At first glance, Ferriss’ ideas on generating passive streams of income, mini retirements and remote work from exotic locations might not seem at all relevant to, say, an hourly worker at Vons supermarket.  Or to a not-so-new-rich working mother of three like myself.  But, since part of my job is talking to unions about bargaining for flex time, I think about how regular workers can take more control of their work environment.  So in spite of the glitzy title, I was struck by one of the book’s central themes:  Don’t wait for retirement to take control of your work hours and love what you do.

The popularity of this book and its offspring websites and blogs has got me thinking that increased flex time is probably the wave of the working future.  And this has me thinking that unions need to take a second look at the issue.

At the Labor Project for Working Families, we have the opportunity to talk to unions about how flex time can help workers balance their home and working lives.  But we also hear the stories of ‘flex gone wrong:’

• Management at a Virginia Walmart recently announced that from now on, employees need to ‘stay flexible’ and clear their calendars because the new schedules would be different for each person each week.
• A woman working for a telecommunications company who was thrilled to learn that she and her entire unit were being asked to work from home.  (Yay!  No more commute!) But when that experiment worked, management’s next move was to push these jobs even further off site – all the way to India.

Too often, flexible work arrangements are designed to help the employer more than the employed.  But unions can make a difference by negotiating for flexible time that benefits workers and employers.  I have heard from grocery store clerks and bus drivers that even being able to change their schedule by one hour would make all the difference in being able to drop kids off or pick them up from school or summer camp.  And, for those of us with family responsibilities, this is even more important than working from Bali.

In fact, I just got back home from dropping my kids off on the first day of high school and kindergarten.  I flexed my time this week to be able to drop them off and pick them up on the first day of school.  Since kindergarten gets out on the early side, I also flexed my time in order to pick my twins up from school two days a week.

Not for the first time, I realize that I am lucky to have this option.  I have friends that make about 5 times my income who don’t get as much time with their kids.  And, while I’m not writing this from Hawaii or France, when it comes to attending school functions and taking maternity leave, I wouldn’t trade my situation in for anything.

A: The new law will not ration care for people with disabilities or the elderly, or anyone else. In fact, the law will address many of the current barriers that people with disabilities and seniors face in getting health care by establishing a number of programs to broaden the availability of long-term services and supports and banning discriminatory insurance company practices.

Some concerns about rationing under health reform have stemmed from myths about how Medicare enrollees will be affected by changes to the way that health care providers are paid or health care services are delivered. The new law does not reduce Medicare’s guaranteed benefits. In fact, it improves Medicare’s coverage by increasing coverage for primary care services and making prescription drugs more affordable. It also aims to improve the quality of care for people in Medicare by promoting collaboration among health care providers and eliminating waste and fraud in the health care system. Important measures to make sure that Medicare stays financially stable, such as reducing overpayments to private insurance plans that are selling policies through the Medicare Advantage program, will not diminish access to any of Medicare’s guaranteed benefits. Instead, these changes will encourage high-value, high-quality plans to participate in the program.

Although many seniors and people with disabilities receive health coverage through the Medicare program, others have found that the Medicaid program, traditionally for low-income people, is the only source of coverage for the long-term supports and services they need. The new health reform law includes several programs that give state Medicaid programs more federal funding to deliver these services in community-based settings, like people’s homes, rather than in nursing homes or other institutions. The law also establishes a voluntary insurance program, Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS), which provides a cash benefit to help people afford community-based long-term services without exhausting their financial resources.

The law also helps people with disabilities and seniors in the private insurance market. It prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, starting this year for kids and in 2014 for everyone. It also prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums to people based on their health conditions, starting in 2014.

There are many myth-makers out there trying to convince people that health reform will ration care. However, the truth is that health reform makes important improvements to our health care system that will provide seniors and people with disabilities better access to comprehensive health coverage and to the care they need in community-based settings. All this while guaranteeing continued access to the benefits that have worked well for them in their current private insurance plans, Medicare, or Medicaid.

