(FORTUNE Magazine) – THERE WAS PLENTY of gossip in the corridors of Levi Strauss when Donna Goya, a personnel manager and rising star, cut back to a three-day-a-week work schedule in 1982. ''One of my colleagues thanked me for taking myself out of the running,'' she recalls. Two years later, with her son in kindergarten, Goya returned to regular hours -- and a promotion to director of personnel. The gloating colleague? ''Now he works for me.'' Goya, 43, belongs to a pioneering group of managers and professionals who are breaking the stranglehold of the five-day workweek to devote more time to other aspects of their lives, such as caring for a young child or an elderly parent. These men and women have told their companies that, for a while, they will require flexible work schedules. The surprise is that, in many cases, their careers are prospering. It's still an uphill battle against entrenched corporate practice, but by now enough companies have tried this kind of innovation that some lessons can be learned. And ought to be. Flexible is a term that covers a variety of arrangements: unconventional hours, part-time work, job sharing, leaves of absence, working at home. From the company's perspective, the theory goes, allowing employees to work fewer and more pliable hours is a powerful way to attract and retain top-caliber people. Adaptable schedules should also foster a sense of empowerment among workers and a feeling that the company trusts them. Most important, these work arrangements enable dual-career parents to address the serious societal issue of raising children responsibly. Sounds great. Why is it, then, that employees even of ostensibly progressive companies still encounter a lot of resistance when they try to take advantage of the option? Unfortunately, real flexibility undermines timeworn assumptions about the way work works: How can a manager be off duty while subordinates toil on? Why should a part-timer be promoted over those who have given their all? Can we really pay people for the results they produce, not the hours they keep? In the past decade companies unexpectedly confronted these issues when a few mavericks risked their careers by asking for novel work arrangements. Now some of the most forward looking corporations -- among them American Express, IBM, Levi Strauss, NCNB, and PepsiCo -- are systematically trying to promote flexibility throughout their organizations. It turns out that professionals who have such arrangements are indeed fiercely loyal to their employers. Grateful for the treatment they have received, they strive to prove themselves worthy of the company's trust. Although they take on fewer projects and clock less time, they can still hone their skills and make considerable progress in their careers. Many say their truncated hours force them to be better managers -- delegating real responsibility to their subordinates, planning ahead, and setting priorities rather than treating marginal issues like crises. Their companies are beginning to notice. Renee Garbus, 33, a manager of project finance at PepsiCo, asked for an unconventional schedule after the birth of her third child last spring. Now she puts in three ten-hour days a week -- Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays -- looking at new methods for PepsiCo to finance expansion. ''Allowing me to work this way shows the company cares about me,'' she says. ''I've really felt valued as an individual. I'm taking much more of a leadership role in projects. It may be a reflection of how I'm growing as a person, but the depths of my responsibilities have increased, if anything.'' Wendy Hoerner, 32, a Steelcase product engineer, asked for mornings-only hours in 1985 while expecting her first child. The company cautiously agreed -- but warned her she might get only minor fill-in assignments. As it turned out, Hoerner was able to handle substantial projects and kept moving forward. While conspicuously pregnant with her second child in 1988, she was promoted to senior product engineer. Says she: ''I got a kick out of that -- a pregnant part-timer being promoted. Some other people weren't too thrilled.''

