Elise Jones: To Work or Not Work? That Shouldn't Have to Be the Question

Elise Jones is a former Microsoft work/life champion and president and founder of E Jones Consulting. In line with her passion for supporting people across multiple life roles, she is also a wife, mother, Master’s student, ukulele-strumming public school volunteer, Sunday School teacher, and community board member. You can follow her on twitter at @elisejones.

The morning of April 9, 2003 found me bent feverishly over my laptop outside the conference room where my team was attending a divisionwide meeting. After choosing not to return to my full-time position at Microsoft after my first child was born, I was in the final 48 hours of an internal search for a part-time position, and the urgency of my few remaining leads trumped the inspirational words of our VP. I centered my efforts on one hiring manager in particular, enumerating how I could improve his group’s bottom line, and sent off the email with a vigorous click.

A few hours later I looked up in disbelief to see this hiring manager approaching me from across the cafeteria. His words “Would you like to join my team?” and “When can you start?” transformed my life, opening the door to an exciting new career that kept me at Microsoft an additional five years. That experience taught me the lengths I was willing to go to in order to shape the life I have chosen for myself and my family. But it also infused in me a dream for a world of work very different from the one most of us live in. 

My dream is to create a world where all people can engage in meaningful, growth-promoting, and financially rewarding work regardless of their dedication to priorities outside the workplace. That means thinking about work in new ways. In particular, it means greater access to workplace flexibility and more part-time, career-track jobs.

Source:  istockphoto

The reality for most professionals today is that you either put in a traditional full-time workweek or you quit (as illustrated by the rash of opt-out articles spanning the last decade). Why must this be a binary decision? If an individual’s dedication to work doesn’t stop when it no longer matches the demands of a full-time, face-time workplace, why should their career? Thankfully, growing access to flextime, telework, and other forms of flexibility bridges the gap for many. But countless others judge the demands of caregiving, community involvement, and other investments to be incompatible with their workplace and downgrade to less-demanding positions or opt out altogether.

Even where part-time professional work exists, it is no nirvana. A Fortune 100 executive speaking at a recent  conference suggested that part timers don’t generally get what they deserve and that “people around them are always wondering”. For the few workers able to craft part-time positions in professions dominated by full-time work, these are just a few of the myriad conditions threatening their success. It will take vision, dedication, and hard work from the highest levels of companies to front-line managers and individual employees to create not only part-time and other flexible positions, but also a work environment that recognizes and values those who occupy them. That effort is absolutely worth it.

Source: istockphoto

Much has changed since I put my Microsoft career on the line nine years ago. New investments in my husband’s career, my departure from corporate America, our family’s cross-country move, two growing children, and increasing investments in our local community have placed new demands on me and changed my work/life configuration dramatically. But through it all my dream has stayed with me – even grown because of it.

Today I’m pursuing a Master’s in Psychology and investigating how people’s ability to invest in the roles they most value impacts their overall wellbeing and performance. As part of my work this semester, I’m conducting a study looking at whether mothers utilize employer-provided work/life supports and with what impact. If anything in my dream resonates with yours, I hope you’ll take my online survey or pass it on to someone else. (Qualifying participants will be entered to win a $25 Amazon.com gift card.)

And speaking of intersections between our mutual dreams, I would love to hear any thoughts my story has sparked for you. What dreams would access to part-time or other flexible work options enable for you or someone you care about?

Comments

[Elizabeth Keeler]

I love this! I really support this idea, 100%. There are few things as satisfying as meaningful work. Everybody should feel justified in having the right kind of work. Thank you so much for this post.

[Amy Jo]

I did give up my career to stay at home with my children. There was no other option then. I think technological advances have made so much more possible. When I dream, it's always about me back in the work environment, so even after 20 years of being gone, I think I must still miss the intrinsic feelings of being good at what I did that are not so readily available at home.

[Robin Cangie]

As I read your post, I kept thinking, "YES!!" over and over. By all accounts, I shouldn't be struggling with work-life balance. I don't have children. I'm in my late twenties, and my career is just beginning to really blossom. I'm the sole breadwinner at the moment, which means I even have a stay-at-home spouse who does all the dishes, laundry and cooks me dinner every night (bless his wonderful heart). According to the traditional corporate narrative, now is the time when I'm supposed to be putting in the long hours, working very hard with single-minded dedication to a company, and reaping the proverbial rewards.

But who decided that that's what good work is supposed to look like? Who decided that working long hours equated to professional success? I realized long ago that my best work doesn't happen when I spend 10 hours sitting in a cubicle. Quite the contrary, that's a sure-fire recipe to kill my productivity. My absolute best work happens when I spend 60-90 minutes of razor-sharp focused time working on something important to me. I suspect that if we instituted a nationwide 4-hour, 4-day work week, productivity in the knowledge economy would soar.

My sense is that culturally, we're coming to recognize our collective burnout., though very gradually. Thank you for calling it our here, especially the oh-so-important insight that choosing "between" work and life is a false dichotomy. It's not either/or. It's both-and.

[Dscofield]

In 1988, AT&T/Bell Labs graciously offered to move me to Oberlin, OH when I got married if I wouldn't quit. They set me up with a home office and I commuted to NJ or somewhere else in the world weekly. When our son was born in 1997, I went part time from home, no travel, working remotely. I gave up managing people (which was fine). That worked thru another child in 2000, til I quit in 2001 because the ability to do anything meaningful at AT&T, no matter where you were, was increasingly difficult. I went out on my own, using my "network" to start my own consulting practice and become a partner in an early-stage VC firm.

To say I've been blessed is an understatement. AT&T was ahead of its time in encouraging and enabling my situation. But it boils down to people. I had incredible management who realized my value and the power of the network, heck we were a networking company, we should have! To think that was 23 yrs ago is amazing. Unfortunately, we haven't come as far as we should have.

Thank you for your very important post and sharing your journey!
Deb

[Adam Lofquist]

I really appreciate this article. For some reason in the society that we are in today, we think that a lot of hours means a lot of passion. However I can for one give you numerous instances where this is not the case. Simply showing up and staying is not dedication.

I love the fact that through your efforts the idea of work, will be changed. The traditional vision of sitting at a desk, is no longer work, in fact it never was. Your job is all around you and so is your personal life.

Really like the article