Womenomics

Claire Shipman, Katherine Kay

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061882760
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

"A personal, provocative, and challenging book for career women who want less guilt, more life."
—Diane Sawyer

Womenomics, the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, is an invaluable guide for this generation of professional women, provide knowledgeable advice on how to "Work Less, Achieve More, Live Better." Shipman and Kay, two TV journalists well acquainted with the stress of the workplace, describe the new economic trends that offer today's overworked working women more professional and personal choices than ever before. At last, you no longer have to do it all to have it all— Womenomics shows you how.

CHAPTER SEVEN

nine rules to negotiate nirvana: how to change your whole work deal

On Sunday as the day wore on,” remembers Christy Runningen, “I would become more unhappy, more cranky and more frantic.”

Oh, that Sunday evening feeling. It’s a state of mind we can relate to.

“You know that gross feeling you get in your stomach,” Christy explains, “before the workweek starts, thinking, ‘OK, now I’m going to be locked in, I’m going to be at the office, for these forty-plus hours.’”

How about a world where you never have that Sunday evening feeling? Where that nausea in the pit of your stomach is banished?

How about a world where even the concept of eight to five-thirty for forty-nine weeks a year doesn’t exist at all? A world where you can work when you want, where you want, how you want—as long as you get the job done and done well.

How about a world where you never have to swallow the panic as you add up the waking hours you have out of the office and realize you just aren’t spending enough time with your children? A world where you don’t feel like crying once a week because you’re overstretched, underappreciated, and flat out at the end of your tether?

We are talking about a world where Monday morning feels (almost) like Friday afternoon. Where going to the office is no longer a depressing duty but a chosen pleasure. Where work is rewarding but not regimented.

That’s our nirvana. It can be yours too. You can change the whole structure of your work life—toss the whole thing up in the air and let it fall in a pattern of your choosing. Women all around the country are doing it. Many more than you think. In this chapter we will show you how to go beyond playing with the margins to squeeze minutes or hours out of your day. You will learn how to renegotiate the whole deal. We will teach you to think big and bold, and we will show you how other women have gone about getting a New All.

Oh, and by the way, we’ll show you how to make your bosses love nirvana too!

How to Change Your Deal

There are literally hundreds of different ways you can shape the work deal you want. Remember Stephanie Hampton? She’s our public relations whiz at Marriott hotels. After years as a full-on workaholic, she’s now scaled back to a four-day week. Guess how she got her four-day week? She asked! It took her a ridiculously long time to do it though.

“I was on maternity leave with my son and I just knew I didn’t want to go back to work full time. I talked it over with my husband, and we agreed I’d ask for a four-day week. The only problem was, I couldn’t summon up the courage to ask. Every day my friends and family said, ‘So have you asked yet?’ Eventually my mom came over and pushed me, and when I finally did, my boss was surprisingly accommodating.”

In fact Stephanie got her new deal fairly easily—once she actually made the request. Her boss wasn’t freaked-out, didn’t fire her, demote her, or send her to “mommy track” purgatory. She is still a high-powered, well-valued, top-performing member of Marriott’s management team. Indeed Stephanie suspects he was expecting the call. But, wow, what a lot of stress to get there.

Do you know the number one reason women don’t get the New All they want at work? They don’t ask for it. One day we won’t have to make our individual pitches; the world really is changing, and before very long all companies will realize the benefits of flexibility. But until they do, you have to ask.

We don’t know a boss who will casually saunter up to your desk and suggest, “Clara, you seem a bit overstretched these days. I bet it’s tricky balancing all the different parts of your life. But we really want to keep you here and want to make you happy. Wouldn’t you feel saner if we just adjusted your schedule? Why don’t I just rely on you to get the work done and you can do it from wherever you like, whenever you like? How does that sound?”

Dream on. (OK, if anybody does know bosses like this out there, we want to track them down for our best-bosses listing. Send names to our Web site.)

Listen, we sympathize. We know it’s hard to confront your boss and ask for something “extra,” and it is somehow particularly hard for women. The thought of marching into the corner office and asking for a better schedule brings out a feeling of dread. Suddenly we’re ten years old, not thirty-five. The boss has morphed into our meanest teacher ever and we’re back in school-rules panic mode all over again. The knot in our stomach gets tighter, and we find excuses not to pick up the phone, request the meeting and make the case. But you’ve been through the Womenomics training circuit now and have banished all of those un-confident thoughts from your head, so you have no choice!

