To improve work-life balance, firms must focus on three main areas: flexibility, time off, and childcare support.
productivity, reduce turnover, and improve employees’ mental and physical health. That much is well-known. But our research has revealed another benefit: They can also boost your organization’s diversity. In fact, when it comes to increasing diversity among managers, they’re better than the most popular racial-equity programs.
People of color also more often lack access to reliable and affordable childcare—which allows parents to stay in their jobs and develop the skills and reputation needed for career advancement. On top of that, they often face stronger performance pressures and have to work harder to prove their talents. For instance, as Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo document in the pathbreaking bookBlack women are more likely than white women to be underestimated by their supervisors and to be disciplined.
The problem, at heart, is that many companies’ attitudes toward work/life balance have changed little since the 1950s. Sure, big companies today list generous work/life benefits on their websites and during recent hiring sprees may even have expanded the support they offer.
Professionals, too, often have to be available around the clock. The problem is so well-known in finance and consulting that many female MBA students, anticipating an impossible work/life balance, don’t even apply for jobs in those fields.
Before the pandemic some eight in 10 companies offered flextime, but employees rarely used it. One hurdle is that managers keep it under wraps. In 64% of companies that offer flextime the arrangements for it are informal. An HR manager at an advertising agency told us that he doesn’t publicize flexibility options for fear that “within minutes the line would be out the door and down the hall.
With a little ingenuity, managers can cover for workers on leave. At Tennessee’s First Horizon Bank, for example, to make up for a person’s absence on a team under a deadline, managers might ask a junior staff member to take on a challenging, visible part of the assignment. Or they might look for someone who is coming off another project and has time to spare. Not giving a staff member time off for a pressing family need is considered unacceptable.
Tech firms have taken things up a notch. Since 2015, Netflix has offered salaried workers up to a year of paid parental leave. Meta provides full pay for four months, to be taken all at once or intermittently. And when Google extended its 12-week paid leave to 18 weeks, it cut in half the number of new mothers who quit.
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