Elaine Saly is a Health Policy Analyst at Families USA, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization striving to achieve quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans. For more information, visit www.familiesusa.org.

Aside from shame and blame having a causal relationship to one another, they have several things in common. For one, blame is as pervasively (and fundamentally) woven into our culture as shame. For another, neither add any positive impact on or value to any problem solving process. What’s worse, they are actually both counter-productive to such processes. So here we are once again, faced with our typical cultural behavior standing in our own way of progress. And that part about it being pervasively woven into the culture is going to make it difficult to remove. Don’t let this stand in your way, though. The sweeter fruit tends to be further out on the branches.

First, in using blame, what are we trying to achieve or accomplish?  Would it be safe to say that we’re trying to avoid the shame that we anticipate will be dumped on us as a result of (somebody) making a mistake? Notice it’s not really important who made the mistake. It’s just important that you don’t get blamed for it, because of that shame thing.  Now sometimes the shame thing is so embraced by a company’s culture, that there are systems in place to make it official (demotions, pay-cuts, probation, .ring), and sometimes it’s just the usual tribal banishment (isolation from the ”in” crowd). Bottom line, there is no actual solution inherent in blaming. Nothing gets fixed.

When talking about making mistakes, I’m not talking about performance issues here. This is not about someone not caring about what they’re doing, and exhibiting a trend of sloppy work. This is about looking beyond ”who is to blame,” and looking at the problem to be solved. All the Blame Game is capable of creating is an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and animosity. This atmosphere stops people from coming together to solve problems in team fashion. There’s simply too much suspicion and fear, and of course the overriding concern is about the blame, not about coming up with a solution. Worse, this divisiveness enforces an ”us or them” mentality which always disallows cooperative problem solving.

As an example a foreman might blame a machine operator saying, ”Tom messed up that part again.” There’s no further exploration into why, because the foreman has protected himself from whatever punishment or shaming behavior is being held over either of their heads.  What’s worse, Tom has now gotten a black mark on his reputation, without due process or a jury of his peers. Now, what if we look into why Tom messed up that part? What if we find out that it’s not about Tom’s being incompetent at all? What if we find out that Tom has been complaining for months that his lathe has bad bearings and the material won’t spin true? When we stop blaming Tom for messing up, we can actually find real solutions for real problems. (In this scenario we’d also discover that there’s a communication breakdown between the production floor and management as well).

When we stop blaming the shipping department for getting an order wrong, we open up the discussion to discover that there’s a communication breakdown between the sales department and the shipping department, which can now be solved. We stop passively accepting the log jams being somebody’s fault, and start actively looking at them as common obstacles to work on together.

Action Steps:

1. Start actively becoming conscious of where and when blame comes up in meetings, conversations, and other discussions about processes or problems.

2. Make it a rule that there will be No Blaming in these discussions, and everyone will simply have to find another way to describe what is happening. (The order arrived late vs. Joe processed the order too slowly).

3. Find ways to reward the behavior of taking on responsibility for solving problems as opposed to off-loading the responsibility by blaming others.

The more this behavior is rewarded in place of hiding behind blame being rewarded, the more people will actually come together, take on responsibilities, and help you build a better,  more prosperous organization.

If you are a sole proprietor, dealing with vendors, suppliers, and clients in this manner will help you enroll them in your virtual organization, and get them on your team. If you are a parent, you can teach a far more conscious and effective approach to problem solving to your kids. In a relationship, removing the Blame Game allows you to concentrate on solutions together, rather than blame tearing you apart.

When you eliminate blame from the equation, you’ll get positive, real solutions.

HuffPo has a fascinating article about gender pay disparity and its causes – discrimination against women, or simply differing life style choices? A wonderful piece, but make sure you read all the way to the end. There’s a surprise!

