This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 071 / Retaining Women (and Why They’re Fleeing) with Teresa Tanner

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

There are approximately 2 million fewer women in the labor force than before the pandemic. Why in a country that’s now facing a labor shortage, do so many women remain unemployed? Why did so many women leave the workforce in the first place? Here to help us navigate through this very complex topic is Teresa Tanner - Founder and CEO of Reserve Squad, a company that helps other companies retain women and preserve their pipeline of female talent. A long time advocate for women, Teresa has received numerous awards and accolades for her work. She speaks across the country and is featured in the likes of USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show and many more. In the words of Teresa Tanner, “We need to stop allowing life’s temporary circumstances to permanently derail the careers of women.” This is an episode EVERYONE should listen to! And ladies, keep searching for opportunities and companies that value and appreciate your talent and are willing to prove it by the environments, compensation, and benefits they offer. Your job is to do your job, and do it well. A company’s job is to figure out how to keep talent from walking out the door. Let’s all do our jobs. This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about the work Teresa is doing please visit: www.reservesquad.com To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at www.nicolekalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. I believe that people are re-evaluating what's important to them. And I think companies need to think more broadly about how that talent is leveraged. I am Nicole Kalil, and in today's episode of This is Woman's Work, we're going to talk about women in the workforce. And I want to start with one of my favorite quotes, and that is, women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world. Think about that for a minute. In a world where corporations will pay top dollar and are consistently recruiting, at a time where a third of small business owners say they have open positions they're unable to fill, there are approximately 2 million fewer women in

the labor force than before the pandemic. Why, in a country that's now facing a labor shortage, do so many women remain unemployed? Why did so many women leave the workforce in the first place? And can companies, or the country as a whole, afford to continue on this trend? It's not just women, by the way, as the rate fell for men as well, though not as dramatically. And we are experienced or we have experienced the largest 12-month decline in the labor force participation rate for workers overall. So what's going on? What is this telling us? Are people lazier, more entitled, or greedier than ever before? I mean, maybe, but I don't think so. Or are we facing a crisis of values where people's decisions about vaccinations, public safety, and health,

and the right to choose are in dramatic conflict with each other? Possibly. Or is it work environments, company cultures, and by the book, work expectations that are to blame? Yeah, I think probably. Well, I'd argue at least that's certainly part of it. And where does gender play a part in this whole equation? Here to help us navigate through this very complex topic is Teresa Tanner, founder and CEO of Reserve Squad, a company that helps other companies retain women and preserve their pipeline of female talent. A longtime advocate for women, Teresa has received numerous awards and accolades for her work. She speaks across the country and is featured in the likes of USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, and many, many more. I'm excited to dive in.

So, Teresa, thank you so much for being here. And I want to start by asking, how has the pandemic disproportionately affected women? And what does that actually reveal? Oh my gosh, so many ways, so many ways. And you know, last year was, it was a year of chaos. We very quickly and unexpectedly all went to our homes, schools were shut down, childcare facilities were shut down. There was a lack of supplies that we needed and, and it was truly chaotic. And honestly, first I would just like to do a call out to any parent. And disproportionately, I know women carried a lot of the brunt of this, that tried to work and raise kids and be the school teacher and do everything else. I just don't even know how it happened. But we really saw that so much stress was put on the family. And again, we saw so much stress put on

women because we disproportionately know that things like childcare and home care and managing the home disproportionately, all of that invisible work that gets done disproportionately goes to the woman. So I just feel like there was so much stress put into the system last year and, and people are feeling tired and burned out. It also gave people an opportunity to pause and really say like, what's important here because something has to give. And so it was that moment where everybody, I think collectively said something has to give. So what is that going to be? Yeah. I think everything that you said, I've heard over and over and over and all of my conversations with women and experienced myself.

