08 Mar How to Help Women Overcome WFH Struggles
82% of the women surveyed in Deloitte’s global survey of 400 working women stated that their lives have been negatively disrupted by the pandemic. This comes as no surprise as very few people have been unaffected by this pandemic. However, 70% of these women believe that their careers will also be disrupted, permanently.
How has the pandemic affected these women’s careers? Within most families, women are often saddled with caregiving duties: taking care of children, elderly parents, cleaning, cooking etc. With more time spent at home, the time women spend doing these activities has increased. Balancing their housework as well as office work can be difficult. Additionally, because of remote work, there is pressure to always be available.
How can you resolve this?
To resolve the issue of women feeling that they must constantly be available for work, a proper goal setting system should be put in place, so these overwhelmed women can measure their productivity through the tasks they’ve accomplished. Such a system would be the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) system. Employees set objectives, and the results they must achieve in order to make progress towards that objective. When these women can have a tangible list of goals, and what they need to achieve to make progress towards that goal, it’ll lessen the pressure of constantly needing to be available for work.
According to John Doerr, a venture capitalist who popularized the OKR system among many Silicon Valley companies. OKRs are a tool, not a substitute for factors such as, for example, a great culture.
While OKRs can help overwhelmed working women with keeping track of all their tasks, and lessening the pressure of feeling as though they must constantly available, its important to instill a good culture.
A culture that’ll help these women is a people first or a one team culture. When you instill these cultures, your people are far more likely to display behaviors that are beneficial to these women, such as reaching out to help whenever someone is behind on their OKRs.
Instill a culture that prioritizes people and teamwork:
To ensure that the women in your organization survive and thrive, take steps to ensure that your culture is more people and team-friendly. A culture that prioritizes its people will place supporting employees as its priority. This support can take the form of flexibility of work arrangements, and empowering them to make the best decisions for themselves.
To build such a culture, provide your younger female employees who are also mothers with mentors, other women who have reached higher positions in the organization. Make sure to clearly outline work-life balance and flexible work policies, so that your employees who are balancing housework, care work, and their jobs will not struggle to balance their roles. Measure employee well-being as well. If your employee’s well-being is low, seek them out and discuss how the organization can help them.
When some employees are struggling with balancing their jobs and housework, their colleagues can be of great assistance. Creating a culture that prioritizes teamwork can aid greatly in this. In a culture that prioritizes teamwork, teams care about each others’ successes, and support each other in order for the greater whole to achieve their goals.
No Comments