You’ll find it here: Examining the Defense of Family Values and Unequal Pay for Women.

Something to think about over the long Labor Day weekend.

‘Til next time,

Your (Wo)Man in Washington

The bills approved Wednesday would phase in coverage before they are replaced by the new federal health care law in 2014.

The first bill, AB1825, would require maternity coverage in basic plans sold on the individual market. The federal government already requires coverage by employers, and state law requires coverage by HMOs, but residents who buy their own insurance currently don’t get the same coverage.

The second bill, AB2244, would prohibit insurers from refusing coverage to children simply because they have a pre-existing medical condition.

Maternity care, as defined by the bill, includes “prenatal care, ambulatory care maternity services, involuntary complications of pregnancy, neonatal care, and inpatient hospital maternity care, including labor and delivery and postpartum care.”

As the California Progress Report notes, this mandate will go a long way towards not only ensuring equity of coverage options for women on the individual and group markets, but will relieve financial strain on the state’s public health programs, and “crucially provides the public health benefit of getting babies the prenatal and early care coverage needed to live healthy and productive lives.”

Six years ago, 82 percent of health plans in the individual market, in California, offered maternity coverage. Now? Only nineteen percent of plans offer the coverage.

The second bill not only mimics federal health reform by barring insurance carriers from denying coverage to children based on a pre-existing health condition but also limits the amount insurers can charge to cover those children.

Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed the bill twice already, over the last two years, and seems unlikely to sign this most recent proposal. But, as the Ms. Magazine blog reports,

In an effort to get the governor’s support, “There’s been some discussion about inserting an exclusionary period during which time pregnancy is not covered,” said McGovern [Beth McGovern is the legislative director for the California Commission on the Status of Women]. This is similar to other exclusions for pre-existing conditions and may be offered in the Senate. This isn’t an ideal solution but  would offer women some coverage.

It’s up to the small-business-friendly governor. He’s just made a cameo appearance in Sylvester Stallone’s new action film, The Expendables, playing a mercenary named “Trench” who’s hired as part of a hit squad. Before he leaves state government, he should prove he hasn’t been bought and paid for by the health-insurance industry to become one of their hit men, bent on proving that women are expendable. He needs to make women’s health a priority before he returns to Hollywood full time. What’s he got to lose?

Governor Schwarzenegger has until September 30th to either sign or veto the bill.

If shame has any value whatsoever, it is only within the narrow framework of an internal “Evil Indicator.” That is to say, when you actually do harm/hurt someone, your own conscience will say “shame on you,” (usually with the internalized voice of your parent/inner judge).  This has the incredibly powerful effect of stopping us in our tracks, hanging our heads, and feeling “bad.” This is not what one would call a resourceful state.

So what in the world would bring this dynamic into the workplace?  Unfortunately, a mix of patterned unconscious behavior and less than conscious language usage. There is almost nothing more debilitating, and thus de-motivating than being made to feel shame. When a manager uses language that shames a worker, that worker will have numerous reactions, depending on his or her own relationship with shame.  The one reaction I have never seen or heard of is an excited, motivated, resourceful, can-do reaction. Even when someone genuinely reacts with wanting to do a better job, the shame they feel disables them from doing so.

Shame and blame are close cousins. They come from a “child” place rather than an “adult” place. Blame is the childhood vestige of not wanting to “get in trouble,” and so we blame someone else for whatever happened. Trying to off-load the shame by blaming someone else unfortunately doesn’t work; as you merely take on the shame of knowing you pointed the finger elsewhere. What is more, blame doesn’t figure into ANY solution process, whatsoever. It merely side-tracks the process for a useless foray into Shame-land. As a matter of fact, blame as an obstacle to process improvement is actually a big enough topic for its own chapter. Hmmm….

Back to the power of shaming language. When people feel lousy, they do lousy work. This is obvious, and empirically measurable.  Shaming obstructs productivity, creativity, and morale; not good for an organization. It can be done unconsciously, and have the same bad effect.