This is simply so important that you have to overcome your fear of confrontation and have that talk. The good news is we’ve got a plan that’s going to make this negotiating business a cinch—and the icing is that, as Stephanie found, you usually get what you want, even with the toughest-sell bosses.

Underpinning you entire negotiating strategy is a simple tactic—you have to sell this as a win/win. Your bosses will usually only sign on if they believe it makes good business sense for them as much as it makes good lifestyle sense for you. Here’s how.

Rule One: Negotiate from a Position of Fact-Based Strength

You want to change your work schedule because the current hamster wheel is making your life intolerable. You may even be tempted to quit altogether but want to give your employers a shot at making it work. If so, you haven’t really got a huge amount to lose. And even if you aren’t ready to throw in the towel, or can’t afford to, remember, you are of great value to them.

Have a quick skim over chapter 1 again. Remind yourself of all that female power. Remember how valuable we are in the workplace right now. How expensive we are to replace and how desperately our employers want just our kind of female management talents. In fact you have a lot less at stake in asking for a changed schedule than your employers do.

Feeling braver?

There’s more to boost your confidence. Your boss’s number one concern will be that your productivity falls because you’re not sitting at your desk. He or she will panic that you are lazing around on the company’s paycheck with your head in the clouds and not in your work. It’s an understandable concern. After decades of having employees within view and easily monitored, where every minute is accounted for, you are asking them to cede control of your day and simply trust you. No wonder they’re apprehensive. But they don’t need to be.

Remember—flexible workers are happy workers are more productive workers. We gave you this data in chapter 2, but here’s one more stat: since Best Buy began its company-wide alternative work program—ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment)—productivity is up by an average of 41 percent, and in some departments, by 65 percent.

Best Buy bosses who were skeptical have become converts purely because the business results are so compelling. John “J.T.” Thompson, an old-school, watch-the-clock kind of guy and senior vice president of BestBuy.com was a huge skeptic. J.T. came of age believing anyone who didn’t live in her office wasn’t a team player. He loved nothing more than a Sunday afternoon at his desk. At first he pushed back against the architects of ROWE, Cali Ressler and her co-conspirator Jody Thompson (no relation to J.T.). He dismissed their revolutionary flexibility plan as nothing more than a New Age slackers club.

“I was not supportive,” says J. T. Thompson. In fact he wasn’t just “not supportive,” he was downright terrified about losing control. J.T. was convinced employees would use the program to draw a salary without doing the work. How are you going to measure productivity? he wanted to know.

But one of J.T.’s managers reassured him with a set of concrete performance metrics. They would be able to measure how many orders per hour the team was processing, no matter where they were. The manager promised J.T. he’d haul everyone back into the office if orders dipped for a second. Reluctantly, J.T. agreed to give it a shot.

Within a month the team’s productivity was up, and engagement scores (those job satisfaction and retention measures) were the highest in the history of the whole division. J.T. had always worried about engagement scores, and when he saw these numbers he was thrilled. He moved fast to implement the system in the entire online sales department. Voluntary turnover fell from over 16 percent to zero. “For years I had been focused on the wrong currency,” Thompson confesses. “I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done.”

J.T.’s experience is shared by everyone we have talked with who has embraced alternative work schedules.

At Capitol One, Senior Vice President Judy Pahren says it just makes sense. Simply being in the office doesn’t mean you’re being productive—far from it. “If an employee is in the office but is actually worried about their child getting off the bus OK and doing their homework properly,” says Pahren, “they’re not actually focusing on work because they’re distracted by their kid. It is much better for that person to leave early and catch up on e-mails and project work from home in the evening. That person will actually be more productive in that hour and a half than they would be if they had spent it here worrying about things going at home.”

And this dynamic is certainly not confined to parents. Pahren cites the example of an associate who uses her alternative work schedule to spend afternoons involved in community service. Being able to fulfill her charitable commitments makes the associate a happier, more satisfied person—which in turn makes her a more productive person in all areas of her life, including her work.

