Women at Work - Making the Most of This Mess

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

A behavioral scientist gives advice on how to better muddle through working from home during the crisis. She also points out the long-lasting positive changes in women’s personal and professional lives that may come from having to reset expectations and boundaries right now. Guest: Ashley Whillans. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. When I think about three months, six months, nine months, a year from now, it's hard not to panic that the way I did my job, the way I made money, the way I even took care of myself at home or professionally is not going to be possible. I sort of stop at that panic, which is probably not healthy, and don't think about the positive. But there are moments where I get excited about the possibility of reinventing all of that. Yeah. I think that so much of how we come out of this can be determined by us as women. And this is a time for women to talk to one another about their realized needs and their

changing expectations and how they deal with those new needs and new expectations together. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. In the middle of what's probably going to be another very long, very tiring day for many women, us included, we're catching our breath to reflect on what the daily grind of coping with this unusual situation is doing to our well-being. We'll be talking about the ways to soldier on as best we can in the short term. And we'll also get into how to leverage the positive aspects of this mess to set ourselves up for a better than before experience of work long after we're in the clear. We spoke with Ashley Willans. She's a behavioral scientist and an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and she's part of a team of researchers who are studying employees who are trying to do their jobs from home right now. Her team is learning about solutions and coping

mechanisms that are helping people in crisis mode. She'll share some of that advice with us, as well as her thoughts on how the crisis may benefit women by allowing us to ask for what we need and to be more authentic. And just a heads up, since this episode first published, we removed a couple identifying details to help Ashley preserve the confidentiality of her research project. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I want to start just by asking how you're doing. How are you

holding up? Yeah, thanks for that question. It's an important question that we should all be making sure we take time to ask ourselves. I'm doing well, thanks, as well as can be expected. You know, I feel grateful and lucky that I'm employed, healthy, that my family is healthy. My partner is a healthcare provider, an ER physician, and that's been a source of increasing stress in both of our lives. one at a time and try to savor the small moments of spending time together and really try to control what we can control and let go of the things that we can't control. And I think that these strategies are hopefully what are going to kind of carry us all forward one day at a time. Yeah. Well, tell your partner thank you for us, please. I will. Thank you. He appreciates hearing that. So you're working on some new research. Tell us about it.

We've been tracking, like so many, we see this as an opportunity to both understand how employees are navigating and what organizations are doing to navigate this uncertain time in the short run, what's working well, what's not working well. But we also see this as an opportunity to see if when things start coming back online, if we can't carry forward the positive into the future to redefine what it means to work and to balance work and integrate work along with our personal lives. So we're trying to understand what about this quote unquote new normal is positive and how can we carry forward those positive strategies into the future. I wanted to ask about work from home in particular, because I think it's been thought of as a benefit that helps women balance work and life, but not everyone wants to work from home. And I'm curious, is this going to be more people just having to do what the organization is thinking is best for them? Or is it going to be they have the option to do these things? I mean, I've been doing a lot of interviews with organizational leaders, with employees from all kinds of different firms over the last few weeks, months.

And it seems that they're using the current situation to evaluate their lives, really. So if work from home is something that they want, if they don't want to commute an hour each way to the office, the current crisis, COVID-19, is opening up conversations that people felt like they couldn't have before, especially women or junior people. This conversation is starting to happen around, well, maybe when things go back to more normal, like when we're allowed to leave our homes or not quarantine anymore, maybe I still want to retain some of the flexibility I had. But at the same time, I'm also hearing a lot of, Amy, what you're talking about, which

is women and parents, caregivers in general, feeling really frustrated. They wanted to have separation. They need to have separation in their lives to be fully engaged as an employee and fully engaged as a parent. And so by having this forced integration, they're trying to be on a work call. I'm hearing all these stories of parents or just caregivers, people being on work calls and their mind is distracted. You know, you have the working mom trying to be a top level executive and then watching out of the corner of her eye as her partner struggling with the kid or struggling to cook a meal and hearing all these stories of like, I don't want to know how my partner struggles when I'm at work. Like I can't be trying to do my job and then feel so unhelpful,

so helpless when my partner's trying to manage all these demands. And when I travel to a client site for four days a week, I can compartmentalize. I don't have to know what's going on with my kids, with my family. I don't have to have it so top of mind for me. I can completely compartmentalize. And we've been hearing a lot of people saying, well, I can't now pretend I never saw that. I can't pretend that I never saw the impact that my work is having on my family life, not always in a positive way. So I think this separation is something that some people

