Life/Work - Issue 34

Life-work balance in Silicon Valley? An oxymoron if ever there was one. And why should that be a surprise? The environment for startups is nothing if not competitive. Most startups are run by bright, young, single white males with few priorities beyond trying to get very rich, very fast. Early on, tunnel vision and turbo-charged adrenaline are cardinal virtues. But what happens when the fierce focus on getting the business off the ground gives way to a need to manage and grow?

That's the rub, and it's starting to create a fair amount of friction in the workplace. The hard-charging SWMs at the top may not be inclined to change their 24-7 priorities, but as their companies get bigger, a growing number of their employees are becoming less and less willing to play by the original rules.

"The problem for these guys is that they're still afraid that there won't be a tomorrow," explains Nancy Ramsey, 59, a futurist, an author, and a leading Silicon Valley consultant. "Fear sustains their drive to keep going 24 hours a day. But it also makes them demand that people work at a level of intensity that simply can't be sustained. What happens next is that people -- especially women -- burn out and end up leaving. It's a very serious issue."

Indeed, 12% of IT jobs in the United States are unfilled. Statistics on employee turnover are hard to come by, but no one disputes that the numbers are very high. More provocative still is the widely accepted view that women (especially women with families) are far more likely than men to opt out.

Take the case of a woman (I'll call her Sally Benjamin) who worked at a small startup that was recently purchased by one of the world's biggest dotcom companies. "I have two children, so I had been working part-time," she explains. "The new company clearly frowned on part-time schedules and on working from home." So Benjamin left -- and is now working part-time at a company that is run by a woman. "Many young men who are running companies today have an air of arrogance, of ignorance," she says. "They don't know anything about school holidays or teacher conferences or pediatrician appointments or sick kids. They don't know much about having a life at all. It's not enough to offer your employees free coffee and stock options. There has to be a human side to working at a company, or else people won't stay."

Caryn Joseph Siegel's career path is an increasingly common one for women in Silicon Valley. A mother of three, she spent 2 years at Applied Materials Inc. "I truly had to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," explains Siegel, 47. "It wasn't uncommon for me to get home at 7 PM, go back to work at 10 PM, stay there until 2 AM, and then have to be at a meeting at 8 AM. The people at the 8 AM meeting weren't the same ones who were at the previous night's meeting, so they had no idea that I was exhausted." For a long time, it didn't occur to Siegel to question the life that she was living. "It's almost addictive," she says. "Everyone is in the same boat, and people take a kind of macho pride in how hard they work. At my company, sleep wasn't on anyone's agenda."

Six years ago, during a rare day off, it finally dawned on Siegel that her kids were growing up and that she wasn't around enough to share the experience with them. She decided to quit her job at Applied Materials and to set up shop at home, working as an executive- and organizational-development consultant. Her new role helped her discover that her experience was not unique. "There are a number of established companies that now have sabbatical programs," Siegel says, "and I've worked with some of their executives. What's phenomenal is how many of those people resign shortly after they come back from sabbatical. I think it's because once they get away from the addiction of the work, they realize how nuts it was, and they don't want to live that way anymore. I haven't seen any company out here address that issue successfully."

Even at established companies, the concept of balance is a new one. "The whole work-life area is just starting to emerge as an issue," says Kirk Froggatt, 39, Yahoo!'s vice president of human resources. Yahoo! doesn't yet have formal programs that address work-life issues, and it still mostly discourages employees from working at home -- which is ironic, given the company's pioneering role in making virtuality possible.

"Our organization's only about 5 years old, and the average age of our employees is 30," Froggatt explains. "As people hit a new plateau in life, they start to see the need for more flexibility. We're making the transition from an entrepreneurial startup to a more mature company, and that involves teaching managers that people can still be productive even when they're not giving face time." Froggatt acknowledges that he himself would benefit from more flexibility. "I commute to Palo Alto from San Francisco, and, quite honestly, doing so adds two and a half hours to my day. Last week, for the first time, I worked from home. And I got more done in one particular area than I could ever have gotten done at the office."