Okay. So I know it's not as simple as one problem, but what do you think are the biggest factors that played a part in women in, you know, not just low level jobs? I think sometimes people think, oh, well, you know, they, they chose to leave their jobs because they weren't making enough in order to pay attention to their children during the pandemic. But that's not necessarily the case. Women were leaving from executive level, managerial level, highly compensated level jobs. So I guess my question is, what are the primary causes of that?

What made women make that choice? Yeah, I think there was a lot of different things going on. And we did lose millions, millions of women from the workforce last year. As a matter of fact, we are at the lowest female workplace participation rate that we've been in in over 30 years, which really is my entire career. Like we have not been at these low levels since the late eighties. Well, that's when I entered the workforce. So it's like, oh my gosh, we've lost my entire career wiped out in one year. And a couple of things were going on. First of all,

women disproportionately were laid off because a lot of those service industry jobs, hospitality jobs are disproportionately held by women and people of color, which, again, is a big systemic problem where the job distribution is. Right. So when you look at where do women hold most of the jobs, it's not running the Fortune 500 companies. It's not at the higher end. Right? It's at those lower end jobs. And so you saw that disproportionate impact on women. And then at all levels, as you said, women at executive levels, mid-career levels, they had no choice. There was so much burnout. And then that infrastructure that collapsed, all of that invisible infrastructure like childcare and school and daycare, it all of a sudden closed. And when my entire support infrastructure shuts down, then that goes back to something has to give. And then so often because women may not be the primary earners in the household, although that is shifting and I'm happy about that. So often if it's like one of the parents have to stay home,

it was disproportionately the woman that had to stay home. And, you know, across the country, we lost 26% of our childcare facilities, 26%. And we had a shortage before that. And so now, you know, even companies that are like, all right, everything's open back up, you know, vaccines are out and get back to work. Well, we still don't have this infrastructure. You know, even companies that are like, all right, everything's open back up. You know, vaccines are out and get back to work. Well, we still don't have this infrastructure. You know, we have this long tail on this pandemic and new variants popping up. So schools aren't necessarily all back to order. We've lost those child care facilities. So that's going to take a ramp up.

I'm glad to see that that is part of the political agenda. But quite frankly, we need to be even more aggressive with it. So there's a lot of things that are going on and it's not just as simple as people don't want to work. There is so many dynamics that we have to solve for both, you know, public and private agendas. So I don't know why this kept popping in my head. And I can't even remember where the article, like who wrote it or what publication or anything like that. But there was something that came out maybe a year ago or somewhere in there that it was like, it's not companies that

are to blame, it's husbands. It was obviously like a snazzy title to get people to click on it, but where do you see the biggest problem or is it both? Is it that we are disproportionately expected to handle all of the workload at home or most of it, or is it that company cultures aren't flexible and allow for that work-life balance, or is it a combination of both? I'm just curious your opinion on that. I think it's both. I think that as progressive as we want to think we are, there is still a social stigma around men stepping into that role instead of women. I mean, I know personally, I made a decision right as I was on a path to the C-suite that something had to give at home. And this was years ago. And my husband and I talked about it. We saw more runway in my career. And so

he made the sacrifice to stay home. But that decision was judged. It was not seen the same way. Right. So if I say, oh, my husband stays home with the kids, it's like, really, Teresa, like, can't he get a job? But no one asked an executive man if his wife should get a job. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If a man has a woman staying at home, that's an honorable thing. That's a thing that's lifted up, but not so much. So we still have a long way to go on social stigmas around whose job it is to hold these roles. And we have to be bold about talking about opportunities for men as much as women. Men are parents too, and they need the right and they need the social support to also step into those roles for their family. And then I think the other thing is corporate culture. You know, work was designed for men just quite candidly, right? These work structures have been in place for over a hundred years and the workforce was primarily men. And so all of the structures, you know, the hours that we work, the way we did networking, all of those things were built

