change. So either way, outsiders are often coming in to a tougher job. They're going to be driving change, and so they're going to need new people with new skillsets to drive the business forward.

So to that point about skills, how much of this is really about bringing in new skills, and how much of it is about what you mentioned earlier — just looking for people they can trust, people they're comfortable with?

It's really both. Every good seasoned executive will do two assessments of people. One is, they'll look at you and evaluate, "Do you have the right values and motivations for what I need on my team and what we need moving forward?" Can they trust you? The other big piece of it is, "Are you going to put the enterprise before your self-interest?" And that one is big. They need their senior team to make big decisions about where resources go, and sometimes that may disadvantage you. You may have to be selfless, give up some of your budget. So after they've looked at those two things, then they might go down that more methodical path of, "Do you have the capabilities to do what I need in your function?"

Speaking of functions, it wasn't terribly surprising to me that the CHRO and the CMO are two that are likely to leave. But why the General Counsel?

That was an odd one, and I don't have a great answer for that. Certainly we know that heads of finance and HR tend to move around a lot more because the skills are very transferrable, and in fact it looks better for an HR executive or CFO to show a breadth of industry. You actually get a bit disadvantaged if you've been in the same company or the same industry your whole career, as an HR person. But general counsel is a little different, because legal issues are often more specific to the industry. So I don't really understand that one.

What about the difference between insider and outsider CEOs — they really seem to replace different functional heads. Insiders are much more likely to replace the COO, for instance, while outsiders are more likely to replace the CFO. Why the discrepancy?

When a new CEO gets that [internal promotion], they want to be closer to the business than not, and boards usually want them to have their thumb on the pulse of the organization, rather than someone else. But CEOs do need to be less in the day to day operations, and become more externally focused. So they need to have the right person in that COO role.

When you're coming from the outside, the CFO role and the head of HR are the right and left wing of a CEO, they're the people CEOs come to trust most for obvious reasons. The CFO in particular is one where outside CEOs really need to get the person they trust.

If a CEO has been around the block before, they seem more likely to bring in the people they know can get the job done and they have a bigger and better network at the c-level they can bring in and rely on.

New CEOs don't have a good a sense of what good looks like. They don't necessarily know what a great CFO really looks like. They rely more on search firms.

What are some of the other differences between first-time CEOs and more experienced CEOs?

There are such differences. The leap is so great, especially if you're going into a very tough situation. You learn so much, so fast that when you get that next CEO job, you are so much faster in making decisions. You almost have a template.

That has pros and cons. The pros are that certain types of people really want to follow that kind of leader with confidence and declarativeness. Boards like that, too. The downside is — well, take your first-time CEO, who doesn't have the templates. The pros are that they often form really strong teams to go on a journey with them; you're going to help define the path. So those CEOs really get people to follow them who want to have impact, who want to shape the future, and who want to create those templates together.

Both can be very successful, but at different times you really want different types of leaders.

Why Brazilians Were So Quick to Protest Bus Fares

Recent protests in Brazil reflect not just opposition to higher bus fares but deep discontent with quality of life, according to Gallup. A December 2012 survey shows declines since 2010 in the proportion of citizens who are satisfied with four types of services: availability of quality health care in their communities, 25% (down 16 percentage points); local schools, 48% (down 9 points); local roads, 44% (down 9 points); and public transportation, 48% (down 8 points). Moreover, 70% believe corruption is widespread (up 9 points), and only 36% feel safe walking alone at night (down 12 points).

New Research: Flexibility Versus Face Time

When Yahoo! ended the company's telecommuting option for employees early in 2013, and Best Buy followed suit a week later by terminating its groundbreaking, decade-old flexible work program, Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), they joined a growing trend among organizations trading flexibility for face time. Prior to Yahoo!'s decision, Bank of America had drastically cut back on their popular My Work program that used flexible scheduling and telecommuting centers to help employees find a work environment and schedule that made them most efficient. And Zappos, Amazon's online retailer, also recently scaled back their flexible work arrangements.

In an age when technology enables us to work in a coffee shop just as easily as a cubicle, these dramatic reversals in access to flexible work arrangements in favor of face time—especially at e-commerce companies—drew contentious debate. Arguments addressed all angles of the debate: the rationale for these decisions, the merit of "presenteeism," the impact of telecommuting on productivity, the implications of eliminating flexibility for working parents, and consequences for the future of work. Reactions from all sides have been emotionally charged, and unending, signaling the deeply personal nature of this debate.

But despite all of this discussion, in the absence of hard data, many armchair opinions persist about flexible working arrangements, specifically with respect to who offers them, who uses them, and how important they are to attracting and retaining top talent.

To examine this common wisdom, Catalyst recently surveyed 726 high potential employees—MBA graduates around the world working full-time in both for-profit and non-profit firms across industries—about their experiences with, and perceptions of, flexible working arrangements. Their answers were revealing.

Flexible working arrangements are no longer the exception.

Despite all the attention that Yahoo!, Best Buy, and others have received recently for doing away with their flexible work arrangement policies, our research shows that they are in the minority among organizations today. Among our sample of high potential employees, 81% reported that they were currently working at a firm that offers flexible work arrangements of some kind. In addition to telecommuting, this includes flexible arrival or departure, flex time, compressed work weeks, reduced work/part-time, and job sharing. And this is true for both global and local organizations of all sizes and in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Flexible work options are in fact the rule, and not the exception, at organizations today.

Women and men use flexible working arrangements to the same extent — but men usually choose options with more face time.

Contrary to popular belief, our research revealed that women and men report using most flex options to the same extent throughout their careers. But this is only true for flex time and flexible arrival and departure—the flexible work options that do not adversely impact face time. We did find that women were significantly more likely than men to telecommute—working outside of the office where they don't have traditional face-time requirements—over the course of their careers. So while men and women are equally likely to use some flex work options, women are more likely to telecommute, which could unintentionally be creating a talent drain in companies by denying these women access to influential networks, senior-level sponsors, and advancement opportunities. As Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said in a recent New York Times article, "informally everyone knows you are penalized for using" flexible work arrangements. "I invented the term 'flexibility stigma' to describe that phenomenon."

Availability of flexible working arrangements is critical for organizations to maximize their talent pool.

Much of the debate around the termination of flexible work options centered on the rationale behind the decision. Both Yahoo! and Best Buy cited the importance of face time to successful collaboration and innovation, two elements deemed critical to turning these struggling organizations around. Yet our research shows that this move has unintended consequences that could stall their progress. We found that access to flex options impacts career aspirations.

High potential employees without access to flex options are less likely to aspire to the top.

And women working at a firm without flex work options were more likely to downsize their aspirations—a finding that remains true when comparing them to men working without flex options as well as women working at firms with flex options.

Clearly, lack of access to flexible working arrangements damages high potential employees' career aspirations, and is especially harmful to women's aspirations, impacting the number of women raising their hands for stretch assignments and promotions.

Offering flexible working arrangements is critical for organizations to maximize their talent pool and become employers of choice for high potential employees throughout the pipeline. Most competitors already offer flexible working arrangements; there are negative consequences for those that don't. Organizations need to decide if increased face time—or increased flexibility—is really in their firm's best interest. Catalyst's flexibility research can help leaders determine the best options for enhancing productivity, employee engagement, and organizational change in their company.