Jobs for Life

"So what are you doing for the next five years?" Deborah Holmes laughed off Philip Laskawy's question. The chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young LLP couldn't be offering her a job. It was the fall of 1996. And Holmes, 36, research director of Catalyst, a New York City-based organization that studies women in business, had just presented her analysis of turnover among female employees at E&Y. And the news wasn't good. For years, half of the $5 billion accounting-and-consulting firm's new hires had been women, but the percentage of female partners and managers -- not quite 20% -- had barely budged.

More disturbing was that E&Y's turnover problem did not involve only women. Holmes's research revealed that corporate culture was producing equal-opportunity angst. A culture that equated face time with commitment and that consistently demanded that its employees sacrifice family for work was clearly out of whack. About 60% of the women and 57% of the men in senior management at E&Y told Catalyst that they were dissatisfied with working long hours. Each year, about 23% of the women and 18% of the men were leaving.

Imagine the cost. E&Y was losing not only talent but also continuity with its clients. And it was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fill each vacant position. Holmes told E&Y's leaders that if they wanted to buck that trend, they would have to make sweeping changes in the way they conducted business, and that such an effort would require the full-time attention of at least one person -- and probably more than one person.

That was when Laskawy, 59, threw down the gauntlet: "So what are you doing for the next five years?" But it wasn't until Laskawy called Holmes at her office later that she finally realized how serious he was. She knew she was staring at what could be an opportunity of a lifetime -- a chance to see whether the ideas that she had been developing for the past seven years as a work-life consultant would work in the real world.

"You realize that I'm not guaranteeing anything. My ideas may not work," Holmes hedged. Laskawy agreed: This was no layup. But "whoever cracks this code will be a winner with this workforce," Holmes remembers him saying. "So let's give it a try."

Today, more than three years later, Ernst & Young still hasn't cracked the code, but it certainly has made progress. Laskawy and Holmes are reshaping the work lives of 34,000 professionals in an industry where customer focus is crucial to survival. How do you bring balance to a profession that, by definition, demands brutally long hours? How can work be flexible when a client sets a tight deadline and expects to see you working around the clock to meet it? How do you make it acceptable to talk about personal needs with partners as well as with clients?

In late 1996, soon after Holmes was hired to direct E&Y's newly created Office for Retention, she launched four pilot programs to address those questions. Three of those programs -- involving internal networking, mentoring, and external networking -- were aimed exclusively at women, and all have proved reasonably successful.

The fourth, and by far the most ambitious, targeted all 34,000 E&Y employees. Its focus: balancing the work-life equation. That program had partners and staffers across the firm fundamentally reevaluating how E&Y does business. And the program wasn't about establishing flextime or job sharing; it was also about incorporating the reality of peoples' lives into the firm's business strategy.

By the end of 1999, 11 of the firm's 50 largest consulting teams and all of its 12 tax-and-audit practices had rolled out retention initiatives. From San Jose, California to Detroit, E&Y consultants, auditors, and accountants began experimenting with a variety of self-generated measures -- among them, telecommuting, restricting consultants' travel, even curbing the temptation to check email and voice mail on weekends. (As this article went to press, France's Cap Gemini SA announced that it was acquiring E&Y's consulting practice. That deal will not affect the firm's work-life strategies.)

"What's impressive is the extent of E&Y's initiative and determination to create a wave -- a set of changes -- that will make the company look like a new organization in five years," says Stew Friedman, on leave as director of the Work/Life Integration Project (based at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), which recently did a case study on E&Y's efforts. "There is not just one measure here but a whole campaign that is being mobilized to engage everyone in changing the values and beliefs that drive the company."