Employer Profile

IT workers at this company, which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, are given the choice of three work/life balance policies. The "grant day" policy allows exempt employees to take a half or full day off after working a certain number of hours above and beyond their regular schedules. The remote access policy allows employees to work from off-site locations (such as their homes), and the flextime policy includes a variety of schedules, such as compressed workweeks. An IT policy and culture team designed and implemented these policies and helps to encourage colleagues to take advantage of them. After the IT department pilot, the new programs were rolled out across the entire company last year. Another IT team focused on improving and streamlining the communication process across all IT workgroups, and an infrastructure group worked on decreasing the number of weekends worked and offering employees greater flexibility to work remotely. The team helped to increase the availability of laptops and 3G cards to help with remote access. It also upgraded the quality assurance testing environment to allow changes to be tested during the week as opposed to weekends only, as had been the case previously.