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MILWAUKEE - Half an hour in the middle of the afternoon is the golden window for Denise Merkel.
In that half-hour, she hands off the remaining duties of the day to the staff she supervises as an assistant vice president for data and financial services at the Greenfield, Wis., PyraMax Bank and drives nine minutes home, from a world of parking lots and signs to green grass and pines.
There, she picks up where her husband, Todd, has left off with daughters Brianna, 5, and Isabella, 2. He's off to his shift as a diesel mechanic, and she can watch the girls play on the swings and slides in their backyard.
Four years ago, PyraMax hired Merkel through that golden window. Its family-friendly work practices have made it a magnet for young moms who negotiate flexible schedules right along with salaries and vacation time.
Baby boom moms largely worked out the details of flexible hours, telecommuting and the like with their bosses one at a time, behind closed doors, for fear of setting an apple-cart-upsetting precedent.
Their daughters, the current mothers of young children, put their expectations squarely on the table. Employers can respond with "flexwork" options, or they can look for someone else.
If they don't offer flexwork, they might be doing a lot of looking.
A 2005 survey by staffing company Spherion found that a "continued need for work-life balance" was one of three top retention factors. Only 32 percent of workers, it found, are satisfied with their ability to maintain balance between their personal and professional lives.
"For many young mothers, it just didn't work for them that their mothers went to work. I hear that all the time: `I'm not going to do that to my kids,'" says Susan Seitel, president of Work & Family Connection Inc., a publishing and consulting firm in Minnetonka, Minn.
Young moms say that they've got flexible attitudes about flexibility: They'll make it work for their employers, if their employers will make it work for them.
In her 20 years in the work force, Vicky Vogt has seen a 180-degree turn in how young moms are straightforward about presenting their expectations of flexibility upfront in job interviews.
Vogt is vice president of employer-relations services for Pewaukee, Wis.-based MRA - The Management Association Inc., an employer consortium that provides consulting services to members and that strives for a culture that accommodates working moms.
"I would say they're very upfront and, as they look for opportunities, they've made up their minds that they'll only leave their present positions or get back into the work force if it meets their needs," she says. "I don't think that attitude existed before."
MRA's national research indicates that about 25 percent of the work force at its member companies use a compressed workweek, and fewer than 22 percent take advantage of flexible schedules. Half of MRA's own employees work some sort of alternative schedule, and of those working full time, about 30 percent use a flexible schedule.
Brookfield, Wis., resident Linda Berger started working at MRA five years ago, when her first child was a baby. She now puts in up to 20 hours a week as part of MRA's employment-reference-checking service.
Her volume of work fluctuates with member companies' hiring patterns. Team members back each other up so that deadlines are met, says Berger, and that can mean taking work on short notice or working from home.
Sarah Slaughter, 32, for years has been collecting intelligence about blending families and careers.
"I talk about this all the time with my friends from college and business school," says Slaughter, a 2005 graduate of the University of Chicago Business School who is an internal consultant with Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co.
Instead of being forced to accept or decline a job with non-negotiable hours and work culture, she says, "for our generation, we hope that there's the opposite - creative ways to make it work."
Each department at Northwestern Mutual offers a combination of work-life programs that meet its business demands, says Jean Towell, a company representative. Managers can decide if and how to use options such as job-sharing and compressed workweeks.
Some employers get it, and some don't.
Merkel says she is at PyraMax because her former employer was clueless.
Back in 2001, she had eked out a little flexibility at a bank where she was a branch manager.
She agreed to work a four-hour Saturday shift in return for a half-day in the middle of the week.
Those hours had to accommodate doctor's visits for her daughter Brianna, her own health care and as many errands as she could manage.
But at that bank, she says, flextime and other family-friendly practices were topics that employees knew were off-limits.
"You knew not to bring it up," Merkel says.
She had seen other moms presented with all-or-nothing propositions: work the traditional hours or forgo the job.
The last straw was a reorganization that would shred the flexibility she did have.
Hearing through friends of the opening at PyraMax, Merkel applied.
"I was very upfront that I was a mom with a 10-month-old child and that I wanted to spend more time with her," she says.
Still, she was skeptical when her interviewer - Monica Baker, senior vice president of marketing and human resources - told her about the bank's flextime practice.
"All of the managers are doing the flextime," Baker tells a reporter. "If someone wants to do four 10-hour days, they can. It's just the culture now, as long as the work is getting done and the bank is profitable."
Baker says she realized 12 years ago, before she had her own children, that cultivating flexible work was a no-cost way to retain employees.
Employers that don't adapt their cultures to embrace the expectations of working moms "don't know what they're missing - a big swath of people who need flex," she says.
As a manager, Merkel now sees both sides. She has to manage a staff that expects the same freedoms that she has and balance the needs of employees who don't have young children with the needs of those who do.
"There are a lot of last-minute requests," she says. "But it's not just the moms that understand it. It's a culture throughout the whole company. And I just hired a mom, and she asked about flex in the interview."
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The degree to which companies accommodate worker desires:
Flextime: 57 percent
Ability to telecommute on an ad-hoc basis: 45 percent
Compressed workweek: 35 percent
Family leave above the required federal Family and Medical Leave Act: 27 percent
Ability to telecommute on a part-time basis: 26 percent
Family leave above required state law: 25 percent
Ability to bring child to work in emergency: 22 percent
Ability to telecommute on a full-time basis: 19 percent
Job sharing: 18 percent
Source: Society for Human Resource Management 2006 Job Satisfaction Report and 2006 Benefits Report
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(c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
