Employee engagement is recovering since the end of the recession, new research from Gallup shows, but the improvement is uneven: Those higher up the corporate ladder are experiencing much greater gains than the people they supervise.

Engagement rose in eight out of nine sectors measured, with “managers, executives and officials” recording the most dramatic increase: 10 percentage points between 2009 and 2012.

By contrast, workers in manufacturing and sales — the next two highest improvers — had increases of six and five percentage points, respectively. People in other fields including transportation, installation and repair, clerical and office, professional, and construction and mining jobs were all slightly more engaged than they were in 2009.

“It is possible that, amid tough economic times, managers and executives are increasingly motivated to drive a sense of purpose in their organizations,“ Gallup said. The research organization also suggested that executives might be more optimistic about the recovering economy or might experience a greater sense of control than their underlings.

This last possibility is likely, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I suspect that they feel empowered in the current situation,” he said via email. “While managers might be relatively secure in their jobs, most other workers are not.”

This hunch appears to be borne out by the one outlier in Gallup’s survey: service jobs, where a complete reversal has taken place. Three years ago, these employees were the most engaged; today, this is the only sector where engagement fell.

“During the recession people were happy just to have a job,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. “Now, those that are most marketable are feeling more confident in their options.”

A report last year from the National Employment Law Project found that employment gains in the years following the recession have disproportionately been in lower-paying fields, many of them in the service industry.

“Lower-wage occupations constituted 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth,” the group said. Between 2010 and 2012, 1.7 million jobs — 43 percent of net employment growth — came in the food services, retail, and employment services sectors.

With low pay, minimal benefits and erratic hours, these aren’t what most Americans would consider great jobs, and even an increase of 1.7 million leaves a significant overflow of jobseekers.

Employers can afford to be choosy, and replacing departing workers isn’t a challenge in these lower-skilled industries. Employees know this, and that uncertainty is a contributor to their falling engagement, Lister said. “There’s a lot of fear remaining.”

“It is much easier to be engaged in a job that you expect to hold for the foreseeable future (than) a job that you could lose at any time,” Baker said.

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The moms who graduate from the nation's best universities are also among the least likely college grads to be working full-time - or at all -  a new analysis of government data finds.

About 70 percent of married moms who attended top-tier universities such as Princeton and Harvard were employed in 2010, the analysis showed.

That compares to about 80 percent of married moms who attended the nation’s least competitive universities, said Joni Hersch, the law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University who prepared the data.

The married moms from the nation’s best universities also tended to take more time out of the workforce than those who attended the least competitive universities, and to work fewer hours if they did work at all, she said. About 45 percent of the married moms from the best universities were working full-time, compared with about 57 percent of the married moms from the least selective universities.

Hersch’s analysis looked at married women between ages 21 and 54 who also had children under age 18, and is based on the National Survey of College Graduates, which provides government data on around 77,000 college graduates.

 “Every dimension showed lower labor market activity,” Hersch said.

Hersch said she thinks the results are surprising in that women who attend the best universities in the country would seem to be the most coveted potential employees. That means that employers would presumably be more likely to accommodate their desire for work/life flexibility.

“The flexibility alone doesn’t explain it,” she said. “The elites are going to dominate the non-elites in terms of flexibility.”

She thinks it’s possible that the married moms who attended the most prestigious universities are more likely to work part-time, or not at all, in part because they can afford to do so.

That’s because other research has shown that graduates from top schools are more likely to come from wealthy families and to marry men who also attend prestigious universities and come from similarly wealthy families. That could give them more financial flexibility to opt out.

Related: Class of 2013 grads, we want to hear from you

Still, she said there appears to be more to the decision than that.

“It’s not all explained by the husband’s income,” she said.

The tendency for these highly educated moms to work part-time or not at all even extended to many who had also earned advanced business degrees. But the weak economy seems to have played a role in sending some of these moms back into the workforce.

Hersch found that just about 35 percent of the married moms with MBAs who went to the best universities were working full-time in 2003, but that had increased to 54 percent by 2010.

By contrast, about 66 percent of the moms with MBAs who attended the least selective universities were working full-time in 2003, but that fell to about 48 percent in 2010.

She said that implies that in a strong economy, married moms who graduated from the best universities can hold out for the job they want. And in a weak economy, they can likely beat out the women from less selective universities to land a job if they want it.

Other researchers also have found evidence that moms with MBAs who attended prestigious universities tend to be more likely to “opt out” than their peers who get other advanced degrees, such as medical doctors and lawyers.

Catherine Wolfram, an associate professor at the University of California’s Haas School of Business who has studied this issue, said one problem may be that women who earn MBAs tend to be most qualified to work in business and finance. Unlike other fields such as medicine, she said it could be that women in business and finance find that there is little flexibility for going part-time or making other family accommodations.

