On Wednesday 7th July 2010, Equilibrant held its first drinks event (completely by popular demand, I should add, as the plan wasn't to start events until September). It was fantastic!
13 women and 2 men, all currently or formerly senior execs in the London area gathered at Itsu Notting Hill for what was advertised to be cocktails and sushi and what turned out to be a very interesting meeting of minds. The attendees came from a variety of industries. Some were working flexibly and some weren't. Some had taken time off work and were interested in going back. Some were happy with how things were going in their current arrangements and some weren't. But all were interested in the topic of flexible work, and all had interesting viewpoints.
For those of you who were unable to attend, here are 10 take-aways. If you were there, thank you for helping to make the night so interesting - if you have other points to share, please feel free to add them in the comments section:
1. Successfully implementing flexible work is a complicated task for employers.
Most companies have flexible work policies, but very few have actually gone through their entire organisations and had a close look at which jobs might realistically be done on a flexible basis. Finding cases where it's worked (or not worked) is a starting point. Telling real-life stories of flexible work success from within the organisation is compelling.
2. If the client wants senior women, the company sits up and takes notice.
There was at least one tale of an account lost because there were no women put forward on the pitch, as the customer felt strongly that its suppliers must mirror its own values. The company in question sat up and took notice of importance of senior women after that.
3. Flexibility should be a positive conversation, not a gun to the company's head.
We suspect that companies that are forced by law to do something will instinctually do the bare minimum, whereas companies that are "encouraged" may actually think about doing it properly. On the subject of mandatory female board appointments, one member made the point that a quota for female board nominees might be more effective than a quota for female board members.
4. Women are feeling guilty - guys, not so much.
A lot of our issues with asking for flexible work, or over-working when we are meant to be working fewer hours seem to be to do with guilt. This is a huge kettle of fish, but it's an area where coaching could be very effective.
5. What's so urgent?
It was pointed out that much of the "urgent" work that is stressing us out and making flexible work difficult need not be urgent - that is, if expectations (the client's, the board's, etc) were managed properly.
6. Technology is on our side.
We discussed a few of the great (some free!) tools available online to facilitate remote and other forms of flexible work, like DimDim (www.dimdim.com), Doodle (www.doodle.com), and WebEx (www.webex.com).
7. Flexible workspaces are popping up everywhere.
Forget Starbucks - in London alone there are more professional flexible workspaces all over, including the Institute of Directors (www.iod.com), Adam Street club (www.adamstreet.co.uk), One Alfred Place club (www.onealfredplace.co.uk), Home House club (www.homehouseclub.com), and even one in Clapham that offers drop-in childcare (anyone know the name and/or URL of it)?
8. And specialist headhunters exist too.
Kate Grussing, founder of Sapphire Partners (a recruitment firm that specialises in women) will be doing a seminar for us in the autumn, focused on recruitment options in flexible work. She is actually looking to hire someone (ideally from a finance or consulting background, no recruitment experience required) - if you are interested in an introduction, let me know. Other websites mentioned by attendees as worth consulting if you're looking for a flexible job are: www.workingmums.com and www.professional-identity.com.
9. What do I want to be doing when I'm 50?
This was a fantastic topic on which we only scratched the surface, just as we were leaving. At this stage in our careers, we tend to plan only a few years ahead, but given that the odds are that we will be working until late in life, shouldn't we be looking further out and sowing career seeds now that we can reap when we're in our 50s?
10. More of the same, please!
I think it's safe to say that this session was a hit amongst those who attended. We'll definitely have to do it again soon.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Managing People You Can't See
As you may be aware, I sit on several corporate boards. In most cases, the businesses involved are "virtual" - ie. they don't have offices of their own and use borrowed meeting rooms whenever face-to-face meetings are required. In some cases, that is working well. In others, less so. What I have learned (am learning!) is that managing and/or collaborating with people you can't see is a highly relevant topic in this day and age, no matter the size or physical footprint of your business, and that while it is perfectly doable, it requires deliberate adjustments to the way we work.
Two decades ago (or even more recently), the conventional wisdom was that collaboration was best done face-to-face. These days, that bias is subsiding (aided by generation X & Y workers, who have grown up with the internet), and both companies and individuals are seeing the virtues of collaborating across space and time - it can improve productivity, save money, and enable more efficient use of global resources.
