Jobs for Life

And his support has not flagged: He meets privately with Holmes once a month to plot strategy, and he often talks up the OFR in his companywide voice-mail messages to employees. "Seven times over the past two decades, we've focused on women's issues. But this time, we're seeing real change," one male managing partner told the Wharton researchers. Why? "We now believe that those issues are a real business imperative. And Phil has made them a priority."

Holmes understood how to leverage that support to effect change in a staunchly traditional organization. She had seen companies like E&Y before. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Holmes began her career representing the Alyeska Pipeline Co. in the Exxon Valdez oil-spill case. But two years of litigation dampened her interest in a corporate career. So she quit the law, married a musician, and spent the next seven years advising Fortune 500 clients on work-life issues, first as a consultant at the Families and Work Institute, in New York, and then at Catalyst.

As a consultant, Holmes had watched many of her clients' best-intentioned diversity efforts fail. At E&Y, she realized early on that her office had to create highly visible prototypes that would involve as many employees as possible. To do that, she began canvassing senior leaders, looking for allies. She wanted to establish the first programs in offices run by partners who were recognized as both innovative leaders and big moneymakers. "I was looking for people who could bring a lot of credibility," Holmes says.

Within two months, she had zeroed in on two offices under Dunbar's aegis -- the San Jose and Palo Alto tax-and-audit practices. Despite its stature as one of the firm's most lucrative offices, the San Jose office was bleeding staff. Set in the heart of Silicon Valley, the roughly 600-person practice -- today, it has nearly 1,000 people -- was losing so many people to technology companies that by 1997, half of its professional staff had been at the firm for less than two years.

A self-described maverick who sports a beard and peppers his conversation with New Agey contemplations on leadership, Dunbar threw himself into the program. He quickly put together a steering committee of 16 top partners and senior managers. In January 1997, that committee spent a full day with Holmes and her colleague Susan Sweet, 38, thrashing out the causes underlying the retention problem.

At first, some partners pushed for opening a day-care center or starting concierge services. "That's a Band-Aid," Holmes told them, "not an answer to your problem." By the end of that first meeting, the committee had identified the substantive issues that could drive retention -- among them allowing telecommuting, making leaders role models, and instituting an evaluation-and-feedback process. The steering committee then created eight teams -- made up of 100 mostly rank-and-file managers -- to study each issue and to come up with some viable solutions.

Four months later, the teams had generated about a dozen proposals. Some were modest -- for example, making every day a casual-clothing day and encouraging people not to check email and voice mail on weekends or during vacations. Other suggestions cut to the core of how people worked, communicated, and related to clients. "Some of those things may sound obvious," Sweet says, "but they have been revolutionary in terms of their impact on the culture."

Walking through the quiet halls of the Palo Alto practice, past a sea of cubicles and cookie-cutter offices, it's hard to envision their clean-cut inhabitants as revolutionaries. But partners and managers bear witness to the change. Take McNicol, a senior audit manager in Palo Alto. Before McNicol started telecommuting, she would spend as many as three hours a day driving between work and her home in San Francisco on the eternally jammed Highway 101. Now she works at home in the mornings and evenings and drives to the office for a few hours at midday, when traffic is lighter. Her daily commute takes 90 minutes. "That's made my life so much less stressful," she says.

Some staffers in those two offices had telecommuted before, but only on an as-needed basis. The pilot represented E&Y's first attempt at creating a program that would work on a large scale. The firm provided qualified employees -- those who had, for one thing, a discrete home office -- with an ISDN phone line and high-security access to E&Y's computer network. It also threw in a computer, a printer-scanner-fax machine, and office furniture. E&Y legitimized telecommuting by making sure that people could get their work done at home as well as they could at the office.

The biggest change, however, had more to do with how people managed their work than with where they got it done. Like staffers at most professional-services firms, E&Y staffers get assignments from a number of different partners, and little attempt is made to coordinate those assignments. Employees usually accept most projects because billable hours are equated to a person's value to the firm. The result: unlimited work and collective insanity.