will want even more strongly coming out of this, or it might make people re-evaluate their career decisions more broadly. So kind of just choose to leave their job or choose to reimagine what it means to be a professional and a parent at the same time. Yeah. Let me ask about that, because I find it really optimistic and hopeful that women are asking and that we're having these conversations, that people are questioning what is an ideal worker, what do I want? At the same time, most organizations and companies are going to be under serious economic distress post-COVID whenever we get back to work. We've heard a lot from DEI experts that they're concerned about backsliding around policies that have benefited women, people of color, other marginalized groups. And I'm curious if you're hearing anything about that in your research or if you have a perspective on whether we're going to experience some of that. I mean, I think that we need to be really careful. Part of the reason people are kind of overexerting themselves right now is because we're in an economic downturn. People are rightly scared that they're going to

lose their jobs. And so they might be overexerting themselves. You know, they feel like they can't have these conversations. And policies need to get implemented. We need to help people, especially working women who might be taking on disproportionate amounts of the child care at home while also trying to work these really challenging jobs. We need to be telling them that they're going to be okay. contracts and you do this in a way that everyone gets those same extensions, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're taking care of a young child versus not, then that is going to have these disproportionate results in differential attrition later because some people actually needed that extension to just cope with their lives. And some people were kind of using that time, using that extension to take on

additional client work or take on additional projects, further their career in some ways. And so I do think that it's going to be, you know, there are the potential for these costs. There is this potential to go backwards, either because women feel like they just can't do it anymore. Like if this goes on for six months and you have children at home and you're trying to work this job, like we're hearing already a few weeks in that women are like, I don't think I'm going to make it. Like, I just don't think I can do this for another two months. So you're going to have a differential attrition, but then, you know, the policies and practices that get instituted might also lead to differential attrition down the road because some people

were actually using that time to deal with their extra demands in their life and some people were not because they didn't have those demands and I don't know how you solve for that it's a really thorny open question but I think we're going to have to be really thinking about how anything that we do now any support we provide or the lack of support that's perceived could have really severe consequences for women, for people of color who are dealing with a whole lot of things right now. And that's going to fundamentally shape what our organization looks like down the road. Yeah. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle,

the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to

the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Mudupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So let me pick up on this whole notion of differential attrition. How do we avoid that? How can women, let's start with the women, ask for what they need, the support they need? What are you hearing from the women you've spoken to? Yeah, so I mean, we have some data suggesting that women, and especially junior women, don't

ask for time, for example, on adjustable deadlines at work because they're really worried that they're going to be perceived as incompetent, unmotivated. And if anything, managers actually think the opposite because, you know, to what we've been saying, if you ask for what you need, it seems like you're in charge of your career. It seems that you're in charge of the demands that are on your plate. So if anything, asking for what you need is more positively perceived than people expect. And women and junior employees are especially likely to be worried what their managers are going to think of them. And what I've been hearing in my conversations fits with my research in the sense that these conversations have to come from the team leader,

from the managers. This is like Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, but when this is working well, when women feel like they can ask for what they need, it's coming from the fact that they feel safe. They feel supported in their team environment. They have managers who ask very deliberate questions that go beyond, how are you? That's a good place to start, but that are asking, well, what's positive for you today? What's negative? If you had to have one word that describes how you're feeling, what's that word? Why? Really trying to delve into the full experience of what people on teams are facing, having really open and honest conversations. That's helpful for managers on how to sort of lay the groundwork. I'm curious, as a woman, how do you judge whether it's psychologically safe

in this environment whether to ask for what you need? And then what do you actually say? In what I've been hearing, it can't be a conversation, really. It's sort of almost like, this is what I need to be productive in this job in the long run. I think our default is to go into this kind of apologetic mode of hedging

where we're like, oh, well, maybe it would be great if... And really what I'm hearing that is most effective is just being direct. It's almost not a conversation. It's saying for me to be an efficient worker in the long run, to not get burnt out, to be able to do my job, I need this. This is a very hard environment to work in, working virtually, remotely, having to balance work and life being so integrated. I think that that is one lesson that's coming out from the interviews is we can't be apologetic.

