Will that lesson last after the crisis is over? American families want greater choices in determining how their work and their families fit together. They can rethink highly competitive career tracks where you make it or wash out - such as giving tenure-track scholars and partner-track lawyers the choice of a longer clock before their evaluation.ĭuring this pandemic, employers are seeing that workers can’t function well without accommodation for their family responsibilities. They can stop rewarding the faster response over the better response, or the longer workday over a more productive workday. They can value the creative ideas that emerge after a midday hike or meditation session, rather than putting in face time at the office. Now is a time for companies to step back and reexamine which traditional ways of working exist because of convention, not necessity.Įxecutives and managers have the opportunity to choose quality work over quantity of work. There have been many calls for restructuring how work is done, including making more room for our families and questioning the real value of the eight-hour (or more) workday. In the midst of this pandemic, store clerks, delivery drivers, and warehouse workers are now forced to be “ideal workers” too, risking exposure to the virus in public with little support for the families they leave to go to work. But low-wage workers increasingly are subject to similar expectations of responsiveness, even as they have less job security and even less flexibility than higher paid workers. In our world of laptops, cellphones, and teleconferences, the intellectual and analytical tasks of “knowledge workers” can continue at home. Many organizations are not amenable to adjustments, leading to the perception that women are opting out of the workforce - although research suggests women are actually “pushed out.” Furthermore, men are more likely to “fake it” and pass as ideal workers, while women make clear that they cannot meet these expectations, including by negotiating flexible-work arrangements. The “ideal worker” expectation is particularly punitive for working mothers, who also typically put in more hours of caregiving work at home than their spouses. Simply asking for workplace flexibility engenders professional stigma. When individuals push back - asking for less travel or requesting part-time or flexible hours - their performance reviews suffer and they are less likely to be promoted, studies find. Flexible-work arrangements come with severe penalties many who leave the workforce for a period or shift to part-time never recover their professional standing or compensation. “Time greedy” professions like finance, consulting, and law - where 80- or 100-hour weeks may be typical - compensate their workers per hour more than professions with a regular 40-hour week. With schools and daycares closed, work cannot continue as normal simply because working remotely is technologically possible.Įmployees are disproportionally well-compensated for being ideal workers. Yet today, over two-thirds of American families are headed by single parents or two working parents. This was always an unrealistic archetype, one that presumed a full-time caretaker in the background. Further Readingįor decades, scholars have described how organizations were built upon the implicit model of an “ideal worker”: one who is wholly devoted to their job and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year of their career. As people postulate how the country may be forever changed by the pandemic, we can hope that one major shift will be a move away from the harmful assumption that a 24/7 work culture is working well for anyone. The Covid-19 crisis has shoved work and home lives under the same roof for many families like ours, and the struggle to manage it all is now visible to peers and bosses. We attempt to wedge the rest of the workday into the early mornings and post-bedtime. Our own conference calls are scheduled for naptime and occasionally interrupted by a request for potty. For the two of us, our daughters’ virtual morning preschool meeting is one more item to be juggled as we attempt to work full-time from home without childcare. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.Īs if being a working parent didn’t already include enough moving pieces to manage, even toddlers are now having standing teleconferences. In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers.
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