Here’s a real world example, where the consciousness or unconsciousness is not clear, and yet the damage was done: Long ago in a galaxy far away, while working diligently on a project for a client, I received an amazing E-mail. From my perspective, it was a perfect example of how to utterly de-motivate me. Although the client knew that I was fully committed and producing an abundance of deliverables beyond expectations; the language chosen for this E-mail questioned my dedication and professionalism, as well as if I was even doing the work.  There I was working my tail off, and among many other choice phrases, he actually used the words “if only you would step up…” and do what I was already doing? Ask yourself, what would go through your mind?  Would you ignore it and happily get back to work? Would it stop you in your tracks? Would you be motivated to jump back in?

On a conscious level, using language to shame a person into taking action is commonly called a “guilt trip,” and we all know how we react to them. Why in the world would we do unto others, what we can’t stand done unto us? Of course, using language to shame a person just to “down them a notch” is outright abuse, which has no productive purpose whatsoever.

On an unconscious level, most of this mess has no malicious intent,  but merely results from an unfortunate choice of words. Not being conscious of the actual words we use puts us in danger of this behavior, so there’s where we can put some intention. The repeating theme here is being Conscious.

Action Steps:

1. Remember that it’s a complicated process to transmit a concept residing in one brain into another; stay conscious and don’t do it in autopilot.

2. When you use words, pitch, tone, and volume to convey something, keep in mind the recipient’s relationship to those components. (The image we see connected to a word can be a vastly different image than the one they see.)

3. Keep in mind that your whole meaning could be shifted, and even side-tracked by your listener’s reaction to what you triggered. It’s important to us to express ourselves, but even more important for the listener to actually hear what we meant.

4. Take a little extra time and care with your communications. When trying to transmit a concept, put yourself in the receiving position, and see how it comes in. How can you lift someone, rather than downing them? How can you help them to a resourceful state, rather than shamed and bereft of motivation?

By avoiding shaming and blaming, you can keep the communication in a productive and positive dynamic, keeping people engaged and involved. And after all, when you get right down to it, won’t you feel better as well?

In order to keep this national conversation going, the Obama Administration is now planning a series of regional forums on workplace flexibility in cities across the country.  These events will address the impact flexibility can have on a range of industries – from healthcare to hospitality to manufacturing – as well as in small businesses and local governments.  They will explore how flexibility can work for employees in a range of professions and income levels – including low-wage workers, whose need for flexibility is often acute.

But beyond these official events, the White House is also asking community members from across the country to contribute to the national conversation on workplace flexibility – through the White House Work-Flex Event Starter Kit.

The “Starter Kit” is designed to encourage a diverse range of stakeholders – from employers and managers, advocates and state and local officials to civic associations and working Americans from all professions and industries – to organize their own community-based events on workplace flexibility.

A “Starter Kit” event could take a range of forms – a town hall meeting designed to spur open discussion; a briefing by business or policy experts; a training workshop for employers, managers or employees interested in implementing flexibility in their own workplace.

The only real requirement is that “Starter Kit” events encourage meaningful discussion on flexibility.  And to channel this local and community insight back into the national policy dialogue, the White House has created an online system for organizers to register their events and share feedback from their discussions with the Administration.

These “Starter Kit” events represent a tremendous opportunity for local leaders and working moms and dads to make their voice heard at the White House – and to ensure the national conversation on workplace flexibility reflects the realities facing employers and employees on the ground.  Our hope is that communities across the country will use the “Starter Kit” as a first step in joining the national conversation on workplace flexibility.  To get started, visit the “Starter Kit” on the White House website:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cwg/work-flex-kit

Jessica Glenn, Communications Director

Workplace Flexibility 2010

Georgetown Law

When a mother or father comes home from a workday, one or both make dinner, helpthe kids with homework, read stories at bed-time – all working parents know we haveboth the role of employee and parent to fulfill. The vast majority of us want to do bothof those to the best of our ability. But in most traditional working environments, ourconfidence, stamina, and sense of well-being has been eroded during the 8-10-12 hourdays.

