“Every form of employee appreciation has been cancelled. There are no raises or bonuses. Work is being packed onto skeleton departments because all of the ‘fat’ has been trimmed. Employees are burning out.”
“Trying to give 100% to my job during work hours and 100% to my kids for their schoolwork has been impossible. Both my work and my kids’ education have suffered from that.”
“Pay me for the hours I work. My hours have been cut, but I still need time to accomplish what my employer needs. I am being exploited under the guise of ‘we all need to pull together to see this through.’”
“There is a lack of empathy (at work.) The response we get is to just figure it out and get it done.”
These are some of the comments of the more than 1,500 parents who have participated in the Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs anonymous pandemic study since March. it’s clear that parents are struggling to care for their kids and careers. Overwhelmingly, they need real flexibility at work.
And in the wake of Covid, people’s priorities have changed. Most don’t want the old normal. And organizations that learn how to model flexibility, in all the ways that honor people’s full lives, will retain employees when this crisis ends. To do that, however companies must offer real — not false — flexibility.
I’ll be talking about this during “Replacing False Flexibility With Real Flexibility at Work,” a TLNT webinar on Wed., Feb. 3. But in the meantime, here are some important points to ponder about the role that flexibility should play at work.
When conditions change in an organization — a new strategy, less revenue or profits, etc. — a company rewrites the rules. It often requires employees to be “flexible,” but it rarely gives people reasonable options around working different hours, forgoing a bonus, or relocating. That’s false flexibility.
Many employers are asking for the impossible, that people continue to do the same work, in the same way, despite not having access to the same resources. They’re telling people how important their mental health is, while booking back-to-back meetings. They’re saying that the company is “family-friendly,” yet schedule staff meetings at 8 a.m. or managers sending email requests late at night. Such actions poison the very notion of flexibility.
Meanwhile, when people have children, aging parents, illnesses or loss, they need flexibility, too. But traditionally, employees aren’t extended any grace for their human fragilities at work. Flexibility has been one-sided in most organizations, setting up for the company to win and the employees to quietly accept.
In other words, organizations aren’t really asking people to be flexible. They’re merely bending and stretching them to suit company needs.
Covid has changed mental, emotional, and physical availability for the entire workforce. This creates a huge opportunity to restore trust, which begins with reexamining how the work gets done. But what does that really mean?
It’s been a prolonged period of anguish, and many caregivers feel like they’re doing “terribly” at everything (as workers, parents, and caregivers to themselves.) One surveyed mother shared, “I’m working full-time in a hospital while my husband is working full-time at home trying to take care of our 5- and 3-year-old boys. No one is getting the time and attention that we need from each other right now.” It’s situations like this that have led millions of caregivers, primarily women, to leave the workforce since the pandemic began.
Organizations must do better. HR leaders have a real opportunity to replace false with real flexibility. Join me to learn more about the new rules of flexibility and how to make them work within your organization. Register here for an interactive webinar, “Replacing False Flexibility With Real Flexibility at Work, on Wed., Feb. 3, at 2 p.m. ET.