Nearly a decade ago, Elizabeth Perle McKenna wrote "When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity", in which she questioned women's ability to "have it all" and found women's aspirations incompatible with the workplace.
Economist and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett's latest book, Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, is, in many ways, the natural successor, raising the "have it all" question and agreeing that women and the traditional workplace are ill suited. But where Perle McKenna's solution was to leave, Hewlett's urging organisations to re-think their structure to support "non-linear" careers that are often pursued by women and, as Hewlett points out, Generation Y employees. What's more, Hewlett persuades that the issues facing the current crop of working women and Generation Y are similar to those facing ethnic minorities.
So it's hardly a question of accommodating the minority but adapting to the demands of a new type of employee. As the global talent pipeline shrinks, few companies can afford to turn their noses up at any idea that keeps the best talent sweet, so Hewlett persuades with solutions, featuring some of the most profitable companies worldwide and demonstrating how the likes of Unilever, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Cisco are transforming their workplaces with a little flexible magic.
Work, believes Hewlett, is becoming more burdensome, particularly where 24/7 client demand and multiple time zones factor into working lives. She expects women and men to need to "off ramp" more frequently. Those workplaces that have creative workplace programmes in place will win the "war for talent", hands down. Consider yourself warned.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "core package"
Six initiatives to add to the mix right away
1. Establish a rich menu of flexible working arrangements
Reduced-hour options, flexible stop and start times, telecommuting, job sharing and seasonal flexibility—time off in the summer, balanced by long hours in the winter.
Flexible work arrangements are likely to become even more important. With jobs becoming more extreme, an increasing number of talented women will both want and need to step back for a while.
2. Create arc-of-career flexibility
[These are] Policies that provide flexibility over the arc of a career and allow a woman to ramp up after having taken time out of the paid workforce. Senior executives driving these new policies are beginning to conceptualize work in different ways: jobs are being unbundled, clients shared, and teams are deployed in ways that allow responsibilities to be handed off seamlessly. This is happening with the goal of allowing high-value, high-impact work to be done by experienced professionals working in "chunks" of time with "nuggets of responsibility".
3. Reimagine work life
Talented women also need work-life policies that offer accommodation for responsibilities associated with elderly relatives and dependents outside the immediate family circle.
4. Help women claim and sustain ambition
Data shows a serious fall-off in ambition as women move through their 30s. Confounded by the escalating pressures, many talented women downsize their expectations for themselves. Women's networks create myriad leadership development opportunities. Networks provide access to senior women who can act as mentors and role models, and expand the business relationships—both within and outside the company.
5. Harness altruism
The aspirations of talented women are multidimensional and tend not to be centred on money. In focus groups, women talked about friendships they found in the workplace, the importance of being able to believe in the products they sold and their commitment to giving back to their communities, both their corporate and outside ones.
7. Reduce stigma and stereotypes
In many corporate environments, flexible work arrangements and other work-life policies are heavily stigmatized, either because of open disapproval or because of more subtle cues—someone who has taken a reduced-hour schedule is simply never considered for promotion.
Flexible working arrangements, no matter how well designed or cutting-edge-quickly become illegitimate or "off limits". In the words of one executive, "These policies label you as some kind of loser."
When a senior executive takes a scenic route and shouts it from the rooftops, it can have a transformative effect on what is possible for everyone else. Suddenly, flexible work arrangements become legitimate, even desirable.
Off-Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett is published by Harvard Business School Press (www.HBSPress.org).
Posted 31 May 2007 : Director.co.uk