When the job comes home

With the Covid pandemic, a lot more parents have been working from home, but though this can bring more flexibility, it has its disadvantages, writes Niki Bezzant.

Emma Mclean is the founder of Works for Everyone, a consultancy for employers and women returning to the workforce. She reckons the pandemic has done some good things for working parents. But working from home might also be “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, she says.

“The positive thing about Covid is that it’s taken a wrecking ball to this idea of working from home,” she says.

“So there are now employers who realise that when someone works from home, the world won’t stop, they actually do work. They don’t spend the whole time folding washing. So that’s good.”

On the other side, though, “people now have no workhome life delineation, so ironically they’re working longer hours.”

And working from home with kids is no picnic. Mclean describes a client who, during lockdown, with an 18-month-old at home, was forced to have Zoom meetings locked in a cupboard, with the toddler banging on the other side of the door.

Another downside of the Covid work revolution is that “people think we’ve kind of fixed the whole flexible working thing”, she says.

“But, in fact, working parents don’t just need flexible working. What we really need is genuine part-time working opportunities. And that is very different from flexible working. And part-time working has not moved at all.”

She’s also worried about the post-Covid trend of split or flexible shifts, with people working different days in or out of the office to suit their lives.

“It will be interesting to see what genders take up the opportunity to work from home. If it’s women who choose to predominantly work from home, we need to be careful what that means to their careers.

“It’s dressed up as a good thing”, she says. “But if you’ve got the bosses and the men at work face to face, having coffees, bumping into people, who do you think is going to get the big juicy project that comes on to the boss’ desk? How do you build your career in a corporate? Big juicy projects.

“If women are going to choose to be two days a week at home that may off-ramp them. And

I worry about that.”

Location, Mclean says, is only one part of work.

“A lot of companies are looking at this as a way of cutting costs. It’s not people-centric. It’s cost-centric.”

For working parents. Mclean says, life is “this constant push and pull between what you should be doing and all the questions in your head around whether you’re doing the right thing.”

The expectations that working mothers put on themselves to do everything, she says, takes a huge toll.

“It’s insidious, particularly if you’re doing it alone. It’s just relentless, like being a frog in a pot of boiling water, because you don’t know how stressful it is.

“You’re like, Henry has to go to hockey; I’ve got to book in Rose’s high school orientation visit. And what are we doing with the broccoli that’s going off in the fridge? All this stuff lives in our heads in addition to ‘how am I going to optimise the KPIs [key performance indicators] on project Everest?’”

The enormousness of this, Mclean says, “stops us being able to perform to our optimum level at work. And ironically, because we know that, it makes us sad and angry, and it’s like this terrible cycle. The mental load we carry is just exhausting.”

What can we do to lighten the load?

If we’re co-parenting, Mclean says, “I think we have to be much better at sharing the load.

“It’s not about just telling [your co-parent] what to do, because then you’re still the project manager. It’s about working out what needs to be done [together] and allocating the jobs. It’s about treating your relationship like a business… who’s responsible for what, and really managing that.”

The other big pain point for working parents is childcare. “We spend a lot of time in the media talking about roads and rail, and all this core infrastructure. Childcare is core infrastructure! But it does not exist for [many] working parents; affordable, conveniently located and quality.”

Mclean says most New Zealanders can’t afford childcare and, as a society, we should care more about that.

“It’s terrible that they have to find a solution for 12 weeks a year. What are we doing about that? In my experience, it’s the No 1 reason why mothers who are professional workers don’t go back to work. They just can’t figure out how the school holidays are going to work. That’s a lot of talent we’re missing out on.”

Despite all the challenges, Mclean says it’s good to work.

“It’s something for you. It gives you options. Your children aren’t going to be there forever, so you’ve got to forge a path for yourself. And it’s a great way to be a role model for your children, if you can be working, but also having great conversations at home around how the load is shared. It’s an opportunity for you to forge a path for your children around how they’re going to run their families.”

If women are going to choose to be two days a week at home that may off-ramp them. And I worry about that.