“The work environment really matters,” she said.

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard who also has studied these issues extensively, said it’s always been true that many women will slow their careers when they have children. But she questioned whether that should be considered a problem when women have long lives to pursue both professional and personal goals.

“There isn’t any change in opting out. Professional women, women who have advanced degrees - even women with BAs and nothing else - are having their kids a lot later,” she said. “So, seeing women slow down a bit in their 30s may have been a surprise to some, but it’s not a surprise to anyone on the ground.”

High school and college graduates are still being hobbled by years of weak economic growth and an extremely tight job market, and that difficult start in the job market could impact the class of 2013 for years to come, a new analysis finds.

“Graduating in a bad economy has long-lasting economic consequences,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which prepared the report on young workers released Wednesday.

The liberal-leaning think tank looked at high school graduates between ages 17 and 20 who aren’t enrolled in further schooling, as well as college graduates between ages 21 and 24 who have a bachelor’s degree and aren’t seeking further education.

The analysis found that the unemployment rate for the high school grads who aren’t going to college has improved somewhat since hitting a high of 32.7 percent in 2010, but not enough to give young workers (and their parents) much comfort.

An average of 29.9 percent of high school grads between ages 17 and 20 who weren’t enrolled in further schooling were unemployed and actively looking for work between March 2012 and February of 2013, according to their analysis. That’s up from an average of 17.5 percent in 2007, when the job market was much stronger because the recession had not yet begun.

Getting a college degree still greatly improves people’s job prospects, but many young college graduates also continue to struggle to find a job after many years of high unemployment and dim job prospects.

The unemployment rate for young, recent college graduates who weren’t furthering their education stood at an average of 8.8 percent between March of 2012 and February of 2013, according to the EPI analysis. That’s down from an average of 10.4 percent in 2010, but still much higher than 5.7 percent in 2007.

The EPI report noted that more than half of young high school graduates were enrolled in a college or university, following a long-term trend toward more young Americans heading to college. Still, many are finding it difficult to finance the increasing cost of education, and the weak job market could make it hard for those young people to pay off their student loan debt.

That's especially true if they can’t land a well-paying job. The EPI analysis found that young high school grads were making an average of $9.48 an hour in 2012, while young college grads were earning an average of $16.60 an hour.

Both groups have seen wages fall in the past decade as the economy has weakened, according to EPI’s analysis. That could turn out to be a big problem for young workers because when you start out your career at a lower wage, it can take years and years to catch up.

According to EPI’s analysis, the class of 2013 could be earning less than they might have in a stronger economy for as long as 10 or 15 years.

Shierholz noted that the unemployment rate for young workers is always higher than average, and that’s especially true in times of economic distress. Now, she said, young workers are in a particularly tough place mainly because the overall job market has been so tough for so long.

 “The unemployment rate of young workers is exactly what we would expect it to be just given the broader weakness in the labor market,” Shierholz said.

The overall unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But economists weren’t cheered by the drop because it came as many Americans stopped looking for work and therefore were no longer counted in the tally. The unemployment rate only includes people who have actively looked for a job in the past four weeks.

Related:

It still pays to go to college, new data suggests

Psst, bosses: Take a good look around your office. There’s a good chance at least some of your workers are counting the days until they can take this job and shove it.

A Life Inc. post this week looking at how workers might bolt if the job market gets stronger prompted many workers to confess that they are coming to work with an eye to the door.

About 23 percent of the more than 12,000 readers who took our survey admitted that they hate their jobs. Another 60 percent said they’d be open to a better job if one came along.

The dour outlook comes after years of a tight job market that has left many employees working hard for the same – or less – pay and benefits.

 “They squeeze you like getting blood out of a turnip. Work you to death and generally treat you with disrespect. Bring it on!” one reader complained.

Others lamented that their work environment has left them demoralized, frustrated or angry.

“It's hard to stay energized while watching management all but suck the life out of an organization,” one reader lamented.

Many said they just don’t feel valued.

 “If management didn't treat us as though we are a dime a dozen, I wouldn't be looking,” one reader said.

Only about 12 percent of our readers said they love their jobs. Many of those workers said they were grateful to have a good employer.

“I was laid off for 10 months when things were bad, but was asked back when they improved. My boss has always paid and treated me well,” one reader said.

For those workers who are unhappy, it could still take a long time to find new work.

The jobless report released Friday showed a severe slowdown in the number of jobs being created. That means many people who want a new job may find that there isn’t a good one out there – yet.

How are white male managers doing when it comes to diversity? Great! At least that's what the white male managers said in a recent survey.

What do the non-white, non-male managers think? Not as upbeat.

But according to the study, it's not entirely the fault of white male managers. What we have here, it claims, is failure to communicate.