In the absence of visual cues, however, communication must be turned up a notch. Clear expectations must be set around why the work is being undertaken, what the deadline is, what success looks like, etc. Feedback must be more consistent, for example, through the use of "flash reports" (quick weekly emails, cc'd to everyone in the group, outlining the most important things you accomplished in the last week and the most important things on your agenda for next week) and the like. The ad hoc meetings that would have taken place around the water cooler or in the hall need another place to exist, like group bulletin boards or chat rooms. And non-work conversation, too, needs a time and place to occur. Some companies reserve chat room times for social gatherings and, as odd as it might sound, they work - depending on how many beers are involved, I suppose.
There are numerous technological tools out there that are extremely helpful for virtual collaboration. In the autumn, Equilibrant will host a seminar to go through some of them, so that you can try them out - if you are interested in that, please comment below.
Some of my favourites are:
www.doodle.com (for finding availability amongst a group of people for a meeting)
www.skype.com (at this point everyone is probably aware of Skype!)
www.dimdim.com (excellent - and free - for sharing presentations/desktops in real time)
www.linkedin.com (you can create secure sub-groups for your company)
www.yammer.com (bulletin boards for communication within your organisation)
Email, as handy as it is, is not necessarily the most efficient tool for remote work - and we have all had first hand experience in how emails can be misinterpreted in the absence of aural tone, body language, and/or good spelling.
Remote work is the way of the future - there's no denying it. Making changes to how we communicate in order to make remote work succeed isn't that difficult, but it does take a bit of focus and buy-in not only from remote workers, but from those who are spending most of their time in the office. The good news is that, with these small changes, everyone wins.
Two decades ago (or even more recently), the conventional wisdom was that collaboration was best done face-to-face. These days, that bias is subsiding (aided by generation X & Y workers, who have grown up with the internet), and both companies and individuals are seeing the virtues of collaborating across space and time - it can improve productivity, save money, and enable more efficient use of global resources.
In the absence of visual cues, however, communication must be turned up a notch. Clear expectations must be set around why the work is being undertaken, what the deadline is, what success looks like, etc. Feedback must be more consistent, for example, through the use of "flash reports" (quick weekly emails, cc'd to everyone in the group, outlining the most important things you accomplished in the last week and the most important things on your agenda for next week) and the like. The ad hoc meetings that would have taken place around the water cooler or in the hall need another place to exist, like group bulletin boards or chat rooms. And non-work conversation, too, needs a time and place to occur. Some companies reserve chat room times for social gatherings and, as odd as it might sound, they work - depending on how many beers are involved, I suppose.
There are numerous technological tools out there that are extremely helpful for virtual collaboration. In the autumn, Equilibrant will host a seminar to go through some of them, so that you can try them out - if you are interested in that, please comment below.
Some of my favourites are:
www.doodle.com (for finding availability amongst a group of people for a meeting)
www.skype.com (at this point everyone is probably aware of Skype!)
www.dimdim.com (excellent - and free - for sharing presentations/desktops in real time)
www.linkedin.com (you can create secure sub-groups for your company)
www.yammer.com (bulletin boards for communication within your organisation)
Email, as handy as it is, is not necessarily the most efficient tool for remote work - and we have all had first hand experience in how emails can be misinterpreted in the absence of aural tone, body language, and/or good spelling.
Remote work is the way of the future - there's no denying it. Making changes to how we communicate in order to make remote work succeed isn't that difficult, but it does take a bit of focus and buy-in not only from remote workers, but from those who are spending most of their time in the office. The good news is that, with these small changes, everyone wins.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Should Parents Get Special Privileges?
A member of the Equilibrant network wrote to me yesterday saying that her female manager within a major, quite important section of the UK government (I really want to tell you - it's that appalling - but I won't) told her that she (the manager) would "block home working for any colleagues who had children as they shouldn't be given 'privileges' just because they have a family."
There was a time, not that long ago, where I could actually understand that point of view. I was working my *rse off in finance, putting in 12 hour days, and actually felt hard done by every time one of my colleagues (male or female) said they were ducking out to do something with their kids. Why should they get special treatment just because they chose to have children? Now that I have a child of my own, of course, I am completely embarrassed to admit that. I should point out, though, that I also secretly felt it was unfair when my male colleagues would randomly duck out to play squash during the day, which they did often.
I can see now that I, like the government manager, was missing the point entirely. Flexibility in working hours and venues is a privilege, to be sure, but rather than denying it to some employees, on the basis that exceptions should not be made, it should be offered to all employees.
In my pre-kid life, would I have been pleased to be encouraged to work from home a couple of days a week? You bet. My company could have even saved money on physical space by having me share a desk with someone who was working from home on other days. It doesn't matter that I didn't "need" to work from home due to family obligations - to me, it would have been a valuable perk, and one that I might have taken up if I felt confident that I would be judged on my performance, rather on the amount of face time I was putting in at the office.