All of this, from women’s power in the marketplace to the increased productivity that flexible schedules can generate, will help you make an impressive case. And remember, you’ve probably spent huge chunks of your career persuading people to do what you want. You persuade the boss to pursue a client, a client to sign on their account, a colleague to join a project. You, in fact, are the expert at turning data and facts into a fluid, persuasive argument.

The fact is, you already have the power of professional persuasion in your back pocket. You just need to use it for yourself.

Rule Two: Perform Well and Know It

Managers told us repeatedly that they would bend over backward to retain women who add value. It seems obvious to us. You are in a much stronger position to demand the work life you want if your company wants to keep you. Let’s not kid ourselves. If your bosses think you’re of marginal benefit, they’re going to be happier to let you go than to disrupt their carefully organized office routine to satisfy you.

Chances are, however, that you do add value, and we suspect your biggest problem, as a woman, is not that you don’t perform but that you don’t appreciate just how needed you are. That’s the case for the vast majority of women we’ve spoken to.

However, just to be sure, take stock of your performance—in any job there are ways to measure performance. How are your annual appraisals? Do you meet your sales targets? Have your bosses complimented your work? Are you someone they turn to with confidence? Do you shape the discussion at your company strategy meetings? Do they happily put you in front of clients? Have you been promoted recently? Do you get face-time with higher-ups? How easy would it be to replace you? You may need to spend a number of months making yourself invaluable.

If you’re feeling at all nervous, chuck a little confidence and pride into the negotiating mix. We love Linda Brooks’ story about how she negotiated her two-thirds law partner deal—almost unheard of in her circles.

Linda simply gave them no wiggle room, and it worked. “I said, ‘I have to go flextime, I want flextime.’ Actually, I don’t even think they would have negotiated if I had said it in less stark terms,” she admits. “But I just said, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and they said, ‘Specifically, what percentage of time off do you want,’ because with our firm it’s all a time-percentage thing, and I said, ‘Two-thirds time.’ Which means I leave a third of the profits behind. And they said, ‘For how long?’ and I said, ‘In-definitely.’ They were convinced then, I’m sure, that it was just a passing phase.” She laughs. “But now I can’t ever see myself going back, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

For women in their thirties and forties, this is the time to really push for your New All because your stock has never been higher. You have years of super valuable experience in your field and quite possibly years in your company too. You can’t be replaced by an inexperienced twenty-five-year-old, and your company needs your longevity. So these are the years to max out on your value and demand all the time you need. Linda Brooks was nearing forty and already a partner when she got her new life—it was the ideal time to up the ante: “I got what I wanted because I already had power. So what were they going to do?”

Rule Three: Never Negotiate in Anger

That never is serious advice. We mean never. You cannot negotiate something as important as your whole work life in the heat of anger. But let’s face it, this is an issue that gets our hormones going and our emotions raised.

Imagine you’ve had a really bad day, one of those days when you felt close to quitting. Your boss has kept you in the office way later than you’d like. You missed a parent-teacher conference. You missed homework. You missed your Pilates class. You missed dinner with your spouse. You missed calling your mom, and it’s her birthday. You got home too late for bedtime, and little Chloe cried, the sitter tells you disapprovingly. And to top it all off, your boss chewed you out for not meeting the deadline (which she’d only given you that morning) and turning in sub-standard work (even though this was a two-day project jammed into one day). Yes, one of those days. In the privacy of your car on the drive home you finally let the tears flow. You’ve had enough, you can’t bear spending this much time in the office for so little return. You’re going to go in next morning, tell her you are way overstretched, and demand a different schedule.

Don’t. At least don’t do it the next morning.

There is no point negotiating in anger. Negotiations are stressful enough, so it is worth waiting until the heat has subsided. An employee who comes in angry and upset seems out of control and unprofessional. Your boss will probably end up thinking she was quite right to chew you out.

No, you need to wait a few days, even a few weeks if necessary, and go into those critical negotiations calm and cool. You may not really feel that way, but you’ve got a better chance of faking it if there’s some distance between you and that day from hell.

Rule Four: Know What You’re Asking For

Decide beforehand exactly what you want your work life to look like and write it down. We’ve giv...