One of the major fringe benefits I enjoyed during my sabbatical leave in 2007 and 2008, teaching at the IESE Business School, was the opportunity to interact with world-class professors of business administration. One of these professors is Nuria Chinchilla, a professor in Managing People in Organizations and author of best-selling books on the issue of harmonizing work with family life. In a recent article she wrote for the online magazine, Mercator.net (August 7, 2009), she summarized a scholarly paper that she presented to the FEMM Committee in Brussels and to the From House to Home Conference organized by the Home Renaissance Foundation in London.

As I wrote in a former column about family enterprises being most effective nurturers of appropriate values that make businesses sustainable, Ms. Chinchilla makes the same point by stating that neither business nor society at large can remain viable without healthy family life. She quotes Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker of the University of Chicago saying that the family is the best ministry of social affairs. It provides the greatest scope for solidarity and generosity, what Pope Benedict XVI calls in his recent encyclical Charity in Truth as the virtue of gratuitousness. It is in the family that human beings learn what it means to be loved and accepted as they are, simply because they exist. In traditional societies still largely unaffected by rampant divorce and trial marriages, relations between family members are usually caring; they are generally forgiven, protected and looked after – even when work, friends or health may fail.

The importance of the family to businesses cannot be denied. The family is the first "school" where people learn and develop skills that are also necessary in the workplace – in the first place, the ability to commit oneself and form healthy and lasting ties with others. There are many other skills acquired in a normal family, such as the ability to work as part of a team, to emphatise, delegate, communicate, organize and focus on "the customer." The time one spends with his or her family can help a person contribute positively
to the smooth functioning of a business.

Ms. Chinchilla asks "How can we create a healthy and fruitful relationship between the realms of family life and business?" The first step is for both men and women to make the home their first business priority, in their hearts and minds as well as in their timetable. As Dr. Maria Victoria Caparas of the University of Asia and the Pacific School of Management and Philippine research collaborator of Ms. Chinchilla said in a recent lecture at the UA&P, parents should devote both quality and quantity time to the family. The frequent reference to "quality" time is just an excuse of parents to neglect the family.

Ms. Chinchilla rightly points out that families need work more than work needs the family. It is far too easy for the strict, goal/incentive/sanction-driven workplace to impose itself on the more flexible and understanding family. Work is like gas fumes that permeate every nook and corner of our lives. It ends up filling the entire space if there is no containment wall in place. It is necessary to make the time and effort to control one's life and build a home. One critical area is the number of dinners and cocktails a business executive permits himself or herself to attend in a week. If these social functions are not controlled, it is very easy to skip family dinners for most of the work week and end up having meals with the entire family only during the weekends.

Secondly, according to Ms. Chinchilla, we need to revise our concept of work so that it includes and properly values work done in the home. In many cultural environments, women who devote themselves to working entirely at home are treated as second-rate citizens and undervalued – sometimes even by their own children, who have been influenced by the economically driven worldview the media and the rest of a consumerist society have fed them. An unpaid service is work, even if it is not assigned any monetary value. In the country where she lives, Ms. Chinchilla points out that the GDP of Spain would increase by 33 percent if work done at home were to be assigned its monetary value by the national income accountants. In the national capital city, Madrid, GDP would increase by 55 percent if the work of housewives were assigned a market value. It is for this reason that international comparisons of GDPs can be misleading as regards the real state of economic welfare of the citizens of different countries.

Especially in countries that suffer from very low fertility rates and the rapid aging of the populations, with the consequent pressure on pension systems and health care programs, there should be a move to promote social and economic measures that will make it feasible to freely choose housework as a professional option. The government should work with the business sector to facilitate these goals, in which they have a common interest since the state would otherwise be forced to spend more of its resources on social needs and raise more taxes. The reference here is to child care, homes for the elderly and the consequences of increased juvenile delinquency and addictions as a result of the absence of parents. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that forcing a single parent to work outside the home greatly increases the poverty of her family.

Finally, the business sector could help put an end to the discrimination against mothers staying at home to take care of their children during their early years by considering the years spent at home as years spent working, rather than as unemployment. This time should be viewed as positive experience when returning to the labor market once the circumstances have changed, without the woman losing her benefits. Formal training in housework – which could also be made available to the husbands – would help its recognition as professional work in a CV, and other courses could facilitate re-entry into the workforce after an extended leave.

Businesses have everything to gain by being family-friendly. They will be able to expand their talent pool. They will be able to help maintain a younger population that is crucial to both a growing consumer market and an expanding labor force. Being friendly to the family can help especially the emerging markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines prolong the demographic dividend that immunizes them from the many problems of the aging societies of today. For comments, my email address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.