We have to be very direct about what we want and not apologize for the reason, maybe not even explain the reason. You mentioned work-life balance, Ashley, and I was really interested in an email that one of our listeners sent us. And I just want to quote from it. This is the part of it, the passage that really kind of grabbed me. She said, I think the desire to achieve work-life balance for me has capsized. I am now just trying to stay afloat and just get my

family to shore safely. Once we do, perhaps, I can figure out a new plan forward, but I know my direction will be very different. And it made me wonder, this quote made me wonder whether the whole notion of work-life balance is capsized. And do we need a new metaphor? Do we need to think about this in a different way? I think that this reader is very rightly acknowledging something that I've thought a lot about recently, which, I mean, again, I think work-life balance suggests that you have separation, like that you can go from work to life and seamlessly transition back and forth and now that both of those things are happening simultaneously in the same physical location I think of it more as integration more as everything happening all at the same time so I don't think

balance implies you have separation and you can kind of go from one place in your life to another. And I don't think we have that right now. So I think we should throw this metaphor off the table. But she's also talking about something that, like I said, I've been thinking a lot about, which is the idea of self-compassion. And we know from research that people have self-compassion are better able to navigate stressful situations and demands. They set more realistic goals and targets. And I think one thing I was hearing a lot in the interviews

is you're thinking about COVID, you're thinking about being home, and you're like, oh, great, I'm going to cook more, I'm going to work out more, I don't have to commute, and I can fill all that time with being productive and being a wonderful friend and getting to all these hobbies I've always wanted to have. It's like you're on vacation. Learn to play piano. Yeah. That's not

what's going on here. No. We're in a crisis. We're dealing with emotional stress. That commute time that we're saving is going to extra meetings where we're literally just trying to figure out how to do our jobs and not have everything that we work at implode on itself. We have to be checking in with each other more to make sure everyone's okay. And I think this reader is pointing to the importance right now of self-compassion. We need to remind ourselves it is okay if the only thing we're trying to do is get through this period of time where we're not trying to become the fittest version of ourselves, the best version of ourselves, but that we're simply trying to

survive intact with our health and our family's health together. I think that's enough. And I think this goes back to the ideal worker mentality. we should not hold ourselves to those unrealistic standards. We need to be okay with being compassionate and getting through day to day and being nice to ourselves to not hold ourselves to the same standard as if everything was okay. It's really not okay right now. And it is okay to not be okay to not be achieving right now yeah yeah i want to come back to this idea of self-compassion but i also want to ask about the metaphor of and the integration versus balance because at the same time right it's all sort of

collapsed in on each other yet to do my job i do need my daughter and my husband not to be in my office space, right? Like I really, not just for appearance reasons because I can't focus. So I'm curious what you're hearing in your interviews around how people are getting that separation in this current environment. I think we need to have rituals. And I think they're more important now than ever before. But when this first started to happen, I didn't have a home office and I borrowed my office computer, stuck it in our guest bedroom, which was usually my partner played video games in this office. sense of like personal life happens where the couch is and professional life happens where my office computer is. And I would, you know, and I still do this now. I'm wearing a suit jacket. Why am I wearing a suit jacket? Like I don't need to be, it doesn't matter. But I like put on perfume,

I put on makeup and I march into my office and I close the door and I'm like, okay, workday is starting. I think those small rituals do help us kind of create, at least if we can't create physical separation, we can at least try to create some sense of mental separation. Another interviewee that I was chatting with, to get her and her family all on the same page about what her work schedule is like, they put a physical board in their living room. So, you know, from 10 to 11, mom is on a meeting, like a client meeting call. That's really important. And so it's a physical reminder in a shared space that, no, mom can't check in on you 10 to 11. Mom's in a meeting. Dad's on duty then. And I think that also seems to be working really well. These

kind of like physical reminders, the shared coordination on people's schedules and these small rituals that we can build in for ourselves to give us a semblance of a normal work-life structure when it doesn't exist, when time is actually completely unstructured now. I've also been hearing about the importance of weekends, right? Oh my gosh, yeah. Because especially now when we could work any, like to the extent that our jobs are virtual anytime, if it wasn't already like this, it's especially like this now.

