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The Ongoing Journey of WorkLife at RSM McGladrey
Our journey began in the fall of 2003 when RSM McGladrey’s Women’s Advisory Council made the strategic decision to hire a resource dedicated to exploring WorkLife issues. I was hired to lead those efforts and quickly developed a strategy, identified employee needs and made work/life a priority by positioning it as a business issue. Fast forward to today and with the visible support of our senior leadership and a lot of hard work, we’ve made terrific progress – both culturally and programmatically.
Our goal throughout our efforts has been to change the thoughts, behaviors and attitudes of our employees and leadership about where, when and how work gets done through the execution of local, customized, well-implemented WorkLife solutions. A good portion of the groundwork for this has been laid, but it’s an ongoing journey that will take a number of years to realize its full potential.
To advance our efforts, we intentionally took a dualistic approach by focusing not only on programmatic solutions that support employees’ WorkLife needs, but also focusing primarily on cultural solutions that actually challenge the fabric of our organizational orthodoxies and processes. Here are examples of the cultural and programmatic solutions we have implemented thus far:
Cultural Solutions
- WorkLife goal setting that elevates WorkLife as an important component of our business goals and fosters the dialogue about WorkLife needs. Every employee is required to set a WorkLife goal and discuss the goal with their manager as a part of our annual performance management process.
- Rollout of Flexible Work Environment (FWE) live training sessions and an online database that provides the tools employees and managers need to support and expand Flexible Work Options (FWO), including operating principles, FWO guidelines, assessment tools, supplemental training modules, proposal process and tracking capabilities
- “Coach-on-Call” WorkLife coaching that provides employees free confidential access to a personal coach who will assist employees with action plans that empower them taking personal responsibility for WorkLife success.
- Brand recognition for being a progressive WorkLife company through external PR such as Working Mother’s 100 Best list , the Conference Board’s Moving Into the Future Award and the Alliance for Work Life Progress Rising Star Award
- Increased leadership awareness and dialogue on WorkLife issues through robust communications, messaging and sharing of success stories.
- Employee needs assessments and focus groups that provide us with critical insight into WorkLife needs, barriers and solutions that matter most to our employees.
- Summer hours program designed to encourage widespread use of flexibility and provide periods of down time to enable employees to step away without guilt.
Programmatic Solutions
- Concierge Program – Over 1,000 employees have benefited from concierge services, saving users more than 3,000 hours of time over a three-year period
- Gym Discounts – Employees can stay healthy by taking advantage of our gym and equipment discounts through a national discount provider
- Paid Adoption Leave & Subsidy – Adoptive employees receive a subsidy and paid time off to support this important time in their life
- Paid Paternity Leave – Nearly 800 men have taken advantage of our paid paternity leave policy that gives them 3 weeks off within their child’s first year
- Extended Care Cash – A $1500 subsidy helps offset the cost of dependent care when employees have to travel or work outside of normally scheduled hours
- EAP* Living Healthy/Working Well – Full, free access to resource & referral and other WorkLife services through the EAP program
- FlexCareer & FlexYear – our unique Flexible Work Options that allow employees up to five years off while staying connected and current on skills and the opportunity to work a “teacher’s schedule” enjoying a portion of the year off with prorated pay all year
- WorkLife Educational Webinar Series – Approximately 400 employees have received education through participation on one of our monthly WorkLife webinars
- New Parent Coach Program – Just under 30 new parents have benefited from support throughout pregnancy, leave and return to work through this new program
WorkLife Impact Summary Report
To keep our leadership informed about our progress and to ensure that we are on course with our original strategy goals, we recently put together a WorkLife Impact Summary Report that spotlights our efforts and the impact they have had since 2004, when our WorkLife Strategy began. The 20-page report shows the utilization of all of our WorkLife programs from 2004 to the current date and a summary of our year-by-year accomplishments on the following categories of our strategy:
- Leadership
- Enabling a Culture that Promotes Innovative and Flexible Ways of Working
- Support for People’s Responsibilities and Interests Outside of Work
- Empowering Individuals
- Alignment of Performance Management Systems
- Business Measurement and Evaluation
For us, becoming a culture that affirms and supports WorkLife Integration is critical to our success in a competitive business environment and to achieving our goals for organizational growth. Our WorkLife Impact Summary Report helps us demonstrate to leadership that we are making progress in one of our primary goals – having WorkLife Integration support our goal of being an Employer of Choice, enabling us to build the strong talent pipeline essential for business growth.
Being an Employer of Choice
As part of our goal to be an Employer of Choice, we have applied for and received several awards including Working Mother’s Best 100 Companies. Our first Working Mother application in 2004 was intended as a work/life programmatic benchmarking project since we knew full well that we weren’t yet ready to make the list. From that first try, we learned that before applying again we needed to fill some critical gaps and set up our HRIS systems to track our WorkLife information in a way that accommodates Working Mother’s data requests. We took a year off to take a number of action steps to enhance our work/life initiative and refine our strategy. The next time we applied, in 2006, we were lucky enough to make the list. Then after some more enhancements and action steps we made it again in 2007.
Being on the list has helped us improve our brand recognition and convince leaders to allow us to try new and innovative solutions to meet the needs of our employees. It is both an honor and a responsibility for us as our ultimate goal isn’t to be on one of the lists, but rather to create a culture that supports the personal and professional success of our employees. Being on a list is simply a nice side benefit and validation of those efforts and it helps us build the business case that WorkLife is a critical business issue that we need to continue to address in order to stay competitive in today’s marketplace..
Employee Testimonials
Of course, in the end it’s all about how our employees feel about the level of personal and professional support they receive as a result of our WorkLife programs. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback and testimonials our employees have provided that help us know we are on the right course as we continue along this ever-evolving journey:
“I appreciate the work-life balance initiatives and hope they will continue to be as strongly promoted.”
“From an employee experience perspective, I think we have made great strides over the past several years, and feel that the employees are being treated fairly and respectfully (and the flexibility and work-life benefits can’t be beat).”
“One of the reasons I chose my job was the emphasis on work-life balance and the flexibility.”
“I went into my coaching relationship a poster child for depression and came out of it a stronger woman, a healthier mother, and a very appreciative employee. I’m back in the game!”
“RSM’s plan for a Flexible Work Environment/Work & Family Balance is an excellent one.”
“Thanks to Coach-on-Call, I am a much happier, more productive employee than I was six weeks ago. Thanks, RSM, for this wonderful opportunity. It was HIGHLY beneficial and I recommend you offer it in the future.”
“Continue to support/live the work-life balance. Live the talk of work-life balance. We need to continue to make it part of the culture.”
“I received invaluable tools to immediately assist me in balancing my work-life. It made a very noticeable improvement in my work energy level and, frankly, my overall happiness.”
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