The Parent Trap

Maybe it's because she's the only senior female executive at a cool startup, or maybe it's because she doesn't get out much, but Melissa Lloyd, whose baby is due in July, feels like she's the only pregnant woman in Silicon Valley. The prospect of raising a child while working insane hours to beat the competition terrifies her.

In her previous life at Procter & Gamble, Lloyd would have taken advantage of the company's liberal maternity leave, flex-time, job-sharing and other family-friendly policies. Yet taking such a break from her present employer, Hotlinks of Mountain View, Calif., would cost both the company and herself important time to stake out Hotlinks' turf as a personalized guide to the Internet. "The reality of the business is that I can't afford to be out that long," she says.

Lloyd will take 12 weeks of unpaid leave, a benefit covered by a California state law - and will take things one day at a time after that. Lloyd, the company's VP of marketing, plans to cut back her 10- and 11-hour days to eight or nine and says she'll start contacting the office by e-mail about a week after the birth. She'd like to help the 25-employee company establish formal policies for working parents and is hopeful that everything will work out. But like many other parents who work at Internet startups, Lloyd contemplates the possibility that the schedule ultimately will be too much to bear.

"There is a struggle between what is right for the business and what is right for the individual and family," she says.

Lloyd's situation highlights the stubborn conflict between growing an Internet company and growing a family, especially when young professionals must choose between two worlds they love. Few startups can afford to lose key executives for the several weeks - let alone months - that newborns require. Because of the time crunch and, often, lack of funds, on-site day care facilities and maternity-paternity leave benefits are few and far between in the Internet world.

And, since most Net startups are so small - 88 percent have fewer than 50 employees [see "The State of the Startup," June 12], they are not required to offer such benefits. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act requires companies to offer 12 weeks of unpaid maternity or medical leave to full-time workers - but only if the company has more than 50 employees. Roger Brown, CEO of Bright Horizons Family Solutions (BFAM) in Cambridge, Mass., the largest publicly held provider of child care to corporations, says not a single Internet startup has approached his company for services.

To be fair, some Net executives are willingly sacrificing their personal lives in the hopes of making millions. "People commit an enormous amount of time to the business, with the notion that they will retire in a few years when they hit it big," says Tuck Rickards, leader of the Internet practice for Russell Reynolds Associates in Boston. Yet many young companies and their recruiters are not sending the message that they give a hoot about "family values." Up until the recent slowdown in the stock market, says Rickards, any sign of outside distraction was - and probably still is - considered a liability. "If candidates raised the question of quality of life, you dismissed them," he says.

This attitude that dot-com employees must sell their soul to the company is both shameful and outdated, some say. "Startups have an opportunity to do it right," says James Levine, head of the fatherhood initiative at the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research and consulting organization in New York. "If the culture is not already calcified, the founders are in a good position to have people work hard - but also work smart." Levine says the benefit parents really want is flexibility - and that is something freewheeling Internet startups often have in abundance.

Shauna Sampson, a consultant with San Francisco-based e-commerce services provider Scient (SCNT) , couldn't agree more. A single mother, Sampson feels lucky to work for a company where she can leave at 5:30 p.m. to pick up her 4-year-old daughter without worrying that her peers think she's a slacker. "There is a perception universally that parents don't work as hard," she observes.

MAKING DO
Any decent employer with a conscience - red-hot startup or not - cannot ignore that they will have parents on staff. Dot-coms are addressing the issue of child care in the same ad hoc way they form strategy or attack new markets. Rather than form a policy, they try to craft short-term solutions to individual needs. Many, like Hotlinks, don't create a policy until one becomes necessary.

Others simply have a formal policy of no formal policy. At Irvine, Calif.-based Autobytel, an e-commerce site for cars, CEO Mark Lorimar says family leave is handled on a case-by-case basis. "We spend a lot of time on the Internet talking about mass customization, but there are so many companies with policies that are just the opposite," Lorimar says. "We try to walk the talk."

In his view, policies that grant a set number of days for maternity or family leave are designed to ease administration and avoid lawsuits. Lorimar, who has three daughters under the age of 8, says his employees have the freedom to design their own schedules. While some have requested and taken the standard three months of maternity leave, many don't ask for that much time off, he says.

The story changes for larger, established Internet companies that have the resources to offer more concrete programs for working parents. Nearly 90 percent of companies with more than 100 employees have flexible working arrangements for parents and reduced schedules for new mothers returning to the office, according to a 1998 Families and Work Institute study.

Breakaway Solutions (BWAY) , a Boston-based Internet consultancy growing at a maniacal pace, claims a retention rate of nearly 97 percent that stems from its commitment to creating a work-life balance for its 700 employees. Typically, consultants spend 50 percent to 75 percent of their time traveling to client sites. Breakaway has cut that to approximately 12.5 percent by locating much of the work at six solutions centers across the country, says President and CEO Gordon Brooks.

THE VIRTUAL PARENT
The reality is that most Internet employers struggle just to get funding for the next six months of operations, so family-friendly policies are naturally not at the top of the priority list. Dot-com parents have learned that they need to be creative in their quest for the elusive "work-life balance."

"Work is always on your mind - even if you are at home - in the dot-com world," says CEO Kurt Schneider of Asimba.com, an online sports and fitness site in Redwood City, Calif. Schneider's wife just gave birth to their second son. For Schneider, who works 75 to 80 hours a week, "work-family is an oxymoron."

He tries to fit in time for his sons by being as nimble as he can - scheduling conference calls early in the morning so he can slip out to take his older son to school, for example. Nonetheless, he logs large amounts of travel time in which his parental role is virtual, confined to nightly calls from the road. Schneider and Autobytel's Lorimar are lucky: They both have spouses who can stay home and take care of the kids full time. But even with this luxury, the pressure to meet the needs of both family and employer are enormous.

In a perfect world, startups would be run by folks without huge distractions, says CEO Steven Kropper of Domania.com, a Boston-based site for real estate information. "The only people who should be allowed to run companies are single people with no life, no kids and no relationships," he says wryly. But such a world would produce flawed leaders, he admits: "Maturity and experience come with those encumbrances." Kropper believes he has matured enough to run a company because he has a family.

Moreover, Kropper says that having so many responsibilities has forced him to use his time more efficiently. He leaves the office at 6 p.m. sharp every day to spend three hours with his girls - Skyler, 1, and Geneva, 4 - and his wife Alexandra, who works a 32-hour week in media relations at the MIT Media Lab. At 9 p.m., he hits his desk at home for a second shift of answering e-mail and completing work left over from the day, which lasts "until my eyes droop," he says. Kropper then makes a bottle for Skyler and "naps" until she wakes up. "It is all easy when she greets me with a grin so big it stretches her ears," he admits.

Even so, there is no easy answer. Solutions pose new problems, blurring work and family life. To compensate for being out of the office, Kropper gives employees his cell phone number so they can reach him at home. If you ask Geneva, that privilege has been abused. When the phone rang at 7 p.m. recently, she looked up and said, "Daddy, don't answer that." Kropper was lucky: He could see on the caller ID window that the call was not essential and let it ring to voicemail.