Employers innovate to tackle worker stress

(WebMD) -- You've put in a 55-hour week, your pantry is bare, your laundry is piling up and you can't find a sitter for your 5-year-old. "Great," you think. "What I need is a live-in maid."

What you might need instead, is the right employer.

IBM, Chevron, Hewlett Packard, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors and other Fortune 500 companies now provide their employees emergency baby-sitters, laundry service and take-out meals. Other employers help workers find care for an elderly parent or coaching for kids who are applying to college.

After years of trying lunch-hour stress reduction seminars, more and more companies have decided they can better help burned-out employees by relieving the tension between work and family life.

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"Companies are operating around the clock and workers are overwhelmed by the faster pace of work," says Stephanie Pronk, manager of global health services for William Mercer, Inc., in Minneapolis. "We've also been through a period of downsizing, and people need to accomplish more with fewer resources. Workers are stressed-out, and it's not enough to offer them free massages or classes in time management."

Sometimes the help comes in the form of more flexible hours, or in letting workers telecommute. But in other cases, companies are reaching a helping hand deep into workers' personal lives. Far from resenting the intrusion, employees are gratefully accepting the assistance.

"I just transferred to this town from Singapore and didn't know the community," says Kimbrough Elstad, a human resources manager at Levi Strauss in Eugene, Oregon. "But our company has an online concierge service called Lifeworks. I sent them an e-mail, and they told me where to send my son for swimming lessons and how to find a painter and a contractor and hire a housecleaning service."

Ceridian Performance Partners in Boston, creators of Lifeworks, now serves 6,000 companies with some seven million employees, nationwide. It maintains a staff of researchers who can find the cheapest rental car in the New York area, a better day care center or a whale-watching cruise for your next vacation. They will arrange to deliver flowers to your mom on Mother's Day, shop for your husband's anniversary gift, get your car to the mechanic and arrange your evening at the theater. The employee pays for the flowers, the gift or the car repair, but not for the time Ceridian workers spend arranging the service.

Such elaborate perks are spreading rapidly, says Arlene Johnson, director of Work Family Directions, a Boston consulting company. Larger companies -- with 1,000 or more employees -- are most likely to offer an online program like Lifeworks or to hire "work-life managers" whose sole job is to help workers deal with the demands of daily life. But small and midsize companies have begun to follow suit.

And Work Family Directions' research shows that workers are more loyal and stay longer at companies that offer these programs.

"People are less stressed, and so they can concentrate on work," says Kathy Burke, human resources manager at Hewlett-Packard. "We have data that show these programs are better for the bottom line."

In the stiff competition for skilled workers, stress-reducing perks also serve as a valuable recruiting tool. "In this ever more complicated world, people want someone who can organize their lives," says Diane Piktialis, a director at Ceridian.

© 2000 Healtheon/WebMD. All rights reserved.

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