Lack of candor was a key culprit identified in the “Study on White Men Leading Through Diversity & Inclusion” which compiled results of anonymous surveys of about 700 leaders at eight major companies.

“This is a baseline, first-of-its-kind study,” said Chuck Shelton, the report’s author and managing director at Greatheart Leader Labs in Seattle.

Asked to rate the diversity effectiveness among white male leaders in their companies, 45 percent of white men gave a positive rating. Among women and people of color, only 21 percent agreed. Wide gaps were also found in the perception of white men's abilities to coach and improve the performance of diverse employees (33 points difference); build strong, diverse teams (36 points); promote diverse talent on merit (36 points); and include diverse voices in decision making (40 points.)

They are doing great when it comes to being respectful, the survey said, but fall short when it comes to saying what they really think. Too many fear that any criticism or discussion of race or gender will likely get them in trouble, so they avoid it entirely.

Silence can compound the issue. “You don’t provide the feedback you would give to the people who look like you,” Shelton said. “Ultimately you’re discriminating because you’re not allowing that person to improve and get ahead.”

Shelton has been studying this topic for years and is himself no stranger to the outraged criticism from people with strong reactions to the topic. (For a sample, see the so-called reviews at Amazon of Shelton’s 2008 book “Leadership 101 for White Men: How to Work Successfully with Black Colleagues and Customers.”)

Related: Have you been hit hard by a career misstep?

The survey was taken anonymously by managers at Alcoa, Bank of America, Intel, Exelon, Marsh & McLennan Companies, PepsiCo, Wal-Mart Stores and PWC. About 58 percent of the respondents were white men and about 10 percent of the managers had global responsibilities. Future studies, Shelton said, will focus on making an economic connection between company diversity and their branding, sales, marketing and talent retention.

Alcoa and other big firms that took part in the study said they’re eager to use the data to help even their white men to lean into the diversity discussion.

The survey provided the companies with a lot of information to chew on, said Gena Lovett, Alcoa's chief diversity officer. “This is about enhancing our leadership,” she said. “You can’t fix what you don’t know.”

While the report revealed encouraging information, she was surprised by some of the gaps. Some managers admitted they had a hard time articulating the business case for creating a diverse work force.

Now that we know, “these are easy to resolve,” said Lovett. Easy, she said, because Alcoa already has concrete examples of how diversity impacts their bottom line. They have examples of revenues rising as a business unit grows more diverse and technical innovations when they mix up the team’s make-up.

In Alcoa's tech areas, it's very pronounced. “They demand diverse teams. That’s the only way they can get innovation,” Lovett said. One example she named was the creation of the Dura-Bright™ wheels that are lightweight and easy to clean. That team was made up of people from several countries, generations, and specialities including technicians and plant people.

Also “our customers have made it very clear … that they want to see people who look like them,” Lovett said, mentioning that Alcoa is in 31 countries.

The survey also allows the companies to use numbers where there were previously only anecdotes. “Having that empirical evidence is an eye-opener,” said David Thomas, dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Thomas served as a consultant on the study.

He pointed out that the companies that took part in the survey already had good reputations for diversity within their industries. The good reputations, he said, can fool you into thinking everything’s fixed. “Diversity is one of those topics in which many people, many companies, they hear the anecdotes and they think they are the exception to the rule,” Thomas said.

At McDonough, the MBA program now incorporates work on recognizing your unconscious biases, Thomas said.

This isn’t going to work for everyone, Shelton said. But “there’s a huge group of white men in the middle who are teachable,” he said. “That’s why the baseline is so encouraging.”

They may go to great lengths to avoid work, but your slacker co-workers actually love their jobs. A new study comparing job performance and satisfaction found that the least-productive workers are also the most engaged in nearly half of workplaces.

At 42 percent of more than 200 companies studied, leadership training and research firm Leadership IQ found that the people who spend the day perusing Pinterest or updating their fantasy football rosters are more engaged than middle-of-the-road and even star workers.

“We’re putting numbers to things we all kind of intuitively know,” said Leadership IQ CEO Mark Murphy. 

Leadership IQ, which drew on its research database to survey 207 companies, also carried out a more detailed study of one representative example, a 1,000-person tech service provider on which the consulting firm had detailed data about employee engagement and performance. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom that those who contribute more to their employer's success are the most engaged with their jobs.

In this study, low performers were more likely to say they give 100 percent at work, that their company is a great place to work and that everyone there does an equally good job. So, in addition to not being very good at the work itself, these workers also think they’re much better at their jobs than they actually are.

"You can think you’re giving 100 percent effort, but if you don’t know exactly what 100 percent looks like and how that translates into performance... that’s where this asymmetry comes from," Murphy said.

