E8: Creating reasonable operating expectations for the workday
with management and motherhood needs expert Leslie Forde
Key Takeways
So suddenly, the job was different. The company's strategies had changed. The requirements for my work had changed. My department had changed and I was short-staffed. So I found myself doing what I think a lot of us do, I was faced with this challenge I didn't expect. And I thought the answer was I guess I'll just work harder.
There's, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And then there's Mom's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom: our children's wellbeing and their milestones and their health, their education, their activities. The next level: all the things that we're responsible for at home and our household roles. The next layer up: our professional role or a volunteer role. The tippy top: self-care, emotional wellbeing, mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, all of the things that we do to restore ourselves and reset ourselves. The reason that we never get up to the tippy top is because everything down to the bottom is never done.
Four pillars surfaced from the research, 1) psychological safety 2) creating workplace flexibility 3) being able to curate pay for and subsidized care benefits, childcare, and elder care, 4) being able to curate subsidize and de-stigmatize mental health care.
It really requires a different way of making decisions, a different way of setting priorities, a different way of navigating key performance indicators and goals, and really a different way of looking at someone as an employee and looking at their life and their circumstances and how to integrate that with the needs of the workplace and doing so with more compassion and more, two-way communication than what most employers are used to.
Do you really need so many meetings? And do you need to send that email at nine or 10 o'clock? Schedule to send the message during the workday people are exhausted and because of the fear that they have about losing their jobs, losing their health care, losing their livelihood, in a global recession, like they're going to answer that email even when they don't want to. People will break themselves to perform at work at the expense of their own health at the expense of their family's needs at the expense of their wellbeing.
These performative measures right of work are not really a measurement of how productive you are. There are measurement of maybe how busy you are or how many hours you spend. And it doesn't allow people the kind of deep work time and mental space to do and think the innovative thoughts and to create the kind of work that is breakthrough for the organization. You are not going to get great ideas and you are not going to get innovation out of exhausted, burned out people. Burned out exhausted people are not going to stay with you.
I can teach people how not to burn out. I can teach people how to set boundaries and how to recover from burnout. But if I drop them into a culture and an environment that is not responsive to allowing them to set healthy boundaries and not responsive to allowing them to work in the same way, then all the work that I do will not be effective. They will either revert back to the culture, the cultural norms that are rewarded or they will leave.
And I start with just telling employers flip the paradigm from people being on call between the hours of nine to five and instead of it being that people are captive and on-call, and can be available at a moment's notice during those windows. Assume that those people are doing other things and set us much smaller window for synchronous communication.
It's all fine for my leadership to tell me to take care of myself, but if they're still sending me emails constantly and at night and on the weekends and my goals are the same. Then, how am I supposed to take care of myself? And if I take time off, then it means that I'm missing hundreds of emails that I then have to catch up with when I get back. They started moving to time off for the organization as a whole.
People are not encouraged to deconstruct how work is communicated and assigned and valued and rewarded. People are often celebrated for certain types of measures and certain types of end results. But the how we get there is so subjective. That it requires some re tooling and retraining.
Is to recognize that leaders need to be able to navigate the human condition. That is part of leadership. And when I meet leaders and organizations who think it's extra work or a bother, or they're frustrated by having to navigate people's bereavement leave or parental leave or people's FMLA leave. You are working with people and you are not working with robots, leadership really is about understanding how to adjust performance criteria and how to adjust your goals and how to adjust what success means based on changing conditions, including the conditions on your team.
You need to have time for deep work. It's not the emails you send or the meetings you attend. It's the ideas that you come up with and your ability to bring those ideas to fruition. Some of that is on your own, but some of that is inspiring others and it takes a lot of energy to do that kind of creative thinking work. So people grind themselves down into dust, work around the clock, busy themselves with emails and meetings, and never have time to think a thought.
Every field requires innovative future forward thinking. And to be able to do that, you have to liberate yourself from this very dated model of how work gets done.
Bio
Leslie has used research to inform growth and innovation strategy for over 20 years. She’s held brand management, product marketing and business development roles in consumer technology and products, market research, media and publishing companies. Most recently, she held leadership positions at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Care.com and CSpace (an Omnicom market research agency.) She began her brand management career at Bausch & Lomb and Xerox. Her writing about parenting, motherhood and equity has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, Parents Magazine and her website, Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs among other publications. She’s been quoted in CNN, Fast Company, US News & World Report, HerMoney, Fairy God Boss, Livingly and several other outlets.
Links to Additional Resources