Hoerner leads teams that design and introduce new office chairs. The members include engineers, stylists, marketers, and quality specialists. She typically works 7:30 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. and, miracle of miracles, finds that outside vendors have no problem at all dealing with her schedule; they still find a way to pitch her their products. When a colleague or contractor from out of town visits, which happens about three days a month, she stays the afternoon. ''Working part time taught me to delegate more,'' she says. ''It forced me to learn to use support people effectively. Before, it was easier just to do it myself. Now I ask more of other people, give them more responsibility.'' When a position can't be fractured into part-time chunks, maybe it can be shared by two people. At most companies that have tried it, prospective sharers write a lengthy proposal spelling out in meticulous detail how the arrangement will work. For example, How long will it last? What happens if one sharer leaves the company or has another baby? This document serves first as crucial planning exercise for the would-be team, then as a sales pitch to their superiors, and finally as sort of a contract. Job sharing often looks more like job splitting. Partners reach a consensus on their overall strategy but divide the specific responsibilities. They maintain a close oversight of each other's portfolios in order to fill in during an absence -- or to lend a hand on a urgent task. Managerial duos can even split up their subordinates and set separate performance targets for themselves. The key to making it work: good communication between partners, who use any number of tactics to stay in touch -- brief daily phone calls or written updates, electronic mail, voice mail, spiral-bound logs. Partners may share a desk and telephone, so colleagues and customers needn't pause to remember who is where when. Often both sharers work three days every week, creating an overlap day for extended face-to-face conferencing. Companies typically pay the two a total of 120% of what one person would make in the job -- each gets three-fifths of the regular salary, plus partial benefits -- and in response the duo may take on some responsibilities beyond the original job description. The highest-ranking job sharers at American Express are Joan Girardi, 32, and Stefanie Kahn, 34, who worked together in 1990 enrolling college students as cardholders. That year they were responsible for 20% of Amex's new personal accounts. Kahn toiled Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday; Girardi on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each supervised two of their team's four professionals. They split the work by marketing channels: Girardi, who handled direct mail, exceeded her 1990 goal by 12%. Kahn, who oversaw telemarketing and ''Take- One'' displays, beat her target by 8%. Says Kahn: ''I'm very satisfied.'' When her daughter was born in 1988, the Columbia University MBA had worked at American Express for five years and felt ''on the verge of making a real contribution.'' But she also felt she should be spending more time at home with her child, and she would have left the company if not for her flexible arrangement. PART-TIME employment enables skilled people to keep up with their field, a benefit potentially as valuable to the corporation as it is to the individual. In 1988, 23% of the women taking maternity leave from Aetna Life & Casualty did not return. Says Sherry Herchenroether, director of family services: ''They tended to be high performers, that's what really concerned us. High performers strive to be high performers in everything. They wanted to be good parents and felt they had to make a decision between work and home.'' So Aetna began offering six-month unpaid parental leaves; it also pushed managers to offer their leave-taking employees part-time work after the leave expired. Result: The mommy dropout figure was cut in half, to 12%. LEAVING WORK, even for just a couple of years, makes go-getters fearful that their expertise will atrophy and they will lose the standing they have striven to attain. ''Every woman who says, 'I want to spend more time with my 1-year- old,' worries about keeping up her skills,'' says Dr. Kathryn Crowley, 37. For 2 1/2 years she has shared a job with Dr. Catherine Hansen, 34, at Harlem Hospital in New York City. They manage a team of residents, interns, and nurses who deal with critically ill infants. Crowley works Tuesday, Thursday, and alternating Fridays, and serves on call six nights a month and every seventh weekend. The schedule frees her to be with her children, Caitlin, 6, and Angus, 5, and her husband, Jim McMullen, who works evenings in the Manhattan restaurant he owns. She plans to switch back to full-time medicine when the kids are older, but ''if I took these years off completely, I would be a nervous wreck. I couldn't keep up.'' Crowley's specialty, neonatology, entails precise manual procedures, such as inserting an intravenous tube into the tiny artery of a 22-ounce premature baby. ''It's a life-or-death matter,'' she says, ''and if you haven't done it in six months, you feel uncomfortable.''