A major reason your slacker co-workers like their jobs so much is because you’re doing their work for them. The study found that high performers were least likely to say their company held people accountable for their work, while the lowest performers were the most likely to say they received praise for the work they do.

Managers who dole out “attaboys” and merit raises across the board bear a lot of the blame for this, Murphy said. "It’s sort of the everybody-gets-a-trophy phenomenon," he said. "What they don’t realize is that by not differentiating the high performers, you really are irritating the high performers... who are keeping you in business.”

As if giving sub-par performers a pat on the back wasn’t bad enough, the people who do pull their weight often get stuck cleaning up after their less-diligent colleagues. In another study, Leadership IQ found that 93 percent of employees said working with a poor performer had a negative impact on their own productivity.

Murphy said managers may be afraid of confronting people who turn in shoddy work, especially if they know their harder-working colleagues will pick up the slack.

“When there isn’t sufficient accountability... and standards of performance, it’s actually not that bad a job to be a low performer," he said. "We see a lot of organizations where managers will even promote a low performer just to get them out of their department."

It's discouraging, but before you throw in the towel and spend the rest of the day looking at pictures of cats online, there are a couple of things good employees can do if they're stuck in a workplace where no poor deed goes unrewarded.

For one thing, talk to your boss, Murphy said. The idea isn’t to call out the co-worker who spends all day hanging around the coffee machine, but to ask the company to implement better ways to measure performance — which will separate the go-getters from the also-rans.

If that fails, dust off your resume. Companies where hard work is rewarded realize, “There are a lot of frustrated high performers out there and they’re really looking for organizations who recognize what they bring,” Murphy said.

We all have them: those work tasks hanging over our head that we keep putting off even though doing so makes us feel even worse.

Tap into that guilt over unaccomplished tasks and use it to make you a more productive worker, said Nick Jehlen, partner at design consulting firm Action Mill.

Jehlen started an experiment he dubbed “guilt hour.” At a weekly meeting, workers publicly identified the undone task they felt the most guilty about putting off. Everyone spent the rest of the hour tackling the task they named. “It was instantly helpful,” Jehlen said.

Jehlen said that the “social aspect,” in which co-workers will offer to help out or share a burden, is one benefit, since tasks can be transferred but a person's sense of guilt hanging over it doesn't go along with it. “People feel guilty about something they’re not doing ... but somebody else can take it off their plate and not feel guilty about it," he said.

It’s possible to use guilt in a positive way to complete tasks even without group feedback, though. There are a couple of principles that anyone can apply to their own backlog of dreaded duties, Jehlen said.

One reason “guilt hour” works is because people spend an entire hour working on just their individual single tasks. “It’s a huge, huge part of it,” Jehlen said.

"Attention has become the most critical barrier today to high performance and productivity," Louis S. Csoka, president and founder of APEX Performance, said via email.

“Multi-tasking and other things can diminish our productivity,” said Taya R. Cohen, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. “With procrastination, often it’s just starting or carving out that time.”

Making the time is one catalyst to getting the job done. Another is saying you’ll do the task you’re putting off in front of other people.

“Accountability can be a really powerful tool,” said Mark Ellwood, president of Pace Productivity. He created a website called BuddyHive.com to help workers stuck in a rut on a personal or professional project. They can use the site to find like-minded people who will check in with them, offer advice and hold them accountable. 

It’s also worth taking a look at what kinds of tasks you tend to put off, and which ones you feel the worst about shirking. “Anytime you’re asking somebody for a favor or advice, that’s the kind of thing that often comes up” in guilt hour, Jehlen said.

Ellwood said administrative tasks are often blamed for sapping productivity. “The sorts of things people are procrastinating are the things they don’t see as adding value to their jobs," he said. But although we might not see them as valuable, paperwork and the like can prompt stronger feelings of guilt because these tasks often hold up someone else's workflow if they're left undone. 

Cohen added that it’s also important to keep the guilt focused on a specific task. “Guilt can be good if if’s focused on specific behaviors you can then do something about.” Feeling bad about yourself as a person and your work overall, though, can be detrimental.

If done wrong, tapping workplace guilt can be bad for morale. "This is a negative approach to something that should be looked at it in a more positive and encouraging mode," Csoka said. People would be better off just developing and executing a clear goal plan, he said.

But if an unfinished task is really putting a drag on productivity, acknowledging the feelings you have about it might not hurt. “The longer you don’t do it, the more guilty you feel about it and the harder it is to get done,” Jehlen said. So, block out an hour on your calendar and alleviate your guilt.

CVS Caremark has put its employees on notice that they need to reveal their weight or pay a monthly $50 penalty. 

