Reimagining Work: Supporting Parents During COVID19 and Beyond

During this COVID period where most employees need to work from home, what can companies learn about helping parents and other carers?

By Elizabeth Foughty and Shannon Lucas

As working mothers, we’ve been thinking a lot about the struggle parents are facing while they work from home and attempt to educate and care for their children. There’s been a huge amount of discussion amongst parents about how they should cope. What we’ve seen less of is what business can do to help them cope. Or rather, there is plenty of discussion around things like paid time off (PTO), but less on actually how we all do business while a significant portion of the workforce both cares for their children or other dependents and works. PTO is a bandaid. We can’t have so much of our workforce off on PTO for the next 8 weeks or even longer as we determine how to live with this virus in the long term.

To be clear, this is a privileged discussion. There’s obviously a huge number of issues to address around income equality, those who have the ability to work from home and those in roles that do not, and fundamental things like paid time off and parental leave for hourly and gig workers. These are also topics we need to get our heads around and resolve as a society.

But for your average office knowledge worker, what can be done? A great deal of thinking has already been done around empowering women in the workplace (a cohort of people that already do a lot of juggling!) and workplace flexibility generally that can be utilized to support parents during COVID19.

• Core Hours. We’ve based our working lives around structures put in place to protect factory and hourly workers from being overworked. We are 100% supportive of these as safeguards for people who do work that requires being in-person. But why do we still have this structure for knowledge work? If you don’t want to get too radical, many companies have begun exploring the idea of a 4 day work week. They have found that this flexible schedule tends to increase, not decrease productivity. Right now, a 4 day workweek would mean parents have 1–3 full days to teach their kids depending on how they want to use their weekends. It means other carers would have time to run errands for their charges. Or you could take it a step further…instead of having any notion of a 5 days/8 hours or 4 days/10 hours (or more) a week schedule, why not have 3–4 days a week of ‘core’ hours where folks are available for collaboration or even (eventually) to commute to work but otherwise they can get their work done in their own time? Why should a knowledge worker ever work to a schedule based on the needs of running factories? Non-collaborative days allow employees more time for deeper thinking to tackle bigger problems, and also provide desperately needed mental downtime that improves performance.
• Why is time a metric for quality work in the knowledge space at all? Most sales organizations already operate this way, where success criteria are based on business brought in, not time in the chair. Success should be based on deliverables, not chair time, frequently referred to as a “Results-Only Workplace Environment”. Managers should manage work, not people. There is no reason this cannot work beyond sales organizations. If your company has pushed for “SMART” OKRs and KPIs or the other alphabet soup of goals-tracking methods, those can and should be utilized instead of chair time. Else, why do we spend so much time creating them? If indeed employees are not doing their work, managers should figure out why they aren’t empowered to do so, and if it turns out they really just don’t want to work (which we suspect will be actually rare), let them go. This has the added benefit of improving bias issues with People of Color and Women. When women are judged based on their work product alone, they do better. Everyone could benefit from this more level playing field. Think this can only apply to sales organizations with hard numbers? Why is any team doing work where impact cannot be quantified in some way?
• Does this work impact stakeholder value? Crises have a way of making you aware of what is really crucial. A frequent piece of advice given to women in the workplace is to never take on projects that don’t impact the bottom line. This should apply to everyone. Though note we said stakeholder value (e.g., your shareholders yes, but also employees, communities, and customers). Yes, IT security training is boring but DOES impact stakeholder value because if you have a breach, your business will be negatively impacted. But, if you are more than 2–3 steps away from explaining how something impacts stakeholder value, should you really be doing it? A lot of ‘work’ is makework or administrivia, and laser focusing on high value work could mean fewer hours actually spent on work. Though this is not intended as a reason to yet again have fewer workers do more with less.
• Rethink meetings. This is a great opportunity for your entire organization to reevaluate how many meetings you are having, what the outcomes of each meeting are, and who is absolutely necessary to participate. Cutting down on meeting time and being more efficient with the meetings you do have, will not only improve employee satisfaction, it will help you drive accelerated results. What activities do you do via meetings that should be done via writing? Updates? Information sharing? Key updates provided in meetings is already a point of frustration for many (especially those of us that used to travel extensively for work), because in order to then get the updates we had to spend an hour watching a saved recording we missed while in a customer meeting rather than 5 minutes reading a missive.

• Be brief. Let’s follow Winston Churchill’s request that information be relevant, short and to the point. As we are all juggling weird new demands put on us as parents with children home full time, every minute matters. We may not be juggling as much as Churchill, but we can learn from his wisdom.
• Encourage ALL parents to step up. Sadly, though the majority of American households (up until the COVID Crash) were dual-income households, women still bear the majority of the child care activity planning and child sick care. Families stuck at home with children out of school seem to be falling back into these traditional care giving gender norms, meaning women are having to manage more balls in the air during this crisis. This is a great time for employers to encourage ALL PARENTS to find equitable family practices. The best way to do this is for men in leadership in positions to actively show themselves being parents. This means taking time off if necessary, being vocal about meeting reduction, and doubling down on taking paternity leave.

• Re-evaluate the true necessity of business travel. If it has done nothing else, COVID19 is showing us that business travel can be avoided. While in person meetings can never be truly replaced, we can re-evaluate the times when that travel is truly critical versus a nice to have. Many meetings, workshops, and seminars can be virtualized with the right tools and mindset. Afterall, if Saturday Night Live can go virtual, why can’t your quarterly sales meeting?
• Invest in the appropriate IT tools to collaborate virtually. There is a mentality that collaborative tools can increase cyber risk, but your biggest cyber risk is from untrained employees, whether they are seated in an office or at home. An office isn’t a panacea to a complex and ever changing cyber risk environment. And at this point, not supporting virtual work is also a major competitive disadvantage.

The beauty of a lot of these ideas is that they benefit everyone.

Our hope is that companies, rather than fighting to return to ‘normal’, instead create a silver lining out of this by redefining normal. We personally didn’t feel that we were living in a sustainable way in any dimension. We don’t think people were intended to sit in offices 40–60 hours a week and both of us have already structured our own lives in such a way as not to do so. When you think about it, office work is a relatively new phenomena. Our great great grandparents didn’t go to office buildings and sit at desks all day.

Commuting, for instance, is a scourge that takes away from family time and impacts our environment and benefits almost no one except possibly the true crime podcast industry. If even office workers suddenly had to commute less, or could commute at different hours, traffic would dramatically improve. In the Bay Area of California on March 11, traffic was at “holiday” levels and that was just with the big tech companies telling their employees to stay home. Office buildings themselves contribute significantly to climate change and are expensive to maintain. What if all those office parks (and rent/upkeep) became actual parks because overall company square footage could be reduced? And if we didn’t need even more reason to reduce pollution, studies are beginning to show that increased pollution exacerbates the effects of COVID19.

Companies should also be keenly aware of the possibility of losing parents from their workforce as this crisis drags on. This would also be a disaster, not only in terms of lost income and economic impacts, but also because parents are more productive. Don’t lose your most productive, resilient, and likely loyal employees because you want to hang on to old fashioned notions of work.

We have an opportunity to re-imagine how knowledge work is done in a way that’s sustainable for business, the environment and families. We hope you will consider leading the change.

Tools to optimize remote work:

https://zoom.us/ — Zoom breakout rooms

https://mural.co/ — stickie notes for workshopping

https://gsuite.google.com/products/jamboard/ — interactive whiteboard

https://www.mentimeter.com/ — feedback engagement tool

https://vimeo.com/manage/403069748/general (graphic recorder)