Women Executives & Remote Work
Do they understand the need better?
According to a survey, many believe it is to do with the fact that women’s ability to work outside an office environment is higher. Women have always stayed back home for childcare and those with careers have somehow managed work by working from home, when the need arises. Several women drop out of their careers once children are born as the remote work option is not encouraged in many companies. The trend is however changing as more and more opportunities to work remotely ,are emerging. If it means managing a company remotely and working with employees remotely, it is an absolute win win for many women. There is room for better work-life integration by eliminating problems such as inflexible work schedules and the need to be away from home for long periods of time. This explains the rise in the percentage of women leading remote companies.Turns out that 42% of remote companies have female leaders occupying positions of founders, presidents and CEOs, in the U.S. Research done by Remote.co, a company that works with companies wanting to use remote work as a business strategy, confirms that more and more remote companies are being run by women. Since they have a found a solution in remote work sphere, it is reasonable to expect them to understand why, especially mothers want to benefit from a remote work option.
Annie Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the U.S State Department, in her article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, affirms the likelihood of change happening to enable women have a better work-life balance only if there is more women representation in the policy making arena to ensure that more women are present in executive levels and in judiciary. In her article she points out the reality of working women. Relying on round the clock nannies and a supportive family isn’t enough. The pain and the guilt resulting from not having flexible time schedules to spend time with family cannot be ignored. It takes a big toll on especially women.
The pain and the guilt resulting from not having flexible time schedules to spend time with family cannot be ignored. It takes a big toll on especially women.
The fixation with having to work only at the office and the worry that a person who works remotely cannot be trusted, is a notion that must change. Interactions that can be done via phone or email and does not necessarily require in office presence must be encouraged. What this does is to give people the time and flexibility to attend to things at the home front at a given point of time and still be available when required, although not physically present at office. Sure, this leads to another potential problem of being called or emailed anytime and the following expectation that a reply will be received very soon. (How that problem can be handled is a subject for a different blogpost, which is coming soon here on MerryGoWork.)
Nevertheless it is about valuing an employee’s ability and the willingness to adjust in order to make the employee, be it male or female, manage their work-life integration better. To do that, the focus needs to be more on the results. As long as quality work gets done on time, where it is done should not be a matter of concern at all.
The fixation with having to work only at the office and the worry that a person who works remotely cannot be trusted, is a notion that must change. To do that, the focus needs to be more on the results.
Do women executives understand this better?
It certainly appears to be the case.
Annie Marie Slaughter says that when she was appointed dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she chose to bring about change by talking opening about going home early to attend her children’s recitals or sport games etc. She made it a point to end faculty meetings latest by 6, so that everyone could get home at a reasonable hour and spend time with their families. She writes extensively about the importance of changing the notion that more time spent at work is commendable. On the other hand she points out in her article, “Why Women Can’t Have It All?” that the possibility of doing all nighters if need be, actually slows down people and work efficiency declines. When there is a compulsion or facility that enables you to leave early as long as you deliver quality work on time, people work better and more efficiently.
Katherine Zaleski, former Huffington Post Manager, went on to build the women only hiring platform called PowerToFly with Milena Berry, former CTO of the online activism platform- Avaaz.org. Companies such as Buzzfeed, Hearst and Washington Post have found many capable women in the field of tech. Katherine, like most working women found herself in the common and peculiar situation of having to choose between physically being at the workplace all the time versus managing priorities at home. Her co-founder Milena Berry came to her with idea to build a women only hiring platform that would enable women, mothers like themselves to contribute based on their skills without having to feel guilty about not be able to spend enough time at home with family, commute long distances or having to shift to expensive neighbourhoods, just to be able to work. Their database, in the year 2016 had 60,000 women with tech skills and their objective is to be able to connect capable women from low tech areas with high tech jobs. Both of them work out of New York, but their staff of 20 work remotely from all over the world.(95% of them are women and 45% are mothers)
Romy Newman, the founder of Fairygodbosses, a platform that provides women with information about jobs in companies that don’t discriminate based on gender, resources that provide advice for women to navigate a variety of situations at work, network building etc., told Thrive Global that if an organisation has many women working and that women have achieved leadership roles, chances are that the organisation is a women-friendly place.
Millennial Women Are Likely To Be The Game Changers
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
They have grown up seeing their parents struggling to balance their careers and home or quitting their careers to be able to focus on them. They want to do better. Considering that millennials constitute a significant proportion of the workforce, with some of them old enough to occupy managerial positions, the shape of work in the future is set for change. Studies suggest that more and more millennial women are planning on have flexible careers that enable them to mould their career paths in tune with the kind of work-life balance they want to achieve. That translates into several conversations in families and more men becoming aware of the need and benefits to allow remote work as a good employee policy and perhaps even a good business strategy.
They have grown up seeing their parents struggling to balance their careers and home or quitting their careers to be able to focus on them.
The change is happening. According to a study by Flexjobs in 2015, 84% of the millennials surveyed, give importance to work life balance and 85% want to telecommute to work 100% of the time.
Will the future be a workplace located all over the globe?
Technology is catching up to render remote work seamless for both parties. A variety of applications such as Zoom, Github, Google Apps For Work, Buffer, Sqwiggle etc, that are helping to bring remote teams closer, prevent misunderstanding arising from miscommunication through emails and text messages, provide and receive feedback in a more efficient manner.
However the workplace is yet to catch up to the expectations of the millennials. Only 3% of companies covered in a study by Flexjobs and World At Work, have the mechanism to measure the ROI on telecommuting. This simply indicates that companies are either hesitant to moving to remote work completely as a business strategy for a variety of reasons or are simply ignorant of the current trends. The only way to alleviate their concerns is to make measurement of ROI of telecommuting possible. Companies must open up to the idea of enabling people to work remotely and develop coping mechanisms to trust people to deliver without physically having to be present at the office all the time.
If you want change, make it happen
While companies ponder about a change in business strategy in favour of remote work and overcome their anxiety about whether an employee working remotely, is actually working at all, it seems like the millennial women are literally taking the matter in their hands. In 2017, a study done by a market research agency Buzz MG revealed that of 83% of the 400 millennial women surveyed, wanted to start their own businesses and prioritise family alongside. Clearly entrepreneurship gives these ambitious women a shot at attending to both their priorities- work and family. Running their own businesses gives them the power to set terms for flexibility and focussing on quality of work being delivered on time. Needless to say, women who join these enterprises will have a higher chance of having sympathetic bosses, better work life balance and happier lives.
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