“Avoid the $600 annual surcharge,” CVS warns its employees who use the company’s health insurance plan. They’ve been told they are required by May 1 to show up to a doctor for an annual WebMD Wellness Review and submit to tests for blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass and body weight.

“Going forward, you'll be expected not just to know your numbers - but also to take action to manage them,” the CVS policy states.

“There are no penalties based on the results of a wellness screening,” a CVS spokesman told NBCNews via email. “Choosing not to have a screening will result in a $50/month increase.” 

While many employers have been pushing its workers to get healthier, it’s usually through incentives rather than penalties. “This is about as coercive and blunt as I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Deborah C. Peel, the founder of Patient Privacy Rights, a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas. 

“Many employers want to do something for their workers, but very few of them are stupid enough to say give us the information and sign this form and say it’s voluntary,” Peel said. 

Smokers working for CVS are also warned: “You must either be tobacco-free by May 1, 2014, or participate in the WebMD tobacco cessation program.” Defiant smokers can avoid penalties if they are healthy enough in other categories specified by the company. 

Despite the company’s promises, Peel worries if CVS and WebMD will be able to keep the employee records completely private. Peel said people are already declining to get health treatment for issues ranging from psychiatry to sexual diseases, for fear the information will not be kept private. 

In a statement, CVS said the employee health data will be kept private and it defended its new policy. CVS, which is based in Rhode Island, also said the company would never see the test results.

“The use of health screenings by employer-sponsored health plans is a common practice. According to a National Business Group on Health survey, 79 percent of employers offered a health assessment in 2011 and 76 percent of those employers offered incentives for completion. Also, 62 percent of large employers offered biometric screenings and 52 percent of those employers offered incentives for completion),’ the CVS  statement reads in part. 

“CVS Caremark is committed to providing medical coverage and health care programs for our colleagues and our benefits program is evolving to help our colleagues engage more actively to improve their health and manage health-associated costs. An initial step to accomplish this goal is a health screening and wellness review so that colleagues know their key health metrics in order to take action to improve their overall health, if necessary.” 

WebMD did not immediately respond to a request to comment on its program. 

The CVS policy was first reported Tuesday by the Boston Herald.

As part of her push to turn around Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has taken some popular steps (like doling out free food and iPhones) and some not-so-popular ones (like making employees come into the office if they want those goodies — or their jobs). Now, insiders say Mayer’s fixation on college credentials is hindering Yahoo’s ability to hire top talent.

Recruiting experts say focusing on an applicant’s “pedigree” may seem like a shortcut to hiring only the cream of the crop, but this practice can have a negative impact in the long term, especially for tech companies whose survival depends on innovation.

On the company’s fourth quarter conference call in January, Mayer discussed implementing “rigorous hiring protocols” — a phrase unnamed company employees cited by Reuters say is code for a newfound zeal for high grades and degrees from prestigious universities like Stanford. (Yahoo declined to comment on what a company spokeswoman characterized as “rumors.”)

“Given the tight supply of tech talent... I think it’s a rather risky strategy to limit your talent pool with that kind of filter,” said Asa Sphar, vice president of recruitment and profiling at technology search firm CSI Executive Search, LLC.

“It doesn’t in any way mean there aren’t extraordinary people coming out of [less prestigious] colleges,” said John Challenger, CEO of executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 

Some companies do use the college question as what Challenger called a “sorting mechanism” for sifting through resumes for entry level positions. “The name on the diploma really matters most in your first couple jobs.” To fill more senior positions, he said, “Only looking for grads from certain schools would be short-sighted."

“There’s an advantage in this kind of plan in terms of speed but there’s a big disadvantage in this plan in terms of innovation,” said Eric C. Peterson, manager of diversity and inclusion Society for Human Resource Management. Hiring people who have been educated the same way can make it easier for people to work together in teams, but it curtails the infusion of new ideas and perspectives.

Still, Challenger pointed out that some companies want their people to have similar educational backgrounds. “There are obviously companies that have cultures where a lot of people come from certain schools,” he said.

Feeling like the name of the school matters more than an individual's achievements can be particularly frustrating for the rank-and-file today. It touches on a larger debate as to whether a college degree is worth the investment when student loan balances are soaring and new graduates often struggle to find jobs.

According to a 2011 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, people with just a high school diploma earn an average of $32,600 a year, which adds up to $1,304,000 over the course of their time in the workforce.

By contrast, college graduates with four-year degrees have average lifetime earnings of $2,268,000 — nearly a million dollars more. Computer software engineers do even better than that, with an average lifetime paycheck of $3,554,000. Ironically, Yahoo’s last CEO, Scott Thompson, left the company after it was discovered that his claim to hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science was false. 

But hiring exclusively from prestigious universities can backfire, as Northwestern University assistant professor of management and organizations Lauren Rivera found in a 2011 paper. When evaluating job applicants who graduated from a “top five” school, companies “attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance” after they were actually hired.