for men. And so women try to fit in to a structure that quite frankly was never built for them. So it's both. And we have to look at what are those structural. And I always say, we've got three S problems. We have structural problems, we have systemic problems, and we have social problems, and it needs to have a multi-dimension approach to really breaking down all of those barriers. I think everything you said is so important and really relevant, even to me personally. My husband, Jay, has a phenomenal career. And I feel like, I don't know if stigma is the right word or judgment, but if anything, he gets a lot of credit because he and I do divvy a lot of things up pretty

equally, like example, dropping off for school, picking up from school, who ends work earlier one day. We do try to divvy those things up. And I sometimes have a lot of empathy for him because there will be things often in the evenings or on the weekends or work the long hours or stay late. And it's not that he can't do that. It's that we have decided as a family that he's not going to do that as much. And we are going to trade off and all of that. And I think, you know, sometimes I say to him, I know it's tough because the other people he works with don't have that challenge. They can work late, which brings me to the point of, I don't, I agree with you 1000% that company cultures

and environments and, you know, work expectations were designed for men by men very long time ago. But I, I think there is a good chunk or a growing population of men that even want that to change. For sure. Right. And, and, you know, I, I have said sometimes provocatively that women will never get equal rights until men do. And what I mean by that is in this topic of parenting and child care. And we need to give men the support and the infrastructure also to step into those roles, because quite frankly, they want to. I really believe that, right? I believe that dads and parents, they want to have the flexibility to coach their kids' baseball team, and they want the flexibility to be there on the team. And they want the flexibility to be there on the first day of school. This is important for men as much as it is for women.

But again, there's that expectation. You know, I, I was in a situation one time when I rolled out a paternity benefit and, you know, I had, I had male executives saying, well, I understand why women need that, but why do men need that? Well, because they're a parent, right? And I remember chasing men around at the company and saying, Hey, if you're, if you're having a baby, you better take that, right? Because we need that. That's that whatever it is, social expectation, stigma, whatever you want to call it, we need to break those things down. And we need to also honor men who balance their life and recognize all of the important dimensions of their life as well. And that they're given that opportunity and they're not judged for it.

They're supported for it. And they have programs that they can leverage. Yeah. And I, of course, know this is a personal decision, right? Each couple, each family needs to decide what's best for them. And if, you know, if in a situation one person works outside of the home and the other person works inside of the home, then the person working inside of the home, maybe as part of their defined expectations will take on more of the lion's share. But I agree with you. I think there is a growing desire for men to be engaged dads, to, you know,

have that sort of balance, elusive balance that we talk about so often. And also, you know, whether you like it or not, if we decide to have a family or have a house. There are just certain things that need to be done. And, and it shouldn't all fall on the woman to do the laundry and the grocery. Like, I don't like doing that. I don't think my husband wants to do, but we both work and we've got to divvy the responsibilities so that we can not have burnout and not hate each other. And like all the things that I think happen when it's not communicated or talked about and ends up disproportionately just falling on the woman.

Right. And from a company culture perspective, so often these programs or these benefits, you know, we offer them to women and not men, which again, it just reinforces and, and they come across as accommodations, right? All right. We have to make these accommodations for women because they have these kids, right? So we'll give them flex time or we'll, we'll not make the woman travel because she has

kids at home. Right. And that just further reinforces. And I don't want accommodations. I want a structure that works for men and women. Right. Yeah. Like I don't, I don't want you to accommodate me to fit in your male structure. I want you to have a new structure. Yeah. And that brought the thought into my head too. And I want the option, right? So like, I think a lot of times, um, women aren't offered opportunities or jobs or promotions because people will go,

oh, well, there's a lot of travel and she has a family, but they don't do that with men. Or, you know, this might require long hours, like at least give the option, right. Give the choice. But I think you made an incredible point there is, is I agree. I don't want an accommodation. I don't want quote unquote special treatment. And I want our fathers and our husbands and our friends, the male friends to have, um, the opportunity to choose themselves and have that balance and participate in the home and all that stuff. Okay. I feel like we got off on a little bit of a tangent, but I was so curious about your opinion. Thank you. Okay. So let's go back to cultures and work environments. What has changed and is

changing about how people work after the pandemic? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the very positive things about the pandemic is it stretched our thinking in so many ways, you know, before the pandemic, there were, you know, there was a thinking that there's just certain jobs, no way, no, how can ever be done from home. Well, guess what? We figured it out and they were done from home. And not only were they done for a few weeks or a few months, they were done for an entire performance cycle, an entire year, and some excellent results we saw from that experiment. So I think that became a huge catalyst for us to stretch our thinking about what was possible and to look at talent and how we leverage talent differently.

