Jobs for Life

Change hasn't come easily or quickly. E&Y remains, by nature, a deeply cautious place: Requests for even the most mundane information take weeks to process, while staffers ruminate over the implications of those requests. And many E&Y professionals still work an obscene number of hours, missing more anniversaries, birthdays, and vacations than they want to admit. Although some offices have seen retention improve dramatically -- firmwide turnover among women had dropped by 5% between 1995 and 1998 -- overall, turnover stands at 20%. Of course, treading water in this hot economy may be an achievement of sorts: A survey of 1,192 major U.S. employers, conducted by the American Management Association, found that between mid-1998 and mid-1999, turnover decreased in only 16% of those companies, whereas it rose in 28% of them. Yet Holmes acknowledges that E&Y has a long way to go. "Some of the work that we started in 1997 is only now beginning to bear fruit," she says.

Perhaps E&Y hasn't won the war, but it has turned life balance into a grassroots crusade with a momentum all its own. Many companies announce work-life programs with much fanfare, only to forget them within months. E&Y avoided that pitfall by implementing three critical strategies: First, Laskawy has made himself a visible and persistent advocate of life balance, ensuring that everyone understands that Holmes's office has his personal backing.

Second, Holmes doesn't dictate policy. Instead, she urges local offices to examine long-held assumptions and to invent their own solutions. In the past two years, hundreds of partners and staffers across the firm have formed "solution teams" to determine the scope and nature of life-balance programs. Says Holmes: "People who live with a problem can solve it better than anyone who rides in from headquarters on a white horse."

Finally, and most important, partners have tried to reflect change in their own work lives. Employees won't back off work until they see their bosses doing the same. So some of the most driven, hard-working partners now make a point of not checking or leaving voice mail on weekends or during vacations. "You simply have to lead by example," says Roger Dunbar, 54, managing partner for the northern California and Pacific Northwest area.

The work-life initiatives have energized E&Y, infusing its people with invention and purpose. Once-sacred truths -- "serve the client at any cost," for instance -- are questioned openly. In many offices, partners dare to raise their staffers' life-balance issues with clients. In fact, some actually work with clients to reinvent processes, making them family friendlier for employees on both ends. "For me, being part of the process and getting people to talk about these issues has been invigorating," says Jayne McNicol, 34, a senior audit manager in Palo Alto, California, who helped create one of the firm's first life-balance prototypes. Dunbar agrees: "That process has given me my passion back."

The Accountants: Balancing the Books

On the surface, Phil Laskawy is a conventional man who has taken a conventional path. Throughout his 39 years at E&Y, he's toiled and traveled for clients while his wife, Patricia, raised their two sons and worked part-time from home. Still, Laskawy places high value on balance, even leaving work at mid-afternoon to coach his sons' soccer teams. "My family has always been most important to me," he says. "That doesn't mean I don't work hard. The key is to balance that hard work with the rest of your life."

As he rose through E&Y's accounting ranks, Laskawy began noticing that the firm's female employees, most of whom were married to men with demanding careers of their own, were having a tough time striking that balance -- and, as a result, were leaving the company. When he became chairman in 1994, he announced that improving the firm's retention of women would be one of his top priorities. Over the years, he had seen many internal efforts to boost women's retention fail, but he was determined to create a program that would work.

When he heard Holmes's report, Laskawy says, everything fell into place: "This wasn't just a women's issue; it was everybody's issue. We needed to make big, big changes."

From the start, Laskawy made sure that everyone knew how critical he believed Holmes's mission to be. He gave her a staff of three (now up to eight) and named her director of the Office for Retention (OFR) -- a newly created function and perhaps the only one of its kind at a major U.S. company.

That wasn't all. Soon after Holmes signed on, Laskawy asked her to present Catalyst's findings to the firm's 2,172 partners at one of its triannual meetings. Then he took her on a six-week "road trip," during which he introduced her to senior leaders at the firm's top 19 offices. Laskawy made a point of telling the partners that Holmes's office was on the 26th floor, just down the hall from his, and that she reported directly to him. "I wanted people to know that this wasn't just a new flavor of the month," he says.