Denise Lidell, founder of IT search and recruiting company High-Tech Professionals, said limiting the pool of potential candidates to a short list of schools has other down sides, too: It leads to positions staying unfilled longer, because there are fewer potential candidates. “They’re probably eliminating some top candidates,” she said. And when companies do find people that meet their specifications, they are more likely to be lured away by a competitor, given the high demand for tech talent.

There are some small indications that this hiring practice may be falling out of favor. An annual survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers about hiring attributes did find that the importance of school name has risen slightly, but the good news is that leadership positions held, major and grades earned, and extracurricular activities taken were all considered more important.

Rivera also noted that extracurricular activities could be a more valuable assessment tool for potential new hires, saying, “Participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value.”

Focusing on elite schools to the exclusion of other factors like extracurricular participation is an especially bad idea for a technology company that needs a steady supply of cutting-edge ideas. “A lot of organizations out there want to be more creative, more innovative than their competitors,” Peterson said. “Hiring a whole bunch of people who think exactly the same way is not going to get you there... Groupthink is the antithesis of innovation."

Adrees Latif / Reuters

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, speaks during an interview in New York.

“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes,” writes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book, "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead," a self-named “manifesto” for her proposed women’s revolution.  

As appealing as such a world may sound, some working women argue that it’s easier said than done. 

Nonsense, Sandberg says. Too many women are being overlooked for promotions due to lack of confidence and poor negotiation skills, not lack of opportunity. It has become the norm for women to sidestep advancement in order to focus on family responsibilities, she writes, and the result is a shocking imbalance of power on the workforce. 

Women still only hold 4 percent of top government posts worldwide, 14 percent of top corporate jobs and 17 percent of board seats, and those numbers haven’t budged over the past decade. With a skilled, college-educated female army out there, there is no reason men are still holding the keys the kingdom. 

But any "revolution" is bound to draw its fair share of criticism, and this one is no exception. Sandberg, a Harvard-educated, über-power player and Facebook’s COO, is often derided for being out of touch with the challenges and frustrations of ordinary working women. Sandberg’s supporters counter, who better to lead a revolution? – and point out that she has been able to create a meaningful dialogue about the driving forces that define most women’s lives – a conversation that has not taken place on a national scale for quite a long time. 

“It’s hard to talk about women leaving the workforce without sounding like you’re criticizing the choices they’ve made. But by definition, if women aren’t out there making the laws, running the corporations, doing the research – if women aren’t engaged in professional life, they’re not having an impact,” says Kim Grahl, a physician and senior clinical educator at North Shore University Health System in Evanston, Ill.  “So how can you blame it on men when women have taken themselves out of the game?” 

Grahl, a mother of two, has kept her place in the workforce while raising her children. But she’s the first to admit that she has allowed her career to take a backseat to her husband’s. “I have a much less interesting career than my husband has. So yes, women are making our own choices but the problem is, sometimes we’re not given very good choices.” 

The fallacy, she says, shared by many women of her generation, was that it was possible to take time off to raise children and then jump back into the game. 

“It’s like we were sold a bill of goods,” she says. “Jobs demand too much. It would be good if you could take 15 percent of your time to devote to family life – but this is a fantasy, right? The sheer volume of menial work that a mother has, I mean, you’re just exhausted. And then, all of a sudden you wake up and you’re 46.  And the train has gone by. And when it went by, you were in the basement doing laundry.” 

Suzanne Keller, an attorney at The Rachel Coalition, a nonprofit women’s organization in New Jersey, agrees that managing two high-powered careers along with a family can be next to impossible. 

“It’s very hard to accept that I was on a trajectory to be higher in my field than I am,” says Keller, a Harvard Law School graduate whose husband is the director of two Health and Human Rights programs at New York University. “I’m not out there in the way that I could have been if my husband’s job wasn’t so demanding. It’s very hard for two people have big careers.  It’s an incredible strain on a family.” 

Julie Martin, an attorney at Scott, Scriven and Wahoff, LLP in Columbus, Ohio, says she was able to “lean in” and make partner at her law firm because her husband was willing to “lean out.” 

“How I did it was by having a great spouse who took on 50 percent or more of the home responsibility,” she acknowledges. “My husband is a high school English teacher, so he’s home with the kids every summer and shares their schedule. He works the structured hours so I can work the crazy hours.” 

In fact, while most working women acknowledge the importance of a helpful partner, many said the single most important factor in successfully “leaning in” is a supportive employer.  For Laura Griffin, publications editor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, an understanding boss made it possible for her return to her job at a prominent Dallas newspaper after her first child was born.  

