Managing a Life of Frequent Travel: Best Practices - Seminar, April 27, 2000

Helen Frick, PhD, Manager, Staff Services, The World Bank

DR. STRIKER: The next speaker is Dr. Frick, who is going to feedback some of the information, recommendations from spouses about what actually makes a difference in their lives or what could make a difference in managing stress and strain and, if she has some time, talk a little bit about what are some useful and important work life policies to support staff and their families.

DR. FRICK: I thought I might start with that, Jim, just a little bit. And I think the advantage maybe of coming last after five o'clock, maybe you are aren't doing any more micro sleeping, and I will be very brief, because Ann and I are covering much of the same territory. So, I will not repeat.

But I will share a couple of slides with you and share a little bit about the Bank because we have put all kinds of organizational policies and programs into effect. And when I was asked to review not best practices here necessarily but to see what are we doing and how does it stack up, we looked at everything, all kinds of programs, services, policies.

And I was really struck by—in fact, I have to go speak to our Personnel Committee of the Board in May—to talk to them about what is wrong anyway. Why are we so highly stressed when we have so much?

And if you will look, the leave policies—I think Jack said that it is hard to get reduced work or recuperative leave—we have them all. In fact, everything I could find in any magazine, in any article I checked against, we have them.

And is our stress low? Not at all. So, I just thought I would share with you services and programs. We are expanding child-care centers, child-care resource, you name that. On that, I should also have said—I was really looking at what we have in our work-like services within my unit, but it is the fitness center, we have brought in Ann Ladd, we have brought in speakers to do training on all kinds of topics.

So, we are definitely engaged. In fact, Jim and I are in a working group engaged with trying to dig deeper and, in fact, SmithKline Beecham is very much a model of where we are thinking that we need to go, because all I can say work life programs are great, but they are not sufficient and they are not reducing the stress in the way that senior management, of course, wants it to.

And senior management looks at me and says, "What is this anyway? Is this just a racket? What is really wrong with staff?"

So, these are the struggles that we are having. We know that we have state of the art programs and services and yet staff don't take time. As you heard me say this morning, who is using recuperative leave? We have a culture in which they don't, even though they have the absolute ability to stay home, to say no. The pressures of work are so great; the culture is such, the management is such that it just doesn't happen.

But I thought I would share with you very quickly—and I will not go over and be repetitive—but these were things that did come out in terms of our survey. These were recommendations that staff said were effective for them. So, they said this business, we put at the top frequent phone calls and e-mails. Right now, our Bank policy is not too generous on the phone calls, and my Vice President who opened the session this morning said to me last night "I think we are going to have to change that". We have got to make it easier for families to call home.

Certainly, e-mails—in fact, as I read the surveys this weekend, everyone said with e-mail communication with the family is easier. It has been significantly easier.

Some of the old-timers who remembered when this was not possible said this has really changed their ability to communicate with their families. Other recommendations are to use that recuperative leave. I don't know whether that is just theoretical for them, but they said that they should.

The special meals, this is the rituals that Ann was mentioning; sharing country experience with children, especially school-aged children. Adolescents are really eager to hear about it. But I hear one person that was actually a member of the Bank's governing body now as saying that her husband when he traveled used to send cards and letters about what he was doing, what work he was doing and why, and that she kept them in a scrapbook over the years and gave those to the children, and it was very meaningful for them to understand what their father's work was all about and why he was gone.

As Conchita [ph] said, we are really do bring a lot of gifts home too. So, we are doing everything we can to remember our families. And that was a strategy that staff mentioned. Interestingly, the families didn't talk about the gifts but the staff did.

It was interesting to me to see that some thought it was great to have their families go—it just gets to the point that some strategies work for some and not others. Some thought it was great to have the family to go to the airport to see them off and pick them off and others said this was a disaster in their families. So, that was mixed effective.

Keeping the same routine, against mixed effective. Some people tried to do this whether the spouse is around or not.

What was pretty shocking to me—but this was actually said fairly repeatedly—was whether you give the itinerary to the family or not. I simply cannot imagine the family not having that, but that is my value. And I think that they felt that again it may have to do with the changes. Sometimes they get out, and they have to make changes and some of that is traumatic to the family.

Overall, basically, staff didn't have very many ideas. They were so stressed out. The other interesting thing to me was that their comment, in the comment section about how does your travel affect your children's behavior, it was really significant that they did not comment very much.

Spouses had a lot to say; staff did not. So, those are some staff strategies.

Spouse: Spouses talk about giving more attention—and I have overheads, copies of these, so I hope you can pick those up—but giving more attention to children, this was just really striking to me how much they gear up to kind of compensate for that loss in the family. And some people talk about getting our Weekend Guide, The Washington Post has a Weekend Guide every Friday that talks about what is going on in the area, and they will get that and they will go through this with their children, and you can just see almost frenetic activity of arranging special events, movies, sleep-overs, dinners with other families and so forth.

They discuss and research the country destinies, play audio cassettes and videos of the traveler. Several people will read bedtime stories, they talked about, and leave those behind for small children. Mark off the calendars for the return date, although they said if it is a very long mission, don't go at it for a very long. So, don't mark off six weeks at a time. Make daily calls regardless of the personal cost.

Staff had some things to say to the organization, as you might imagine, and that is to say enforce the policy; don't have us go out for such a long time; train managers to become more sensitive. In our conversation last night at our table, we were talking about really it does depend so much on the managers. Managers can be quite sensitive to it and that came through even in the comments. And others would say their managers didn't have children, didn't have families, and expected, as I heard somebody this morning say, somebody to be right back in or they would dock them time.

And change policies; staff said also allow more flexible work arrangements, choice of airlines. This is a big issue in our organization. I don't know if it has hit yours or not, but as the airlines have cut back in terms of giving money back to travel agencies, we had to negotiate and change our airline policy and select a few to choose from and that has had an impact on staff travel. And so, all the things that we are trying to do to alleviate stress, that one just sent them right back up again. So, this is a new cause in the organization.

Station more people out there. Their feeling that we should be more selective now that we have new technologies for dialogue. Eliminate this double work that I mentioned this morning and avoid departures on weekends. This weekend travel, as we saw this morning, again is something that really does have an impact on the family life and on the children.

Finally, I will just mention that spouses had a few things to say as well, which was again very, very similar, reducing the mission, changing the policy on calling home, allowing for refusing. Even that their traveling staff member in the family had even the perception that they could refuse to go improved the stress levels in the family and compensating for weekends away.

So, these are some ideas we are going to be grappling with, as I said, this in the next couple of weeks in order to present something to the Board. So, we are not at best practice; we are doing all that we can to be one and to learn and to deal with the stress that our traveling families have.

DR. STRIKER: Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

DR. STRIKER: I think there is definitely a theme in that. I think that in many places the experiences of the families and the impact of the family is not taken as seriously because in some ways it is hidden and it is much harder to make a business case for dealing with the families unless, of course, you have an executive or a manager who has had problems with a teenager or had serious problems and may become a champion for some of these family interventions.

Thank you, Helen.

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