NATION Employees losing 'work/life' benefits

Benefits such as telecommuting and job-sharing are declining.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Not long ago, employees at Merrill Lynch & amp; Co. making the switch to working from home, trained first in a special Telework Lab -- a cluster of desks and computers, away from the bosses, set up to mimic the dynamics of a remote office.
But Merrill shut its labs last year, about the same time it cut all the staffers in charge of administering such so-called "work/life" programs.
The belt-tightening at Merrill hints at changes at many companies. In the competitive job market of the 1990s, scores of employers embraced telecommuting, compressed workweeks and other benefits designed to give workers more flexibility. But now, some companies are cutting back.
A survey of more than 400 employers released last week by CCH Inc. shows a sharp dropoff in companies offering some of the most popular work/life benefits.
"It's hard economic times," said Lori Rosen, a workplace analyst for CCH, a Riverwoods, Ill.-based business information publisher. "People are saying where can I cut? And it's looking like they're saying, well this is a benefit. I gave it. I can take it away."
Statistics
According to the survey, companies offering job-sharing dropped from 37 percent to 30 percent. Those offering compressed workweeks -- programs that let workers put in their hours over four days rather than five -- fell from 49 percent to 40 percent. Telecommuting fell from 47 percent to 45 percent.
The survey, conducted in June, echoes findings by other workplace experts.
When the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed its membership of personnel executives earlier this year, 55 percent said their companies were offering flextime, down from 64 percent in 2002.
It marked the first dropoff in family-friendly benefits, whose rise in popularity had been chronicled in surveys through most the 1990s, said Frank Scanlan, an SHRM spokesman.
Meanwhile, some companies are continuing to offer such programs but devoting much less money and manpower to running them, according to a survey of personnel executives earlier this year by the Alliance for Work-Life Progress and the newsletter Work/Life Today.
"The work/life area is sometimes considered something of a soft benefit, so it's often the first to go. It's expendable," said Sharon O'Malley, the newsletter's publisher.
Cutting costs
The cutbacks at Merrill Lynch hinged on costs, said Selena Morris, a spokeswoman for the brokerage firm.
As the stock market sank, and Merrill's profits shrank, the company's leadership worked to pare costs and exit businesses, cutting its employee count from 72,000 to 48,000. The staff devoted to work/life was a casualty of that effort, Morris said.
"The environment has been difficult, as you well know. We've cut back. Our head count has been significantly reduced. ... The human resources function kind of went through a transformation," said Morris, who notes that the company continues to offer workers all of its flexible-work benefits.
Now, workers interested in the programs sign up on their own, using a company Web site, she said.
Employers have spent the past few years cutting jobs and asking more of remaining workers. Many companies have been calling employees back to the office to take on responsibilities ill-suited to working from home and to increase face-to-face contact, CCH's Rosen said.
Effects on absenteeism
The CCH survey looks at workplace absenteeism and strategies that companies use to reduce employees' unscheduled time away from work. Employers report that workers' unscheduled absence rate -- not counting scheduled time away from work -- has declined slightly in 2003, from an average of 2.1 percent per year to 1.9 percent per year.
Work/life benefits remain popular methods for combating absenteeism. Rosen said she worries that reducing the programs will come back to bite employers, by driving up absence rates.
But SHRM's Scanlan said the benefits are likely to make a comeback, as the economy recovers and employers reassess matters.
"These are benefits that do wonders for morale, and employees love them," he said. "And they don't cost the organization a lot of money."