In 2005, a new awards program was established on a pilot basis to recognize five research universities for their leadership in implementing faculty career flexibility efforts. As part of this program, each of the winning universities received an accelerator grant of $250,000 to enable them to make further substantial progress in creating flexible career paths so as to advance their institutional goals, including enhancing faculty recruitment and retention, strengthening faculty commitment and engagement, and maintaining competitiveness in the global academic market. Based on the success of the pilot year, the American Council on Education (ACE) will administer the Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Faculty Career Flexibility for a second year, but direct them this time to the 349 large master's degree universities. This grant covers the costs necessary for ACE to administer the awards. As it did last year for the research universities, ACE, working with the Families and Work Institute, will create and administer the award application process, select a panel of judges, and oversee the selection of award winners. Project Director: Claire Van Ummersen, Vice President, Center for Effective Leadership.

Lower-wage workers perform a broad range of valued functions on which employers rely and on which productivity and profit margins often depend. As retail workers, call center operators, and hospitality workers, they are often the "face to the customer." Although lower-wage workers are critical to the U.S. economy, this segment of the workforce remains underserved in both policy and research discussions. Greater attention to this category of worker, especially to the factors that enable their stability, contribution, and productivity, is vital both to the health of businesses and to the well being of the millions of individuals in the lower-wage workforce. This grant supports research by Corporate Voices for Working Families on flexibility practices of employers for different types of lower-wage workers in a variety of industries. The potential impacts of such flexibility practices on both businesses and workers will be investigated for a wide spectrum of lower-wage jobs and work environments. The challenges and barriers to flexibility as related to the nature of the jobs will be examined. Six companies, drawn from manufacturing, hospitality, financial services, and retail, industries with large numbers of lower-wage workers, will be recruited to participate in the study. Participating organizations will be chosen to represent a variety of industries and to include shift workers as well as 9 to 5 workers, and production, service, and office workers, both unionized and non-unionized. The focus of recent academic research and business reports has been primarily on workplace flexibility for management and professional workers, for whom strong positive outcomes of flexibility have been demonstrated. There is a common assumption among employers that flexibility is less feasible, effective, or necessary for lower-wage jobs. The research supported by this grant is expected to throw light on the validity, or lack of validity, of this assumption. Project Director: Donna Klein, President and Chief Executive Officer.

The National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) is the most comprehensive survey of the work and personal/family lives of U.S. workers. Based on a nationally representative sample of the U.S. workforce, this study has been conducted every five years since 1992 by the Families and Work Institute (FWI). The NSCW serves as a critical source of data for academic research on issues facing U.S. workers and their families. The Foundation has made grants supporting the past two iterations of the study, in 1997 and 2002. The last grant went to FWI to support basic data collection, including telephone interviews, for the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce. The current grant will be used by FWI to cover the data-related costs for fielding the 2007 National Study. These costs have increased over the years since the costs of incentive payments to respondents and the cost per interview have grown due to the rapidly increasing difficulty of completing random digit dialed (RDD) telephone interviews and achieving a minimum 50 percent response rate. (Increased costs due to difficulties of securing people's agreement to do telephone surveys create a problem faced by all current studies relying on RDD.) This study will continue to provide significant long-term data for basic research regarding quality of life on and off the job for the U.S. workforce. FWI will arrange for two independent scholars to write a benchmarking report on changes over time in access to flexibility for workers, as well as the degree to which flexibility, or the lack thereof, plays a role in people's decision to withdraw from the workforce. Project Director: Ellen Galinsky, President.

For development of case studies on extreme jobs and emerging models of best practice. Project Director: Sylvia Hewlett, President.

For the development of survey questions to be used in assessing progress on workplace flexibility. Project Director: Lonnie Golden, Associate Professor of Economics.