Women Are Exiting the Workforce: Questions Organizations Need to Be Asking + Roadmap to Recovery
Since COVID-19 became a global health pandemic, the tumultuous elements have been nothing short of difficult for all of us, especially for the three million women who have exited the workforce.
"The data, while not yet fully accounted for, shows the alarming exodus of women at all levels within organizations,” highlights Debbie Goodman-Bhyat, Group CEO at Jack Hammer, a global executive search firm. “Knowing that within the top levels of leadership, in almost all types and sizes of companies, the gender split is no more than 70:30 (male to female ratio), the big question is how on earth we’re going to maintain even these paltry levels when the succession funnel of women to fill these top leadership roles has been so severely depleted. Without massive and focused efforts to redress the imbalance, we’re likely to tread water, at best, for the foreseeable future."
Consider these perspectives from working mothers:
“This year has been a roller coaster blur of exhaustion, treading water, self-doubt, and loss of identity.”
“No matter what I did, I couldn't get ahead. I'm behind on emails, behind on work, behind on dishes, laundry, the list goes on. I still find it hard to comprehend that a whole year has gone by.”
As the detrimental impact of the pandemic on women is becoming more widely recognized, many leaders and organizations are asking themselves how they will preserve their female talent, support women in maintaining their roles, and offer enticing opportunities for women who have left, to return.
WOMEN’S ADVANCEMENT MUST START WITH WELLBEING
Are we experiencing a “She-cession” right now? Has the pandemic set women back at least a decade with a mass exodus from the workforce? Many organizations want to know what they can do to foster the wellbeing of women (and men) at scale.
The answer is this: Organizations must focus on wellness - it’s a non-negotiable.
Here are several innovative solutions to guard against burnout, promote mental health, and support leadership for women:
Empathy – caring for one another to reduce stress and compassion fatigue is not a new concept. However, programs that cultivate empathy are reducing stress and creating more connectivity among employees.
Control – it’s not that we lost it; it’s that we never had it. Several wellness programs have emerged that seek to give participants a greater sense of mastery by focusing on realigning what’s in our control and training employees to focus their energy accordingly.
In-home child care and virtual learning support – Many daycares and schools remain closed or have reduced hours. My sons’ school currently is only in-person, two days a week. How about supporting women and families with in-person, in-home support for virtual learning and childcare?
Allow children to attend job interviews - Women who have left the workforce due to childcare may not have the requisite childcare to attend job interviews. Why not invite their children to attend or provide on-site daycare?
Childcare and virtual learning tuition remission – Many families have paid for a teacher or learning professional to oversee virtual learning. Many other families haven’t had the luxury of this resource. Support for this added expense would help women have more resources to flourish.
Email remediation when we’re away from the office – Let’s face it. A major deterrent to taking time off is the pile of emails that accumulate while we’re away. How about instituting an idea that originated with Thrive Global, a vacation email tool that deletes your incoming emails while you're away, allowing you to truly disconnect and recharge. The key is never seeing the email while also letting the sender know when you'll be back.
WHAT CAN YOUR ORGANIZATION DO RIGHT NOW TO SUPPORT WOMEN’S WELLBEING?
Need more innovative suggestions to enhance wellbeing & resilience in the workplace? Here are five actionable recommendations you can implement right now:
Engage in collaboration rather than consensus – if 66% of stakeholders agree, make the decision & move forward.
Engage in under-delivery – what can be trimmed from work products? Fancy PowerPoint decks? Superfluous surveys & forms?
Create policies that allow a return to the office for working parents so they can have moments of focus - While some may have a great deal of trepidation about returning to the office, working parents with only a thin layer of childcare may be eager to return to the office to have a space for concentrated focus.
Allow employees to drop the ball rather than drop out of the workforce - When I served at Nike as the head of Executive Leadership Development and Talent Strategy, we said, “Perfection is a luxury we can’t afford.” Examine what aspects of processes, meetings, and documentation can be removed or streamlined. Allow employees to make tradeoff decisions around what they can accomplish given competing demands of home and work, and allow less than perfect work products.
Beef up your Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) to include more confidential counseling sessions available virtually to your employees – reducing barriers to receiving support for mental health, burnout, and overwhelm while sending strong messages to destigmatize support for mental health care and wellbeing.
If you would like support & guidance on how to implement these important facets of a connected & resilient workforce based on a unique, proven, and hands-on approach rooted in over 15 years of dedicated resilience research, contact us here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal is one of the leading authorities on Resilience Leadership. Her work is resonating throughout the Fortune 500. As she describes it, "We are a world in which our human experience is defined by facing challenge, change, and complexity on an order of magnitude to which prior generations have not been exposed. The concept of resilience is built on the very ideology that we have the capacity to face hard things: trauma, loss, misfortune, and the like, and come out on the other side; not diminished, but instead, enhanced."