I think another real benefit of the pandemic, and this is more on the individual side, is they really paused and had a minute to evaluate the path they were on, just quite frankly. I call last year the year of reckoning. And I think we reckoned on a lot of things. I think we reckoned on race. I think we reckoned on politics. I think we reckoned on, you know, how we spend our time and work-life balance and family. And, you know, in your opening remarks, you said, you know, what's going on? Are people just lazy? We, I don't believe that's what's happening. I believe that people are reevaluating what's important to them. And I think companies need to think more broadly about how that talent is leveraged. And so I think that there's a great opportunity, and that's a positive

that came out of the pandemic to really force us into thinking about the future of work. And, you know, as HR professionals, we've been talking about future of work for 20 years. Well, wake up, it's here. We are in the future. Right. It's not in the future anymore. It is here. And the companies that are strategic and see how this workforce dynamic is shifting and changing very rapidly. I just, I really feel like last year was an accelerant year. You know, it really accelerated our thinking on so many of these things that was necessary for us to really pivot to a model that works for everyone. So let's talk about some tangible or tactical examples. So flexible work arrangements, I would imagine either where you're doing it or the hours you're doing it. I'm imagining some

things in compensation and maybe looking outside of even the traditional compensation of like how much dollars you get paid, but there are other ways to compensate people. What, can you give us some examples of what companies are considering or should be considering as it relates to the future we're living in now and attracting and retaining women? Yeah, I think, you know, right now the big conversation is, do we let people work from home or not? And I feel like that's just, that's just the foundational, right?

And it's not even really the foundational. There's so much more underneath that. And so you see companies going, oh, we're going to be a hundred percent remote. We'll never come back to the office all the way from everybody has to come back to the office because we're a company that innovates and brainstorms and we need everybody together. And then probably most people are in the middle. Like we'll do a little bit of both. We'll let, we'll, we'll have this hybrid thing, which is like the big buzzword right now, you know, this hybrid model. But what I think we're missing is like the why behind that. If people are saying I worked from home and I liked that, well, why did you like that?

Well, because I could put my kids on the school bus or because I didn't have, you know, to pay for lunch every day, whatever all of those things are, we're not digging to understand, okay, how do we restructure the workplace where even in person is a lot more friendlier to those things. So for example, right, if, if we really loved putting our kids on a school bus or actually there was no school bus last year, but if we like, you know, the morning routine with our kids, then maybe like, we don't have 7 30 AM meetings anymore, right? Maybe we say, okay, we, we really understand that this is an important part of work-life balance is that morning shuffle with your kids. So we're just not going to have meetings until 9.00 AM, right? Every morning. So it's things like that. We need to think broader.

This is, this is bigger than remote in person hybrid. And that's where I feel people are circling right now, but there's so many different things that we can say, okay, what did we learn? What, what did people get last year that they, they didn't get before? And how can we translate that into our corporate culture and our corporate environment? It's so important. It's not just what did you like, or what am I hearing, but why asking that question? What, what were the silver linings for you? What did you learn about yourself and your life? What do you want it to look like? I think there is a great opportunity to dig deeper. Is there anything in your mind on the compensation

side that needs to be rethought just out of curiosity? Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, and I think companies right now are saying, well, wait a minute, if I have to pay you New York city wages and you're going to be remote and, you know, Knoxville, Tennessee, you know, then maybe I'm not getting my money's worth. On the other hand, I think that this is an opportunity for people to understand that we have, we also now can have a broader talent pool if we structure things right. We have, you know, there was a book written years ago that talked about the global nature of talent and the world is flat and no longer do you have to like find somebody in person