The option to work flexibly is something that has been proved, time and again, to be more valuable to employees than money. It increases retention rates and decreases sick days. Simply put, it makes financial sense, which is something the government (particularly in its current predicament) might want to note.
There was a time, not that long ago, where I could actually understand that point of view. I was working my *rse off in finance, putting in 12 hour days, and actually felt hard done by every time one of my colleagues (male or female) said they were ducking out to do something with their kids. Why should they get special treatment just because they chose to have children? Now that I have a child of my own, of course, I am completely embarrassed to admit that. I should point out, though, that I also secretly felt it was unfair when my male colleagues would randomly duck out to play squash during the day, which they did often.
I can see now that I, like the government manager, was missing the point entirely. Flexibility in working hours and venues is a privilege, to be sure, but rather than denying it to some employees, on the basis that exceptions should not be made, it should be offered to all employees.
In my pre-kid life, would I have been pleased to be encouraged to work from home a couple of days a week? You bet. My company could have even saved money on physical space by having me share a desk with someone who was working from home on other days. It doesn't matter that I didn't "need" to work from home due to family obligations - to me, it would have been a valuable perk, and one that I might have taken up if I felt confident that I would be judged on my performance, rather on the amount of face time I was putting in at the office.
The option to work flexibly is something that has been proved, time and again, to be more valuable to employees than money. It increases retention rates and decreases sick days. Simply put, it makes financial sense, which is something the government (particularly in its current predicament) might want to note.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Equi-WHAT?
Equilibrant. Yes, you're right, a somewhat obscure physics term is not necessarily the catchiest name. Good thing it's not required that members be able to pronounce it properly, because I have taken to stressing the "lib" rather than the "quil". The correct pronunciation, for those who care, is:
e·quil·i·brant
[ih-kwil-uh-bruh
nt]
nt]eQUILibrant. eQUILibrant. eQUILibrant. eQUILibrant...
Here's why I picked such a lame name:
- noun Physics.
A counterbalancing force or system of forces.
- noun Physics.
A counterbalancing force or system of forces.
I didn't actually take physics. Can you believe that? A major hole in the liberal arts curriculum that I received at one of America's top prep schools. I think I elected to take "Southern Writers" instead, which was a great course, but if I am honest, I have always regretted not taking physics.
I did study economics, though, with enthusiasm. I was a charter member of the Columbia Economics Society, I'll have you know. I think I may have been treasurer, which is, of course, the job no one wants (even in an Economics Society).
I don't think "equilibrant" exists as an economic term, but it should. It's the force that causes an equilibrium to be achieved, after all, and economics is all about achieving equilibrium, whether on a macro or a micro level. Economics says that we can find an equilibrium to most things in life, normally with reference to supply and demand.
Equilibrant, in this case, is a network (www.equilibrant.net) -- A network with the objective of enabling its members to shift their lives into equilibrium; to find a happy, stable balance between work and family. To feed their minds and their souls in equal measure. It's not about having it all, it's about having enough. That's the micro version.
The macro version is this: There is a huge labour shortage looming in the western world, due to the aging population. And yet there is a gold mine of labour resource sitting right here. Around 50% of corporate graduate trainees are women, but only 12% of executive committee members of listed UK companies are women (the numbers are very similar in most western countries outside of Scandinavia, by the way). Despite the fact that we are being educated equally with men, we are "leaking out of the pipeline" before or once we have achieved senior management level. It doesn't take a physicist to know why that is.
Bring senior women back into the workforce on terms that work for them, and I bet the labour shortage would shrink more than a bit. A McKinsey report entitled "Women Matter" actually puts numbers on this solution: "If the employment rate for women stays constant, Europe can expect a shortfall of 24 million people in the active workforce by 2040; if, on the other hand, the rate can be raised to the same level as for men [it is currently 21% lower than for men], then the projected shortfall drops to 3 million."*
What terms work for women? Try flexibility, for a start. An equilibrium between supply of labour and demand for workers can be achieved, with a bit of a push. So can an equilibrium between an individual's interests in work and his or her interests in family. That's right, equilibrium is not just for women.
And neither is Equilibrant, no matter how you pronounce it.
* "Women Matter" McKinsey & Company, Inc. 2007
And neither is Equilibrant, no matter how you pronounce it.
* "Women Matter" McKinsey & Company, Inc. 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
