Jobs for Life

While he weighs expanding the telecommuting program -- about 40 employees are on a waiting list -- Dunbar is mulling over the possibility of creating satellite offices that would bring work closer to people's homes. He's also requiring partners to undergo annual 360-degree evaluations from staff, peers, and supervisors. Eventually, the results of those evaluations, including how well partners promote work-life balance, will be tied to their compensation. The message: Balance and retention matter.

The Consultants: Are We Home Yet?

And then there were the consultants. Holmes soon discovered that E&Y's huge consulting organization -- about 37% of its business -- posed very different life-balance challenges. Accountants typically work close to home, but consultants often spend months on the road, traveling to visit clients who are located in different states. At one time, E&Y consultants had reveled in the road-warrior role, brandishing their frequent-flier miles and hotel receipts like badges of honor. But now, those demands on their personal lives were breeding resentment.

Increasingly, consultants were complaining openly -- and talking with their feet. Turnover remained high, averaging about 20% a year, according to one internal study. And 80% of those who left cited work-life tensions as a primary motivation.

In focus groups with consultants who were working on a Detroit project, stories of missed anniversaries and children's birthdays came pouring out. Even those who lived in the Detroit area were complaining that their schedules were so inflexible that they couldn't even take time to run a simple errand.

More than that, "there was a feeling that top-down communication was virtually nonexistent," says Bob Forbes, 38, the partner responsible for the Detroit project, who helped develop its life-balance prototype. "Nobody felt comfortable saying to a supervisor or a client, 'Hey, I need to go home.' "

In response to that concern, Holmes rolled out the Detroit prototype in the summer of 1997. What evolved from that program and others that were launched at the same time -- including a 170-person pilot in Indianapolis -- was a radical reinterpretation of how consultants work. Teams confronted the demands of heavy travel and long workweeks. They worked with clients to minimize job stress. And they found ways to bring personal issues into discussions of work assignments and schedules.

Most teams began the process with a 27-question life-balance survey that probed team members' feelings about everything from living arrangements to the expected duration of a project. Then, working together, consultants and their supervisors completed a "life-balance operating agreement" that anticipated personal and professional needs and spelled out ways to meet them.

Life balance was uncharted territory for E&Y consultants, and supervisors were often surprised by what they discovered in the agreement sessions. Take Christopher Mikucki, a manager on a consulting project in Indianapolis. Mikucki, 29, says he had no idea that one of his team members, Marcy Benson, had a commute of more than an hour each way, a drive made more stressful by her client's proclivity for 7 AM meetings. He also didn't know that Benson, 23, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I consider myself a fairly open, personable guy," he says, "but I wouldn't have known about all of that if we hadn't discussed her agreement. That gave her a forum."

Discussions like that also gave Mikucki a chance to air his own concerns. Though driven to succeed at E&Y, Mikucki has interests outside of work that he's determined to pursue. He's married, for one thing. And he's a company commander in the National Guard, overseeing a unit of 140 infantry soldiers -- a duty that requires him to leave work at 4 PM a few days a month.

His superiors understood how important the National Guard commitment was to Mikucki. But he also needed the support of his team members. So he and Benson struck a bargain: He would cover for her when she needed to take time off to make wedding arrangements, and she would take on some of his work when he had National Guard obligations.

They also agreed that instead of coming in an hour earlier to prepare for their 7 AM client meeting, they would do as much prep work as possible the night before. Mikucki contacted their colleagues in Europe, who typically provided data for those meetings, and urged them to send as much material as possible the night before. A few weeks later, Mikucki and Benson persuaded the client to move the meetings to 10 AM. That provided the client with more current information from Europe and relieved the client's team members, all of whom had children, of some stress.