Creating a more flexible working environment isn't an issue that can be left solely to the human resources specialists, says Suzanne Moore, co-founder of the Alterna-track consulting firm in New York City. It turns out to be a strategic move that requires frequent reinforcement from the top. Hugh McColl, chairman of NCNB, the big North Carolina regional bank, where 75% of the employees are women, agrees: ''The first people who have to buy in are the 20 people at the summit.'' The bank encourages all its employees to spend two hours a week visiting their children's schools or volunteering at any school -- on company time. McColl stresses that companies shouldn't scrap such programs when a recession hits. ''It may seem inconsistent that we're asking employees to work harder now,'' he admits, ''but the need to pinch pennies and ! reduce head count plays to the short term, while flexibility is important to our long-term health.'' Would that more CEOs saw it that way. Mention flexibility, and the fellow in the corner office is likely to blurt out impatiently: ''We already have flextime, we've had it for years. Won some kind of award for it. What's the big deal?'' True, the company's dusty manuals probably describe a warmhearted policy allowing employees to come in 15 minutes early or late, on rare occasions. Says Harris Sussman, a consultant at WorkWays in Cambridge, Massachusetts: ''At most of the touted companies, flextime has three asterisks after it that spell out more conditions than your supersaver airline ticket has.'' In an ideal world, companies would not be so stuck on setting compensation by the clock and paying for presence rather than performance. They would say, This job is worth x, just do it well -- whenever, wherever, however -- and we'll pay you x. But there's a long way to go before this becomes standard operating procedure. Take the example of Anne Brown. She works Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and every other Friday as a vice president in the money markets group at Goldman Sachs, selling fixed-income securities to big institutions. How is she viewed on the trading floor? ''My peers and subordinates all comment on my situation,'' she says. ''Some are sarcastic, some are serious. But I have the mandate of senior management.'' Her salary and bonus are docked by a third to account for the time she spends at home in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her two children. Of course, the whole idea behind bonuses -- by far the biggest part of a successful Wall Streeter's total pay -- is to reward performance. Says Brown, 40: ''I told my bosses to judge me on the job I do, not the hours I keep. They argue that when I'm not here, someone has to pick up the slack. I understand that intellectually, but I still have a practical issue. I am more valuable to them three or four days a week than someone here five days who doesn't have the same experience.'' Nonetheless, she acknowledges, ''they pay me a lot for what I do.'' Understandably, people on flexible schedules are apt to complain about their reduced paychecks if it turns out that their workloads aren't reduced proportionally. The lesson: It's important for a manager to negotiate a clearly defined set of responsibilities rather than simply fix the days or hours when he or she will work. Otherwise a star performer can easily get stuck with a 100% load in a 60% time slot. IN PROFESSIONS like law, accounting, and consulting, where there is a precisely timed route to partnership, reduced work hours can mean a detour. Auditor Chris Reilly, 37, joined the flex program at Arthur Andersen, the big accounting firm, in 1989 when she returned from a seven-month maternity leave. The firm allows new parents to lighten their workloads for up to three years, and 100 managers, including three men, have participated in the program since it started in 1988. Reilly worked 35 hours a week instead of the standard 50- plus, and in April went back to a regular schedule. ''I feel confident that I've gotten the respect I would have if I were full time,'' she says. ''That's very important to me, to have credibility in the organization, to be looked at as part of the team and not as a second-class citizen. My peers understand that there's a professional pricetag -- an elongated path to partnership. It's not a freebie. It's a compromise for me and for the firm.'' Reilly started at Andersen ten years ago, and she would be up for a partnership now if she hadn't lost three years to maternity leave and a part- time schedule. But if she doesn't become a partner until she is 40 or 45, instead of 37, so what? Failing an early retirement offer you can't refuse or the unexpected inheritance of a small oil-producing principality, most people can expect to work 40 years, maybe longer. The traditional notion of success -- a swift and uninterrupted ascent into some senior management Valhalla -- stopped making sense in the Eighties, when companies flattened their hierarchies. Much of the hard-line opposition to flexibility comes from middle managers who fear losing control over their fiefdoms -- and having their results suffer. When a subordinate gulps hard and asks for a unique deal, the boss recoils. Aren't you dedicated to the company? How can we meet our near- impossible sales targets if you're not giving everything? If I let you slip out early, won't everyone want to do it? Can't you keep your personal problems at home? Even the most sensitive, supportive managers worry about fairness: How can I let one person leave early and not another? For eons managers have been taught that equity means treating everyone the same -- making rules and then seeing that everybody plays by