Jobs for Life

As part of the prototype, two committees -- one for partners and senior managers, the other for junior staffers -- took responsibility for reviewing time sheets to make sure that no one was overburdened. "There are a lot of type-A personalities here who will work themselves to frustration and then quit. We wanted to get to them before that happened," says Jeffrey Calvello, 33, a senior audit manager on one of the utilization committees in San Jose.

The junior-staff committees handed out booklets that describe the number of regular (2,080) and overtime (300) hours that employees should bill annually. And both committees in both offices made it clear that managers and staffers can appeal to their respective committees when the workload seems excessive. In practice, the committees sometimes intervene even when no one complains.

In 1999 alone, according to Sweet, the utilization committees reduced the workloads of 48 people. At one point, for example, Tyler Purvis, 26, a San Jose audit senior, was working nights and weekends trying to keep up with his 12 work projects -- and plan his wedding. Before he could protest, the junior-staff committee discovered the problem. After consulting with Purvis's adviser, the committee found replacements for 5 of his projects. "These days, nobody wants to be responsible for putting someone over the edge," says Katie Jaeb, 34, a partner on the committee.

That sort of thinking, though, hasn't resounded universally in the San Jose and Palo Alto offices. "I know some of the partners think I'm nuts," says Dunbar. "They want to know, 'How can you run a several-hundred-million-dollar practice that way?' " When Dunbar issued the memo absolving staffers from checking email and voice mail while on vacation, nervous partners immediately fired back questions: Were they forbidden to check in? Did the policy include weekends? "I can't stop you from checking in on vacations and weekends if you want to," Dunbar told them, "but you have permission not to check in."

For Dunbar, who already had begun to reassess his own relationship to work, the policy took on huge symbolic value. Divorced in 1989 after 20 years of marriage, he came to believe that his marriage failed at least in part because of his 24-7 devotion to work. "I sacrificed everything for work," he says. "I worked all the time -- the day before and the day after Thanksgiving. On vacation, I would check in with the office three or four times a day. I couldn't let the phone ring at home without answering it."

Determined now to model the right behavior, Dunbar rarely leaves his staffers voice mail on weekends. "Even if it's more convenient for me to leave a voice mail at 10 PM on Friday, I will just record it and save it for Monday delivery," he says. And when he traveled to Greece on vacation with his second wife, he didn't call the office even once. He put another partner in charge, made a copy of his itinerary, and then left instructions on his voice-mail greeting for callers to contact the partner who was filling in for him or, in an emergency, his secretary.

More to the point, employee retention has improved dramatically. Dunbar estimates that turnover in the San Jose and Palo Alto offices has dropped about 15 percentage points since the life-balance initiatives were implemented.

But the offices are still losing valuable people. In this era of start-ups and stock options, the career path at a professional-services firm looks increasingly tortuous. Why work like a maniac for 12 years to become a partner, when you can make more money faster at a new high-tech joint down the road? Within 18 months, half of the members of the original life-balance steering committee had left the firm. Even some who benefited directly from the measures that were adopted in the two practices have quit to join Internet startups.

Scott Gawel, 29, assistant controller and director of finance in San Jose, was one of the pilot telecommuters. He left E&Y in November to become director of finance at Petopia.com, a San Francisco-based startup. "I had another seven years to go before I'd become a partner at E&Y. During that time, I could be at three different startups." Besides, he adds, as much as the pilot program improved his work life, it didn't change the fact that in a client-driven business, you have to "jump when a partner says jump. Looking down the road, I couldn't imagine both having a family and becoming a partner." Gawel is engaged to be married in September.

Stories like Gawel's only deepen Dunbar's enthusiasm for the life-balance measures. After all, he says, Gawel probably stayed at E&Y a year longer than he would have if the firm hadn't allowed him to work from his San Francisco home. And Dunbar believes that ultimately a more flexible workplace helps compensate employees for any financial sacrifice. Sanity has to be worth something, after all.