Flex for success

To flex or not to flex? That's always been a tough question.

For a long time, having a flexible work schedule hasn't been much of a career booster. You did it to grapple with life needs, and then contended with the raised eyebrows, wage penalties, and other downsides as best you could. Full time, full tilt was the norm.

But little by little, that bleak picture is changing. Flexibility is becoming more workable, and can even be part of a model of long-term career success. That's the clear take-home message from a Simmons College study of 400 professional women released this month that you can read at simmons.edu/som/docs/centers/insights_25.pdf .

More than 90 percent of the women, whose work tenures averaged 20 years, had flexible work arrangements of some kind during their careers. Importantly, women who had worked flexible schedules earned salaries comparable to those who worked full time, regardless of age or whether they had children.

Certainly, this doesn't mean the picture is all rosy. It's clear that some kinds of flexing -- such as taking years off -- can hurt your career more than others. Moreover, those surveyed were mostly experienced, white professionals who represent just one slice of the workforce. Still, 60 percent had children and 18 percent had stopped work temporarily, so the study shows that "it" can be done. Careers can be fluid and flexible and successful -- in new ways.

"We were trying to take a look at what happened over the entire arc of a woman's career," says the study's lead author, Mary Shapiro , an assistant professor at Simmons School of Management. "A lot of women are doing things that are different from the accepted norm. They are shifting the career paradigm."

That's exactly what software manager Pamela LaTulippe has done in recent years. Two years ago while working at a large Boston high-tech firm, she cut back to a 40-hour week and began teleworking so that she could rebalance her work-centric life. LaTulippe, who was not part of the Simmons study, bought and renovated a small horse farm in Rowley and purchased a horse, which she rides almost daily.

"I gave up my VP title and a big corner office but what I got back was my life," says LaTulippe, who has kept her flexible schedule since being recruited by a former colleague to be director of product management at 170 Systems, a Bedford-based financial software maker, in December. Throughout her downshifts, she has not taken a pay cut.

Tony Scotto , the former colleague who is now her boss, says companies such as 170 Systems increasingly realize that flexibility not only attracts top talent, it can be a great way to work. "Pam is both an idea person and a pragmatic, get-it-done person," says Scotto, vice president of product development. "The time away gives her time to do the kind of thinking that's necessary to think at a strategic level."

For every employer with "bendability," there are others who define work as face-time and resume gaps as career killers. Still, the trend is toward flexibility -- day-to-day and careerlong. While more than 10 percent of the women surveyed by Simmons said their companies had been no help or a barrier to flexible scheduling, more than 40 percent reported their companies provided a great deal of help.

Overall, more than 65 percent of employees now have access to some kind of flextime, according to the Families and Work Institute. And many top business schools offer short courses for returning women professionals.

Companies are beginning to appreciate the "women who are not available for 90 or even 60-hour work weeks, but who are smart and energized and have great skills," says Timothy Butler , director of career development at Harvard Business School, which is offering "A New Path" program for returning professionals March 4-10. "But there's a long way to go to translate that into workable models."

Step by step, however, those models -- and changing mind-sets -- are emerging. Ann-Marie Harrington, president of a small Pawtucket, R.I.-based Web development firm, encourages flexible scheduling for her staff of 11. And she makes a conscious effort to nurture the careers of her four women employees who work part time, from home or on flextime, so they don't feel sidetracked or forgotten.

"I don't want to lose sight of the people who work hard and are 100 percent here, even if it's 30 or 24 hours," says Harrington, whose company, Embolden Design, won an Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility last year. "I'm always surprised when employers are inflexible. It just makes common sense."

Balancing Acts appears every other week. Maggie Jackson can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net.