At home, we are looked up to by our children and sought for advice from friends andrelatives. But when we enter a traditionally-managed workplace, all of the sudden we are treated as children who require lots of rules to govern our behavior and a system of punishment (the progressive discipline process) for failure to comply.

As front-line employees, despite years of experience and knowledge regarding the processes and equipment with which we work, our ideas for improvement are ignored – until we finally quit offering them. Over time, we lose the interest and excitement about our working world – and that communicates itself to our children.

People deserve to be honored, respected and treated with dignity at work. However, most companies – in the interest of mitigating risk – create lots of rules. These rules and the “parental” management practices that come with them have resulted from the actions of a small percent of the workforce who doesn’t want to work. This small percent (we’ll call them 5%ers) can’t be trusted and are looking to do as little as possible and get away with as much as possible (and should be removed from the workforce or work team as soon as possible). Traditional companies have focused human resources and management attention on this 5%.  However, when these practices and policies are applied equally to everyone, it minimizes the sense of value the 95%ers have, is disrespectful to them as adults and erodes their interest, excitement, passion and loyalty to the organization.

Companies feel required to establish detailed behavioral rules that apply to everyone for fear of costly lawsuits. Media attention to a few high profile cases confirm the fear and also quantify the potential cost. While there is the slight possibility for a lawsuit or someother costly event to impact the company, what is certain to happen every day is the loss of innovation, productivity, customer focus and company loyalty that results from treating adult employees as potentially bad children. Companies who treat employees atall levels as respected, valued adults enjoy the following documented results:

• Annual turnover rate of less than 4%
• Monthly absenteeism less than 1% (even where absences are paid)
• Zero EEOC charges
• No lost time accidents for 5 years

••••
Companies that have begun the journey of changing their culture, enjoy immediate improvements:

• Reduction in turnover with a bottom line impact of $2.5 – $4 million in one year
• 60-70% reduction in waste
• Increases in efficiencies (to established standards) often exceeding 100%

•••
Treating people as valued adults improves company and business performance. It fosters parents who come home with a sense of pride in their accomplishments and pass this confidence on to their children, our next generation of leaders and workers. It’s not onlythe right thing to do, it’s the ultimate win/win.

Based on how logical it is, how moral it is and how future-focused it is, it must be a well-kept secret. Otherwise, it’s baffling that this simple concept seems so illusive to so manybright leaders.

I have a friend in the professional services sector in New York, working in one of those pressure-cooker 24/7 type of environments I wrote about recently.  In fact I have a whole lot of friends in these industries.  They work insane hours and are, for the most part, remunerated very well.  Most of them laugh at me when they hear what my blog is about.

“When you get called in on a Sunday night to close a deal that for every hour it goes on the client is losing a million dollars, then they don’t care if your wife is sick, your kid is walking for the first time, or your grandma is dying.  They are paying me to accept this deal and all the conditions that go with it.”

“When you’re paying a person fresh out of school with no experience  $100+K you’re not paying them for a 40 hour week.  When you’re entering these kinds of careers, you sign up  for the premium service at the premium price.”

They make fair points.  It is all about one’s perspective.  But my friend has come up with a rather ingenious and ground breaking work life solution.  And because he’s single and not a parent (and a “he”), it might be considered even more unusual.

There are a few qualities he possesses that make these kinds of out of the box solutions easier to negotiate.  Firstly he is brilliant (I mean really, like rocket scientist smart).  He’s got all the right schools and all the right grades.  He has a phenomenal work ethic.  He’s interested and interesting; a good conversationalist, and one who delivers – something that engenders deeply loyal clients.

