The Many Facets of Career Flexibility in Academic Medicine: What Does It Mean to You?

By: Lydia Pleotis Howell, MD, professor and chair, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California, Davis Health, Sacramento, California. What does “career flexibility” and “work-life balance” or “work-life integration” mean to you? When I bring these up to department chairs or academic health leaders at my (or other) school(s), I often get openly unenthusiastic responses such as “Don’t you know that we can’t afford to have faculty working less? We need more productivity than ever before!” This is despite the majority of medical schools—including those ranked in U.S. News and World Report’s top ten—all having adopted career flexibility policies to improve recruitment and retention by helping faculty better meet their work and family/personal responsibilities.1 But career flexibility does not mean working less. Flexibility, as defined by the Sloan Center for Work and Aging at Boston College, involves “making changes to when, where and how a person will work to better meet individual and business needs…. Flexibility should be mutually beneficial to both the employer and employee and result in superior outcomes [italics added].”2 Shared responsibility and accountability are therefore requirements—in other words, no entitlement. The University of California Davis has had career flexibility policies (such as childbearing and family leaves, active service-modified duties, and “stop the tenure clock”) since 1988, but in...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective career flexibility well-being work-life balance Source Type: blogs