“My boss made it easy for me to come back from maternity leave,” she says. “He gave me a sizable raise before I left, let me come back at 30 hours a week and made sure I still had worthwhile assignments. He knew that I needed a compelling reason to 'lean in' to my job when I had the tug of a baby at home.” 

Martin concurs that a family-friendly employer can make the difference between a working mom and a stay-at-home mom. 

“I was fortunate to have an employer who allowed me to work flexible hours,” she says. “It was a flex-time thing, no questions asked: an exchange of office hours for family time.” 

“We don’t live in a culture where anyone can 'lean into' the home and not expect to take a hit on their career,” Keller says. “Sheryl Sandberg’s telling people to lean in or lean out when she should be talking about the culture of business. For instance, why is Yahoo taking away telecommuting? That’s been something that’s been really helpful to women.” 

Mwezi Pugh, a sixth-grade literacy teacher in the New York City public school system, says the work environment at many large corporations, particularly within the competitive financial sector, tends to be female unfriendly. 

“Before I became a teacher I worked for Morgan Stanley, and I could see that my female boss had to work twice as hard as the men in that male-dominated industry,” she says. “I feel like there’s still an 'old boys network' at those places. Men are given extended opportunities to socialize and work their way up, such as going for drinks at a bar or going to a game.  Women are less likely to be asked along in those situations. And even if they went, they’d be the only woman there.” 

Because the balance of work and family can be so fragile, many women say a difficult boss or a hostile work environment can be enough to derail her career -- or at least change the course of it. 

“When I was pregnant with my second child, I got a new boss who resented my maternity leave and my shorter work week,” recalls Griffin of her days at the newspaper.  “She gave me assignments no one else wanted to work on.  It wasn't long before I decided that giving up my time with my children for that job wasn't worth it.” 

Griffin eventually moved to the East Coast and later, found work as an editor.  

“If I had leaned into my job when my kids were little, I have no doubt I'd now be at a very different place in my career,” she says.  “But I think I would have missed a lot, too.  No matter what you do as a woman, it seems you feel guilty.  So I guess I leaned in toward my kids.”

Pascal Lauener / Reuters

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in this January 25, 2013, file photo.

Ever since the world got wind of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book  “Lean In,” which landed on store shelves Monday, it’s been viewed as a sort of modern-day feminist manifesto of how women can get ahead in the corporate world.

And while it is that in many respects, it can also be seen as a good, common-sense approach to career advancement, for either gender.

Some academics are finding it's providing a good springboard for the discussion.

Pulin Sanghvi, assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said he liked Sandberg’s message of developing your own greatness on your own terms. Leaders are rewarded for their “spikiness,” he said, rather than their well-rounded skills.

Filled with studies to back up her anecdotes, Sandberg refrains from whining about workplace inequality. Instead, she offers dozens of techniques that can level the playing field faster.

She gives specific examples of changes that can be made by men (hire and promote women, share household chores with your spouse), companies (offer paid personal time off, engineer less rigid schedules) and government (support affordable child care). Mainly, however, it’s about how women (or men) can work the system even if it’s broken.

Here are some of Sandberg’s pointers:

• Seek a job at a fast-growing company because there will be more opportunities than at a place that is stagnant or shrinking. "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask what seat, you just get on," she writes that Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said in persuading her to work at the company.
• Pay attention and make your own opportunities. Sandberg writes that “increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.”
• Don’t talk yourself out of applying for a job if you don’t have 100 percent of the skills. Sandberg cites a 2008 study at Hewlett-Packard that found women only apply for a job if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria. Men apply if they think they meet 60 percent of the requirements. “I want to do that – and I’ll learn by doing it,” is the more successful mindset.
• Women may have to ask for a raise differently than men. Sandberg cites a study that shows women touting their own success are seen as pushy. One trick is to advocate for yourself as a strong member of a team that deserves the reward. Say, "We had a great year," versus, "I had a great year." Here, Sandberg explains a central point of her book: "I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations," but it's a means to an end, she argues, and it won't always have to be this way.
• Prioritize. In her “Myth of Doing It All” chapter, Sandberg quotes Dr. Laura Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, who admits to not keeping her linens perfectly folded all the time. “I had to decide what mattered and what didn’t and I learned to be a perfectionist in only the things that mattered,” Glimcher said.
• Don’t ask a stranger to mentor you. Instead, ask smart questions to get noticed. In one example, Sandberg notices a junior employee leaving a conference room armed with a succinct, casual-sounding question for a manager. She also cites a woman she met at a conference, Clara Shih of Hearsay Social, who followed up with a series of short emails with thoughtful questions she could not get answered elsewhere.
• When starting out, think of child care costs as an investment. While you may only break even at the start, eventually your salary will rise, making the child care costs a smaller percentage of your paycheck.
• “Employees who concentrate on results and impact are the most valuable,” Sandberg writes. One example she uses is from Lori Goler, who was then the senior director of marketing at eBay. Her job pitch to Sandberg was basically, “What is your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” Goler was hired to run recruiting at Facebook.
• Get more sleep to become a better problem solver.

