Upwardly Mobile Families Face Uphill Climb for Stability

Michele Calbi’s on the fast track, and her family’s having the darndest time keeping up.

It’s not so bad that the 40-year-old sales administration manager for Toyota Motor Sales USA was transferred from her longtime home of Portland, Ore., last year to the company’s headquarters in Torrance.

The real problem is that she expects to be in Southern California for only two or three years. This time. As she wends her way through Toyota’s hierarchy, back and forth from the corporate offices, Calbi figures she’ll be transferred at least five more times.

So Calbi’s husband, Tom Gineo, decided to sit out this first of many transfers and stay in Portland for a while tending to his own career. Son Tommy, 4, came along to Torrance. The next move, the family figures, will bring them all together again. Somewhere. Probably.

“I did look at coming down here as an adventure,” says the energetic Calbi. “I go to new restaurants, the beach, and I try not to think about the things I left behind. . . . It’s not easy. I would not encourage anybody to go this route. It’s very difficult. Mentally the couple has to be ready for this.”

In their tenacious little family unit, Michele, Tom and Tommy embody many of the stresses facing the corporate world and the upwardly mobile American family, ‘90s style. Modern categories include the moving mom, the troubled transfer, the fractured family and the cautious corporation.

In these days of downsizing and cost containment, families are dragging their feet more than ever when it comes to pulling up stakes for the sake of the company.

Women, children and the nastily named “trailing spouse” are increasingly changing the corporate world. Although their numbers are not taking the corporate world by storm, more women are being transferred for work than ever before. Which means that more men are following them.

And while corporations are spending less money on employee relocations, they are taking family issues into consideration like never before as they move their workers across the American landscape.

“What we have found in recent years is that companies have tended to cut back somewhat on the real-estate-related services that they pay for. What we have seen is more services provided to the family, especially the ‘trailing spouse,’ ” says Steve Mumma, a spokesman for Atlas Van Lines, which has surveyed work force mobility trends for 30 years. “They’re a more important figure in the transfer.”

In 1997, nearly 75% of companies surveyed by Atlas said employees most often turn down a relocation because they want to remain close to family members, up from 55% in 1996.

Cost of living has dropped to No. 3 among the reasons to decline a transfer--behind that fast-rising reason, a spouse’s career. While the profile of the “typical” transferee remains a 35- to 45-year-old married white man with two children, 15% of all transferees are women, according to the Employee Relocation Council, up from 5% in 1980.

As a result of this change in the American work force, companies are increasingly offering career assistance to the spouses of their transferring workers. They are also offering elder-care assistance more than ever.

“If someone in a meeting said 10 years ago, ‘I’m concerned about leaving my parents,’ you’d just kind of look at them,” says Bill Agopian, Toyota Motor Sales’ human resources consultant. “I hear it every week now from someone.”

It is hard enough to move the once-traditional family of working dad, stay-at-home mom, two kids, dog and goldfish. But when mom and dad both work, the complications are manifold. No one has time to research doctors and schools. Who’s going to find gymnastics lessons and figure out where to get the car tuned up?

“Either the new employee takes time off or the spouse--who’s supposed to be looking for a job--is doing this,” says Laura Herring, a psychologist and founder of the Impact Group, a St. Louis-based consulting firm specializing in relocation issues.

“You’re out of income longer,” Herring says. “No matter what kind of job they get, they can’t get over the fact that they didn’t bargain for this.”

Which is why 50% of all corporations provide some type of spouse employment assistance, according to the Employee Relocation Council. More than two-thirds of the companies that provide such assistance pay the fees of an outside consulting or placement agency.

Other help includes paying for resume preparation and printing costs, covering the costs of required licensing or exams and offering paid job-hunting trips.

Judy Link, executive vice president of San Ramon, Calif.-based CHA Relocation Management Inc., points out that low unemployment has created a highly competitive job market, particularly in technology-related fields.

“For employees moving to Los Angeles or San Francisco, companies are giving a lot of perks--hiring bonuses, especially in the Silicon Valley, and housing allowances,” Link says. “We’ve had situations where they’ve made all the resources available and done networking to find the spouse a job.”

Not only are these sorts of services in increasing demand and offered more often, but in these penny-pinching times they are also cheaper than the grand real estate gestures that companies used to make with greater frequency.

The average amount that companies pay for transferring an employee within the United States has shrunk by nearly half over the last five years. In 1993, the Atlas survey says, companies were paying $50,713 on average for a move. Today, the average is $27,810.

Companies are less likely to guarantee a sale price for the home a transferring employee is leaving behind, less likely to purchase that former residence, to offer a cost-of-living or mortgage differential and more likely to pay only the real estate commission.

But even if a company goes the extra mile for a worker who is transferring the extra mile, a move will always be stressful for a two-career family. With some preparation, however, most major problems can be avoided.

For Kenneth--who was happy to talk about his move from Los Angeles to San Francisco but did not want his real name used--the key to a smooth relocation was a realistic set of expectations and some serious financial planning.

When Kenneth’s wife was transferred north, he quit his job and came along. After six weeks, he had landed a good position. “Clearly, a key was that we had set aside enough money so that I could look for a job without any crushing financial pressure,” he said. “There was no worry about making the next car payment or the next month’s rent. And that helped.”

Communication is also of life-or-death importance when it comes to moving a two-career couple--especially if the one who is transferred is a woman and the one who follows is a man. In fact, Herring’s company has a special program that teaches women and men in such circumstances what to say to each other--and what not to say.

The reason, Herring says, is that male employees don’t always assume that their spouses need help. The men have probably been transferred before, and the women have managed on their own, so the men assume they don’t need help.

The Impact Group has relocated many executive women, and they tend to ask for support for their husbands. “They don’t want to go to their husbands and say, ‘This is what I’m getting, and there’s nothing for you,’ ” Herring says.

As part of its program for transferring women, Herring says, the Impact Group teaches them not to interfere with their husbands’ job searches. And it teaches the men that they need to keep their wives updated.

“The female transferee will interfere,” she says. “They want to manage the man’s job search. There’s enough hidden resentment . . . that it puts so much pressure on him. We’ve developed a tape for the female executive to say, ‘Look, this doesn’t work for him.’ ”

The lesson for the male half of the equation? “It’s important to keep your wife informed of some of what you’re doing,” Herring says. “Negotiate with her when you’re willing to talk and when you’re not.”