Workplace, Work Force and Working Families
Kathleen Christensen, Program Director

Industry-Specific Workplace Flexibility

One grant area focuses on industry-specific workplace flexibility.  The goal is to provide direct outreach to specific industries promoting workplace flexibility as a strategic business tool.

Business Case Studies

Workplace-specific business case studies are demonstrating implementation of workplace flexibility as a successful business strategy benefiting both the employer and the employee.  These important case studies provide concrete examples of business success through flexibility for use in the Sloan National Initiative on Workplace Flexibility.

• The BOLD Initiative produced demonstration projects in ten major U.S. corporations, providing empirical evidence of workplace flexibility as an important strategy, which can achieve business results such as reducing paid time off and absenteeism and, in some cases, increasing productivity. The chief operating officers of The Chubb Corporation and the Gannett Co., Inc. endorsed BOLD’s performance-based approach to flexibility at a National Press Club event in 2005. The results of this demonstration project have been widely disseminated by the Society for Human Resource Management and may be viewed here.

• The Families & Work Institute, in partnership with local chambers of commerce, focuses on the efforts of small- and medium-sized firms as well as local divisions of national firms.  In 2004 it launched the Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility in major U.S. cities nationwide.  

• Corporate Voices for Working Families  released Business Impacts of Flexibility: An Imperative for Expansion in November 2005 helping to define the business case for flexibility in the corporate setting.  This report is based on an empirical analysis of previously proprietary data from 29 publicly-traded firms that show a demonstrable case for flexibility being used as a strategic business tool to enhance recruitment and retention, as well as improve performance.    

The results of these three research projects are enormously important in repositioning flexibility from an employee benefit to a business strategy.

Faculty Career Flexibility

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also supports projects designed to promote workplace flexibility in higher education.  This specific higher education industry focus is creating greater career flexibility for tenured and tenure-track faculty.  The Foundation has played a major role in shaping this change through its leadership on the issues surrounding the work-family needs of faculty and through the foresight of its grant-making.

The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation hosted an “invitation only” conference titled, An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure-Track Faculty Careers. More than 25 research universities, including Harvard, University of Michigan, and Washington University, sent teams comprised of provosts, deans, presidents of faculty senates, and other relevant personnel to this 2004 meeting with the intent of learning what they could do to advance career flexibility on their campuses. This conference followed on the heels of the well-received ACE report by the same name issued with support from the Foundation, in which ten research university presidents and chancellors endorsed the need for greater faculty career flexibility. This conference foreshadowed the November 2005 release of a statement - signed by the presidents of nine top research universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, University of Michigan, and University of California-Berkeley - calling for more family-friendly policies and practices allowing faculty to have productive careers and meaningful family lives.

The statement is significant in that it sets the tone that leading universities expect to increase and enhance their faculty work-family policies to include such career flexibility options as part-time tenure or stopping the tenure clock. With the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The University of California, Berkeley has spearheaded the development of a full package of family-friendly policies and practices though its project, Faculty Family Friendly Edge.

Given the success in establishing the need for career flexibility in the academy, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation moved to further advance career flexibility by establishing a national standard for flexibility with an Awards program: Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Career Flexibility in the Academy.  The Foundation expects that these Awards will catalyze greater implementation of flexibility among winning institutions and serve as a model to others to implement more flexible practices for career advancement. Eligibility for the Awards has been extended from research universities to universities focused on masters’ degrees.

In addition, the National Clearinghouse on Academic Worklife provides resources to support promising best practices and policies for faculty career flexibility.