Of course we’re more productive — we’re always “at work.”

In the wake of Yahoo and Best Buy ordering telecommuters back to the office, one of the strongest arguments for working from home is that it increases productivity. While nixing the commute and eliminating distractions certainly helps, there’s also another reason why the home office is so good for productivity.

The ubiquity of mobile devices today means that the “home office” has become more of a concept than a place. The dark underbelly of greater flexibility is that we find ourselves checking and responding to work email when we’re at the gym, out on dates and watching our kids’ soccer games.

“The technology that’s happened over the last decade or so is tremendous... but at the same time, I feel constantly connected now,” said James Wagner, a salesman at Rema Foods in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., who upgraded to a new BlackBerry about a year ago.

“You get conditioned to constantly be looking at the thing. For example, I get up in the morning... I’m literally still in bed and I’m checking emails.”

Statistics indicate that Wagner has plenty of company. Market research firm IDC predicts that 137 million smartphones will be shipped to the United States this year, a 14 percent increase over last year. According to the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, and 31 percent own a tablet. College graduates and those whose annual household income is $75,000 or more are much likelier to own a smartphone.

As technology advances, mobile devices can do more — which lets us do more. In particular, the road to constant connectivity is paved with iPads.

“The smartphone is a little too little, the laptop is a little too big,” said Gil Gordon, author of "Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career." A tablet “hits the sweet spot there... Things you probably wouldn’t think of doing with a smartphone you can do on an iPad and don’t think twice about it.”

“Total USA tablet shipments reached 45.2 million units in 2012, up from 32.4 million in 2011,” Tom Mainelli, IDC Research Director, Tablets, said via email. “We're forecasting the U.S. market to hit 62.6 million units in 2013.”

Stefani Stankiewicz, an account manager at Manning Automotive Marketing in Wyckoff, N.J., replaced her Droid with an iPhone and got an iPad about a year ago. “I can do a lot more with the iPhone,” she said. “It’s a blessing and a curse.” 

Stankiewicz said her devices give her near-constant contact with her job. “I have a G-chat app... Yesterday, I left early because my grandfather was in the hospital, and I was G-chatting with everybody,” she said.

American workers have been sold a promise that the constant access afforded by our mobile devices would give us more flexibility as to where and when we worked. The problem is that all these late-night and weekend emails aren’t replacing hours spent in the office — they’re adding to them.

“I call it my necessary evil,” Wagner said. “If I didn’t do that and keep up, it would be impossible to keep up with what’s getting thrown at me every day.”

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that between half and two-thirds of telecommuting hours are on top of a standard 40-hour workweek. “The ability of employees to work at home may actually allow employers to raise expectations for work availability during evenings and weekends and foster longer workdays and workweeks,” researchers warned.

While we could just turn off those devices when we’re eating dinner or on vacation, we don’t. A Salary.com survey found that a third of people say they feel anxious when they can’t check their work email or voicemail for an “extended” period of time.

For an upcoming vacation, Stankiewicz said she planned to not check her work email, but admitted she might cave. “I’m going to really try not to. I might peek and check just to see what’s going on... because it’s right there.”

“It’s a double edged sword,” said Rob Smith, co-author of "Telework: A Critical Component of Your Total Rewards Strategy." “The technology has advanced more quickly than the policies and procedures in the workplace that would allow for a proper work-life balance. We haven’t found that right balance yet.”

Companies generally don’t come out and say they want their employees on-call 24/7, but some workers say there are clear signs from management that answering emails outside of work hours is encouraged if not outright expected.

Knowing that the boss is burning the midnight oil, for instance, can make employees feel obligated to do the same. Wagner said it wasn’t uncommon for his company’s president, with whom he works closely, to send him multiple emails on Sunday nights.

"He certainly works as hard as anyone... Without saying it, he certainly likes when you respond at any time. He likes to see that his people are always connected,” he said.

“In this economy, with so many people out of work, they’re almost afraid of not being seen as accessible and available and responsive,” Gordon said. “So they let the technology intrude at the dinner table or their kid’s soccer game.”

This spillover can cause tension in people’s personal relationships. “We’ll be sitting there, having dinner, and it’ll be sitting on the table,” Wagner said of his omnipresent BlackBerry. “My wife... has literally held it over a toilet before.”

“My boyfriend does complain that I’m on my phone answering emails a lot,” Stankiewicz said. “Am I being more productive or am I stopping myself from having a social life?”