Several years ago, after years of schooling, a ton of student loans finally paid off and an on-fire career, he realized that whilst he might be on the fast track, there were some dreams that were going to die on the vine if he waited much longer.  He walked away and traveled the world for a couple of years, literally and spiritually exploring the planet.   On his return, uncertain as to whether he wanted back into his old career, a temporary contract was leveraged into a unique part time schedule where he has negotiated summers off.

He works his guts out for nine months of the year.  And then every summer he works in a completely different environment where he’s able to give a little back to the world and certainly restore himself.  It’s a beautiful solution. His company gets his absolute best from September to May.  He then renews and restores his passions from June to August.

There is a price to be paid.  He’s firmly off the promotion path.  That has been made clear.  Which I find interesting, given that some working mothers in his company with more traditional part time schedules have stayed on course for promotions – a highly unique feat in itself.

And it’s not something he talks about much.  Not because it is a big secret.  But it is certainly not to be announced to the world.  What if everyone wanted a deal like that?

Indeed.  What if?  In the world of work I dream about, neither of these consequences would have much traction.   But in my friend’s competitive, intense environment, what he has created is truly radical.

Mothers in negotiating the work life solution that makes the most sense for them need to remember a few key elements:

1. Flexibility does not always mean less.  It might.  But not always.  Think through whether you need less hours, or more control over the ones you currently work.

2. It is your job to sell your offering as a win-win and as a business solution.

3. Be aware of the massively disproportional career responses to part-time and related work life solutions.  If part-time is right for you, be prepared to re-negotiate pay, bonuses and promotions.  Don’t accept relegation to the side-track unless that is what you want.  And don’t find yourself doing a full-time job with part-time pay.

When did you last come up with a really creative solution?  Or hear of one?  Post your thoughts in the comments.  Who knows who you can inspire as we share innovative work life solutions.
Chrysula Winegar can be found www.wlbconsultants.com.  This post is updated and revised from the original posted as Get Creative!  It is Possible! on Nov 10, 2009

On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California, showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.

While school officials and parents may have been sold on these tags as a “cost-saving measure,” we are concerned that the real price of insecure RFID technology is the privacy and safety of small children. RFID has been billed as a “proven technology,” but what’s actually been proven time and again (PDF) since the ACLU first looked at this issue in 2005 is just how insecure RFID chips can be:

• RFID chips in US passport cards were cracked and copied from a distance of 30-feet using $250 in parts bought from eBay (2009).
• RFID chips used in building access cards across the country were cracked and copied with a handheld device the size of a standard cell phone that was built using spare parts costing $20 (2007).
• California State Capitol RFID-based identification cards were cracked and copied and access was gained to member-only, secure entrances (2006).
• RFID chips implanted in humans were cracked and copied (PDF) (2006).
• The RFID chips used in the Dutch and British e-passport were cracked (PDF) (2006).

Without real security, RFID chips could actually make preschoolers more vulnerable to tracking, stalking, and kidnapping. Someone who wants to do children harm could potentially sit in a car across the street and scan the children’s jerseys without teachers, school officials, parents, or children ever knowing that any information has been read. And if this information can be read, it can be copied easily to a duplicate chip. A child could be taken off campus while the duplicate chip continues to tell RFID readers that the child is safely at school.

These are just the tip of the security issues—and we haven’t even touched on the core privacy concerns. The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: “Tagging … kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question.”

At this point, we have far more questions than answers about the RFID system in use in Richmond:

• What security measures are in place on the RFID chips?
• How will data collected from the chips be used? How long will it be kept?
• Were parents given a choice whether or not to have their child “chipped?”
• Were parents told how RFID technology works, what the privacy and security risks are, and what the school has done to make sure the chips are secure and compliant with student privacy laws?
• And did the County consider these questions before they received a federal grant for this program?

When it comes to student safety, insecure RFID creates more problems than it solves. We hope to work with the school officials and parents in Richmond to help them take a good look at this program and whether it properly protects the privacy and security of their young children.