around you. And again, this is a concept that's been out there for a long time, but we've not really had the infrastructure in place to do that. So from a compensation perspective, I think that we have an opportunity also to go out and get the best talent and pay for that talent and be rewarded and people to be rewarded. I think that, you know, constantly looking at the gender gap is important. And if your company doesn't have regular routines where you do back testing and you look at rates of merit increases for women versus men, that's important. And especially during this pandemic, because we know that women were disproportionately stressed, had more on their plate. One of the things that I'm urging companies to do right now is when you do your year end reviews, when you're looking at performance trends over the last couple of years, you need to see if there's a gender demographic, you know, dropped 0.5 in your rating system or whatever, and men went up 0.5, well, okay, let's see what's going on here, right? really understanding how, how women could have been disproportionately hurt from a compensation perspective over the last year. And then how does that put us even further back from a wage gap

perspective? All great points. Any insight into, I hear some companies that are doing like unlimited vacation or like, you know, steering away from paid time off, you know, you have your 10 days a year. And if you've been here 15 years, you get 11 days, whatever it is. Right. Um, any thoughts on that? Well, I have a very strong opinion that, um, you should just begin from a position of strut, um, trust. So, you know, in my company reserve squad, I'm a, I'm just a startup, right? So not a big fortune 100 company. But that's my philosophy. It's just there is no vacation time. It's just it's just your time. And this is your job. And it's unlimited vacation. And there is no start time. And there's no finish

time. And we really run with the rhythm. And unfortunately, we don't allow people enough autonomy and trust to do their best work. And we try to manage around exceptions or poor performance and, you know, building structures around poor performance just seems philosophically backwards to me. And it's just amazing that if you give people that autonomy, what they can really do. Yeah. I often think, you know, people go, well, what about the one person who takes advantage? And it's like, well, you, you probably will let go of that one person, but what about the people who are busting their tails and, you know, have the company's best interest at heart, we're going to sort of quote, unquote, punish them for the one person. And yeah, I'm with you.

Honestly, it drives me crazy. I feel like most corporate employee handbooks are written for the poor performers, right? Just like we create policies, we create benefits all around of the one, you know, around a small percentage of people that will not make good decisions, perform inappropriately. And that's unfortunate because it doesn't recognize the hard work and the commitment and the loyalty and value of the majority of your employee base. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the reserve Squad model. What is it that you do? Yeah, sure. So, you know, I was in corporate America for about 30 years and always, always cared about gender equity, always cared about talent.

And we did a lot of things and I was able to lead a lot of programs for women and really work on gender equity and made some really small incremental progress. But honestly, I'm just so frustrated that we're not really making great progress at all. We just talked about that. And even if you look at the billions and billions of dollars that companies have put into D&I initiatives, we don't have a lot of outcomes to show for it, just quite frankly. And I think, again, there are structural, systemic, and social reasons for that. And so I decided to leave my big corporate career to wake up every day and work on those issues. And Reserve Squad is the first step to that.

One of the big things I saw is women dropping out of the workforce. And this was before the pandemic. So I identified this issue before the pandemic and started looking at research that told me 40% of all women will take a career pause at some point. Most often it's for caretaking, whether that's kids or parents that are ill themselves, but it can be a variety of reasons, trailing spouse, et cetera. 75% of those women will come back to traditional work, but only 9% come back to the company they left. And we know that when women make this decision, the consequences are severe. You have a gap in your resume, you lose your networks, you lose your connectivity with the business community, your skills may get outdated as a result, your confidence may fall. And then when you do come back so often, you come back underemployed and this then contributes to the wage gap. So what I built was

