Opportunities for Workplace Transformation: Remote Workers
COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact in our economies, employment and the way we work. More specifically, it has transformed our workplaces, in some instances from a relatively low to a very high risk environment (as we discussed in the previous issue) and in others from an office cubicle to a dining room. In this second part, I would like to continue exploring the same question: are there any emerging possibilities that can improve our life quality and wellbeing after the pandemic given the changes suffered in the workplace? This time I would like to focus on those workers who were able to transition to a home office.
For thousands of years humans have migrated to find better job opportunities. Traditionally our “workplaces” gravitated to economic hubs, for example in 1848 the Gold Rush attracted thousands of workers to San Francisco, and over a hundred and fifty years later, a global migration of engineers rushed to the same area motivated by the silicon/digital revolution.
That same digital revolution developed an infrastructure that made it possible for some to work remotely. As the pandemic hit, millions were forced to embrace what once only seemed possible, and work from home.
Uneven Impact for remote workers
As millions flocked to their living rooms—and IT departments scrambled to enable thousands of workers to work from home—the boundaries between personal and professional life became blurrier. Every so often having a cat or a child interrupting a Zoom meeting is comical. But when what’s competing for our exhaustible attention is work related activities, plus parenting responsibilities, and maintaining a household 24/7 where all the members are in it, well, 24/7, produces a lot of stress, as any remote worker reading these lines may attest.
It is true that the impact of working remotely makes no gender distinction. A survey to 1,212 Americans found “While working from home during COVID-19, mental health has seen a significant decline across all industries, seniority levels, and demographics.” But the impact has been harsher on women.
Portals of Possibility (PoP), the newsletter where this article is published, is a collaborative effort, where a lot of conversations happen around each piece we produce. In an early draft of this article I wrote: “Traditionally, women tend to have a household management role.”
In the early reviews, my PoP colleague Monica Cuneo pointed out “This feels a little uncomfortable for me without naming the unspoken assumptions, social pressures, and unequal power dynamics in households that leads to household management roles being out of equal balance. 'Traditionally' also feels like women who Do do it are part of an arcane system that feels a little guilt inducing.” I greatly appreciate her comment, not only it made me aware of some assumptions I was making, but also it describes different key elements playing a role in the unevenness of household management responsibilities.
The challenge of managing a household, while working from home, while trying to attend to the needs of their children—which all of a sudden also included taking the role of being a teacher—helps to explain how the transition to working from home has been harsher on women.
A study in the early months of the pandemic found that “mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers” The mid and long term impacts of this are hard to quantify but as Zinthiya Ganeshpanchan, who runs a charity serving disadvantaged women in England puts it “is going to take our women 10 years back. Because the only way for women to improve their public participation is by reducing the extra burden of caring responsibilities they have.”
A recent New York Times Business story discussed how the child-care crisis the pandemic bore much more heavily on mothers who not only felt the financial toll, but also a toll on the professional identity they worked their entire careers to build. The stories of the impact on mothers, in particular, have been ongoing throughout the pandemic including another New York Times special series called "The Primal Scream," which showed the corresonding mental health crisis. Both those stories also showed that the burden was heavier still for moms of color, particularly Black and Latina women who lost jobs disproporationately.
Recalibration of Values
As the pandemic threat became obvious, some organizations prioritized the health and wellbeing of their employees. As Joseph B. Fuller synthesizes it “In responding to COVID, employers unlucky and unambiguously elevated their employees’ health and well-being to be their highest priority.”
When analyzing Glassdoor reviews in the early months of the pandemic, employees gave their leaders higher marks of honest communication and transparency during the first six months of the coronavirus pandemic. This is relevant because of 500 of the largest companies in the US, only 12% listed transparency or communication among their official corporate values. Given the protagonic role that corporations play in our societies, any change towards more transparency and honest communication is highly valuable.
A more relevant shift in our values is the humanization of the workforce. As Monica Kang quoted by The Economist puts it “Before the pandemic, we forgot that people are people first. During it, the sight of children invading Zoom meetings or people’s laundry in the background will have softened even hard-nosed managers.” As our communication channels were reduced to a screen, a higher interest for the well being of peers and colleagues became more relevant.
It’s crucial that with the recalibration of values, the humanizations of the workforce, and interest for employees well-being, we pay close attention and act accordingly to the impact that the pandemic has had on working mothers.
Family Leave and Childcare Policy prioritization
As mentioned earlier, women tended to absorb more of the childcare responsibilities during the pandemic, yet a study in the UK found that “43% of working fathers say their caring of domestic responsibilities are negatively impacting their ability to do their paid job by at least a fair amount, versus 32% of working mothers who say the same.” In other words, men took less responsibilities, but felt more impact in their job.
Rosie Campbell, co-author of the study explains the difference by acknowledging that, “Women have always done more childcare than men, and our survey reveals this is continuing under lockdown. Despite the pandemic putting home and work lives under strain, fathers don’t appear to be helping out with the children more. But they do seem to be getting a bigger shock from having to balance their caring and domestic responsibilities with new ways of working – which may reflect the fact they are simply less used to combining both types of work.”
As more men realize the difficulties of juggling domestic and childcare responsibilities -something that women have done for years- makes even more obvious that child care should be considered crucial infrastructure. As Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations puts it “If the definition of infrastructure is that which enables commerce and economic activity, what could be more fundamental [than childcare]?”
Policy-makers in the U.S. are also recognizing this importance as well at various levels including the acknowledgment of the need for paid family leave (which the U.S. currently ranks lowest at zero federally mandated paid family leave days). Some policies are recognizing the need and can hopefully address parts of the issue. Those include:
The 2021 child tax credit. This policy could almost immediatley reduce child poverty in the U.S. by 45%. This policy, as a part of the most recent coronavirus rescue plan, is set to expire at the end of 2021, but there's opportunity to continue this program in perpetuity.
Expanding the definition of "infrastructure" to include child-care, paid leave, and caregiving. While this is all still being debated in Congress, it has opened up a whole new discussion the need for this kind of support to keep the economy moving. It's an acknowledgement (at least for one party's policy-makers), that it's bad for the economy to overlook what women are predominantly forced to take on.
With this acknowledgment, we should pay close attention to what are the current conditions and trends for childcare opportunities in our communities. What are the local and national initiatives in this regard? How can we support them? At the Federal level, the Infrastructure Bill proposed by the new administration considers childcare as infrastructure, which could provide a great support to balance the burden that mothers tend to carry. Beyond regulations and bills, it is also important that we reflect in our own assumptions regarding childcare, because as a sense of post-pandemic normalcy emerges, if some of us don’t make a conscious effort, it’s going to be easy to slide back to the notion of “traditionally women have a more active role managing a home” and miss all the assumptions in such a belief that perpetuate unbalanced situations.
It is a shame that, despite continuous call from working parents that, "women can't have it all," it took a global pandemic for some of us to realize the unsafe working conditions that members of our community endure—as explored on part one—or the pressure that childcare responsibilities put on working mothers. The real shame however, would be if after realizing this we decide to go back to the “old Normal”. If we are able to sustain our appreciation for safety in the workplace and provide a strong and resilient infrastructure for childcare, then we as a society will be more prepared for whatever crisis comes next. And if history has taught us anything, it is a matter of when, not if we will endure a new crisis.