them. Says Fran Rodgers of Work/Family Directions, a consulting firm in Boston: ''I've talked with first-line managers who fear being hit with a lawsuit if they allow someone to come back three days a week after a maternity leave. These are caring people, but they are afraid.'' They are also afraid of the reverse -- that everyone will ask for reduced workloads. But typically, the tsunami of requests doesn't materialize. For one thing, few people are willing to take the pay cut. Diehards insist that flexible hours makes sense only for individuals who labor largely on their own -- technocrats, analysts, writers -- but not for real managers, who must constantly be there for their charges. But if you give subordinates guidance so they can accomplish the work themselves, must you be accessible every hour, or every day? Not that you were to begin with. Says Fran Rodgers: ''If you can be unavailable because you are in a meeting or traveling, you can be unavailable for family reasons.'' Initially peers perceive part-timers as slacking off. Listen to Mary Beth Schoening, 32, a marketer who was part of the first job-sharing team at Lotus Development: ''A lot of people thought we were home doing our fingernails and eating bonbons while watching Oprah. But sometimes we came to work to relax.'' Lotus human resources specialist Christine Mann, herself a job sharer, interviewed the company's nine other job-sharing pairs and their managers last summer. ''People make infuriating assumptions,'' she says. ''They imply that we're not as interested in our careers or that we are somehow disloyal because we openly show that something else is important in our lives.'' The digs came in subtle ways, she discovered. There would be comments like, ''You really must be improving your tennis game.'' Someone even asked Mann why job sharers needed vacations and sick leave. She notes, ''Sometimes people forget to invite us to meetings, saying, 'We didn't think it was important to you because you're semiretired.' '' OVERCOMING these attitudes takes a real push. American Express, NCNB, and other big outfits are fighting the misconceptions through training programs for managers. But nothing does more to change attitudes than a few examples of fast-trackers who flexed and flourished. At Lotus the nine teams of job sharers ranked among the company's top performers in its annual merit-raise appraisals last April. Flexible work arrangements will always be a little suspect until men try them. So far, few have. Only 2% of eligible men have used unpaid parental leaves, for example, according to Margaret Regan, a consultant at Towers Perrin. There are insidious cultural stigmas at work here. Men are afraid of showing that work isn't the be-all and end-all of their existence. ''It's the wimp factor,'' says Regan. A 1989 study by professor Joseph Pleck of Wheaton College found that most men do take short ''informal paternity leaves'' by combining vacation time and sick days. They just don't talk about it, so they don't lose pay -- or face. But Regan predicts that twentysomething men -- half of whom are still single -- will take parental leave when their time comes: ''They don't care what you think.'' NCNB now provides up to six weeks of paid leave for fathers. Says CEO Hugh McColl: ''We had one of the biggest, toughest guys in the company ask for parental leave -- then nobody thought it so odd anymore.'' Du Pont ran into resistance, or lack of interest, when it began offering six-month unpaid parental leave in 1989. ''It was harder to implement that we had imagined,'' says Faith Wohl, the work-family coordinator. ''It took 18 months of tearing down barriers.'' Although men haven't come out in the open demanding more flexible scheduling, they are quietly watching how the female pioneers fare. Large- scale surveys of employees at American Express, NCNB, and Levi Strauss show that fathers are just as distressed as mothers about the difficulties of balancing work and family. Says consultant Regan of the hours people put in just to be seen: ''In focus groups, managerial men are saying, 'Face time is killing us.' '' A few men are coming clean, however. Six times a month, Armand Giannini, 42, a safety administrator at IBM's Houston software lab, takes up to two hours off at lunchtime to bring medication to his son, Ryan, 11, at school. Giannini makes up the time by staying two hours later in the evening. Keith Weldon, 36, an IBM engineer, took four months off to care for his newborn child. His wife, who runs her own graphic arts business in New York City, returned to work four days after the delivery. Says Weldon: ''If she walked away from her business it would collapse. IBM would surely be there when I got back.'' And Steve Eldersveld, 35, a marketing analyst at Steelcase, now works only Monday through Wednesday at the company. He spends the rest of the week at a nearby architectural firm in Grand Rapids, accumulating the 2,000 hours of professional experience he needs for accreditation as an architect. Eldersveld, who received a master's degree in architecture at the University of Michigan and likes renovating the houses of Steelcase colleagues, plans to return to the company full time in a marketing role that involves contact with other architects. In the near future there will be a big payoff for companies that can accommodate workers' needs with flexible schedules. Some of their most highly prized assets -- women -- will stay on the job. If men gradually buy in, the potential benefits are even greater: Nothing less than a freer, more humane, and more efficient approach to work. Says consultant Regan: ''You'll know it's the 21st century when we no longer equate presence with performance.''