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For NationsBank vice president Sheila Burroughs, 31, taking advantage of the phase-back program and spending more time with her new baby reduced the stress of jumping back into the work force after an extended maternity leave. She returned to work part time for about a month after her daughter Melissa was born in February 1997, and plans to do the same with her infant Jenna, who was born last month. "I wasn't quite ready physically or emotionally to go right back to work full time," Burroughs says. "You need that extra time to really just enjoy your baby and get over the newness of becoming a parent."
Flexible work arrangements and the ability to take extra time off are attractive lures in the current economy. Sometimes they give employees the chance to develop the idealistic side that earlier generations felt constrained to repress when they put on a business suit and tie. Bonnie Weisner, 34, a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Fort Lee, N.J., took advantage of the firm's flextime policy because she wanted to pursue an outside interest--becoming an emergency medical technician with a volunteer ambulance corps. In September she took a 40% pay cut and went from a 55-hr. workweek to a 24-hr. workweek at the consulting firm. She spends the rest of the week in training to become an EMT. She has an understanding with the company that she can go back to work full time when, and if, she wants.
"I was at a burnout stage and felt I needed to do something different in my life, but I wasn't too quick to get up and leave my job, since they gave me the option to do something like this," says Weisner, who has worked at the company since she graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton 12 years ago. "I guess I wanted to feel like I'm giving back to my community in a tangible way," she adds. Weisner had toyed with the idea of going to medical school when she was an undergraduate. "If I can save someone's life or even help a little kid who has broken his leg, I'll feel like I'm really making a difference. You just don't get that feeling sitting behind a desk."
PLEASURE PERKS
Other creative benefits can take a variety of shapes, some of them just plain fun. Jerry Daly, president of Daly Gray, a Northfield, N.J., public relations firm with six employees and annual billings of $1 million, donates some of his frequent-flyer miles to his staff. Daly's practice of letting employees add vacation days to business trips if they want allows his firm to save on airfare--because of cut-rate Saturday-night-stayover airline prices. And his grateful employees get the added benefit of a mini-vacation at no cost to them. "I may be competing with the largest public relations firms in the world for employees; I need to differentiate myself from the big guys," Daly says.
Daly Gray vice president Carol McCune says she has saved $15,000 to $20,000 in hotel and airfare expenses during the five years she has been with the firm. When she goes to California on business, she stays a few extra days to visit her sister--courtesy of the boss. "If it weren't for these business trips, I would probably never get to see my sister and 12-year-old nephew," McCune says. "This is my twin sister, and we are very close. And it's real important to me that I can go to my nephew's soccer games and watch him grow up, even though he lives so far away."