Work-Family Interventions

Second generation approaches to work-family interventions focus not on policies but on deeper level changes in organizational cultures. The goal is to change the way work is accomplished—its design and its norms and expectations—so that employees are better able to align their employment with their personal lives. It is a way, also, of making the workplace more gender equitable. The method used is called Collaborative Interactive Action Research (CIAR).

Changes in work practices geared to better aligning work and personal life are particularly difficult to accomplish because they are linked to two sets of gendered organizational assumptions: one about the ideal worker and the other about ideal work. Organizational norms about ideal workers are implicitly linked to stereotypical notions of professional masculinity, such as strength, assertiveness and a life situation that includes someone else taking care of family and other personal issues. Assumptions about ideal work practices are linked to a set of beliefs about the use of time and space, the role of managerial oversight and evaluation measures that are also anchored in traditional notions of masculinity. Less obvious but critically important is the fact that these gendered images also have an unexpectedly negative impact on work effectiveness. CIAR explicitly links equity and effectiveness—two objectives long thought to be adversarial—and promotes a dual agenda. It challenges the deeply embedded assumptions about ideal work and the ideal worker and does so in actionable ways.

Though collaboration is part of most action research, CIAR is somewhat different because it rests on a mode of interaction that is self-consciously based on mutuality and fluid expertise. Mutuality brings two types of expertise together—the researchers' on gender dynamics and the organization's on work practices and systems—to create new, actionable knowledge. The process is explicitly fluid and two directional. This type of collaborative interaction requires the typical skills of action research, but using these presents special problems because these skills are themselves gendered, associated with the feminine, domestic sphere of life. Enacting them can engage strong, even disproportionate resistance. Exploring, rather than attempting to overcome, this resistance provides additional data about the gender dynamics at play and the work practices to examine.

The action part starts at the point of entry into an organizational site. Whether entry takes the form of a survey, interviews or focus groups, its primary goal is to connect—explicitly and from the beginning—the goals of equity for people's work-family concerns with effectiveness issues in business. Therefore, the initial interviews probe the details of work as well as family and try to elicit a new, shared understanding of how these are connected and not necessarily adversarial. The interviewer is not passive in this process but actively engages the interviewee to surface and challenge assumptions. The goal is to bring together the two domains of equity and effectiveness at the level of everyday work practice. These mini-interventions prepare the work group for a larger experimental intervention, which is designed collaboratively. The design must address both sides of the dual agenda and include outcomes to be evaluated.

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