a freelance squad for every individual company where they can give individuals another choice. So if you say, Hey, I'm going to take a career pause. I need to do this, this, or this, the company can say, great, but Nicole, you don't have to quit. Why don't you go into reservist status for us? And as a reservist, you're not going to have a gap in a resume. Call yourself a reservist. We're going to keep you trained. We're going to keep you connected to what's going on at the company. And by the way, when we have a freelance project or a temporary need, we're going to solicit this reservist community to see if they'd like to do some freelance things here and there to keep their skills sharp. And from a company's perspective, I don't have to go out to some of these temporary or contract labor firms and pay high prices. I can tap into a talent pool

that already knows us and they know our culture and our technology. So what we do is we manage, we set these up for companies and we manage this reserve squad for the company. We have a workforce manager that works as a liaison between the company and the reservist. And we walk alongside these individuals. I talk about women a lot because disproportionately, we know that a woman might be more interested in a reservist type of position, but it's open for women and men. It's building a new structure. It's taken this whole idea of freelance and gig, embedding it in a company and populating it with your people. I think you are a genius. That is incredible. I'm like, I can, I, people were popping into my head and how

many companies would benefit from this too. I've experienced, similar to you, a lot of frustration and feeling like I'm working really hard and barely moving the needle with certain companies or in the D&I space. And I've had moments of frustration where I feel like screaming at people, like it would appear that you are in the business of repelling talent because the amount

of women that are leaving, you know, that are high caliber, well-trained in integral positions, and they leave and, and you're right, they, they don't reclaim them. They don't come back after whatever it is, whatever reason. And this is just such a compelling idea. So who, in your opinion, benefits the most from this work? I think it's, I think it's women. I think it's families. I think it's society. I think it's corporations. I don't even know if I can pick who benefits the most. I think this structure fixes a lot of different things. And, you know, I loved in your opening comments, your quote, you'll have to tell me where that quote is from, that women are the largest underutilized pool of talent, because

it's so true. When I first started researching this, and this again was pre-pandemic, it was estimated that there are nine to 10 million educated professional women currently on career pause. And I think there's an assumption that once they're on career pause, they don't ever want to do any kind of work besides being in the home. And I found that that's not true. In fact, I couldn't find any woman that said that all of them said, Oh, I'll do a project here and there. It would be awesome to keep my foot in the game a little bit. I just can't find a structure that allows me to do that when, where, and how I want we are now that structure.

It's so good. So yeah, the quote is women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world. And who said it was Hillary Clinton. I didn't say that at the beginning because I was afraid it would polarize some people. Like some people would hit pause and, or stop and not listen to the rest of our conversation, but it is one of my favorite quotes. Truth is truth. That's right. That's exactly right. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is not politically motivated. No. Teresa, thank you for the great work that you're doing. And if you're listening and want to learn more about Teresa and Reserve Squad, visit reservesquad.com. You can follow her or them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn at MyReserveSquad, and we'll put all that information in the show notes. And if you think Reserve Squad would be good for your company or for you

personally, go to reservesquad.com and fill out the form they have there. Teresa, thank you for your time. Thank you for your important work. I mean, really, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Okay. In the words of Teresa, we need to stop allowing life's temporary circumstances to permanently derail the careers of women. On-demand freelance work is now

one of the most attractive work arrangements for employees, especially for women, who continue to be disproportionately impacted by the effects of the pandemic and who have notoriously shouldered the bulk of the labor outside of work. I couldn't have said it better myself. If working inside the home,

because that definitely is work, is your passion, your desire, your purpose, then you should definitely do that. But if, like me, you feel called to a different purpose, have a passion and desire to start a business, work within a great organization or a team, provide a solution, solve a problem, meet a need, champion a product, or even if you just need to generate an income, then I lovingly invite you to get to work. Keep searching for the opportunities in companies that value and appreciate your talent and are willing to prove it by the environments, compensation, benefits, and flexibility they offer. Your job is to do your job and do it well. Their job is to figure out how to keep talent

from walking out the door. Let's do our jobs. This is Woman's Work.