Women in the homeplace
7 ways to make work more inclusive during a pandemic
By Anisha Singh
Women are at the front of the pandemic response; globally, 70% of front-line health and social care workers are women (1). Yet, unequal pay, higher cases of COVID-19 infections in some countries, and the responsibilities of unpaid care (2)(3), remain on these women. However, these are not the only women facing a disproportionate burden of the pandemic. For women in other organizations (such as start-ups, consultancies, universities, research organizations), where in theory men and women have equal opportunity to work from home, the lock-downs are making the disproportionate effects especially invisible.
So what can you do about it as an organisation? We ran a survey within Busara and, based on the results here are a few measures we put in place that, we hope, you can too. To read at length about the survey and the findings that informed these seven steps, visit the Busara COVID-19 portal here.
- Emphasize flexible working hours, adding house work to calendars and normalize the home setting
We’ve set an organizational norm to allow staff to add home responsibilities such as chores, cooking, childcare to their Busara calendars and block off this time from meetings. Children, partners, family members and pets are more than welcome on our Zoom meetings — it’s difficult to find a quiet space to take calls, and we’re in it as a team. Lastly, we’ve extended our flexible working hour policy to allow staff to craft the work day that suits their needs (night-time hours, weekend hours, whatever is easiest).
2. Create a private support group across teams and divisions
We have a private communication channel for parents and others that’s a safe space to share struggles maintaining work-life balance, share recipes, books, parent-child activities, problem-solving ideas, etc. The channel is opt-in only, open to anyone, but comes with the disclaimer that there are no reporting relations to be adhered to in the channel. Using behavioral science on ourselves, upon joining, staff are expected to commit to not sharing information from the channel as feedback or in other places.
3. Design inclusive wellness activities that are not time-bound
To complement the one-off virtual activities such as virtual happy hours, quizzes and movie nights, we’ve introduced a series of ongoing activities (around music, gaming, book clubs etc) that staff can engage with during work hours, outside work hours and in their own time — passively or actively. Our team lunches have now moved to lunches with partners and family members of staff at home, and we have smaller activities for older staff, parents, and international/local staff.
4. Add empathy to monthly feedback sessions
As feedback is ingrained in Busara culture, we’ve added some reminders to our monthly feedback forms. Specifically, we have taglines to remind direct managers to map objectives and time utilization targets to the current world scenario and particular circumstances of the individual employee, and think if their feedback would be different if they were giving the same feedback to someone else (man/woman/young/old).
5. Free up some mind-space for parents
Most of our staff worried about having to be creative and engage their child’s interest everyday in addition to having to be creative and engaging with their work. So, we’ve put together a list of resources for parents to keep their children busy — this includes a curated list of blog posts, YouTube channels, different online and offline activities and contacts for teachers who are conducting online sessions for children.
6. Empower managers to make better task allocations
In our monthly managers training, we’re sharing norms around how to ensure equal distribution of tasks that fall outside someone’s direct objectives. For example, when assigning a new task, previous task-owners are to be removed from potential volunteers, and managers are to suggest male staff members to take on various tasks.
7. Rotate and commit to part-time staff
At Busara, we are working with a smaller set of part-time staff at a given time, but rotating part-time work amongst the larger pool of part-time staff so there are equal employment opportunities across the board. We have also designed an internal initiative that identifies part-time workers most in need and added them to our list of Give More Tomorrow recipients.
Footnotes:
(1) https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/3/news-womens-needs-and-leadership-in-covid-19-response
(2) UN Women based on data from Spain’s Ministry of Health
(3) UN Women’s Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020
Reach out to us or contact the author if you want a link to the survey to run within your organization. We are interested in hearing ways to work toward greater equality in the workplace in COVID-19 times — send us your thoughts!
As part of our commitment to transparency, and continued focus on fast and responsive data, we have created this repository to #StandAgainstCorona. Our aim is to provide full access to data and instruments for all COVID-related research, as well as, compile resources we have created for internal use during the crisis.
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