We know that technically, you know, it seems easy to schedule a meeting because we all know we're working from home. So why not just have a meeting at seven o'clock at night on a Friday or 10 or 7 a.m. with a colleague in a different time zone because we're all just working from home. So I think that's, again,

coming back to this boundaries point. I've been hearing a lot of positive boundary setting. I'm not gonna open my computer on the weekend because I cannot. Video calls are exhausting and that's all we're doing right now, both to socialize and for work and socializing at work with colleagues. It's exhausting and demanding and it requires kind of a lot of resolve to sit in your office by yourself and work as hard as you did when you're in an office with energizing people. And we need to,

again, be nice to ourselves. It's okay if we feel extra tired right now. There's a lot going on in the world. Our work has shifted dramatically. So creating those boundaries around this is when I work and this is when I don't work, creating some structure in our lives, some semblance of a routine that feels like we are mentally separating at least work and life seem to be especially important right now. And it's funny you mentioned this distinguishing the

weekend. The manager who I work most closely with here at HBR on Friday, I was like, what are your weekend plans? We're chatting on Slack. And she said, I am not going to work. And then we talked about what other things she was going to do. But I was like, that is so helpful as a manager for the very first thing you say when you talk about the weekend is, I am not going to work, right? And I was like, oh, I'm not going to work either. Even though, again, like you say, Ashley, the days are sort of bleeding into one another and who cares if I do email for two hours on Sunday? But you know what? Then I'm not getting the rest I need and I'm stressing out the people I'm emailing. Yeah, and I think being very explicit about that

and making it a positive norm that we tell each other when we're not going to work and what else we're going to do instead is great. Yeah. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities.

Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. So last time you were on the show, Ashley, we talked about how women take care of themselves. And that's something that sociologist Alia Hamid Rao brought up on a recent episode when talking about the extra pressure women are under right now. I think what's going to get lost is sleep. I think it's going to be mental health. I think it's going to be physical health. I don't have any evidence to suggest that women's paid work will suffer.

I don't have any evidence that their attention on their kids will necessarily suffer, but I think their self-care, I think that's what's going to be the thing that we see kind of going down. So what do you say to women who are up against that bleak forecast? It's really tough, right? I think right now we're really seeing women suffer because they're getting crushed under the weight of their own expectations in some ways around what it means to be an ideal worker, an ideal parent, right? That women feel like they have to over achieve at work to achieve the same level of success and then also feel this increased guilt for working and then maybe getting some

support from their partner where they're at work and this all happening at the same time in the same physical space. So I'm seeing a lot of guilt, a lot of frustration that's falling disproportionately on women. And we know from research that women take on more emotional labor burdens, right, than men. At the same time, I'm seeing some women able to capitalize on this as an opportunity to empower themselves, to have conversations with their managers about flexibility that they would have never had six months ago. I'm hearing a lot of women, a lot of junior women on the phone

saying things like, I've never been clearer about boundary setting. I have to make sure I'm taking care of myself. If I'm going to keep doing this job, if we remain in a remote work environment, I need to take care of myself first. I always knew this, but now more than ever, I'm asking for what I need. And I've been having a lot of conversations around if you earmark the things that you need to feel good about yourself, exercise, social interactions, connecting with your family. Instead of taking that activity to the extreme degree and saying like, well, to feel good about myself, I need to work out five days a week. To feel good about myself, I need to make sure I check in with my mom every day. To feel good about myself, I need to meditate every day for an hour. Can we lower the expectation on ourselves of what it means to take care of ourselves? Otherwise, we might never do it,

right? This is at least true for me. Instead of trying to uphold running three days a week, can I just try to go for a half an hour walk in the middle of a work day? Can I try to pull that off? Instead of setting up all these exhausting Zoom calls with my friends, which are great, but they're really tiring on top of a long 10-hour day that we're sometimes doing of constant back-to-back Zoom meetings, can I find a friend to text with instead? Can I reach out to a colleague I haven't talked to in a little while, shoot them in any email and see how they're doing and take a picture of my day and ask them to take a picture of theirs? Can I do a lower-lift social interaction?

And we see this in our data too, is when we're thinking about what it means to live a good life, when we're thinking about what it means to be happy and live with purpose, we hold ourselves to really high expectations around how much time that's going to take. But we know also from research that 10 minutes a day of walking and a few short conversations with people that aren't even your close friends and 10 minutes of breathing and checking in with yourself, 10 minutes of writing what you're grateful for,

that these small actions add up over time to have really profound impacts on our mental health and our physical health. And I think given that we know women are especially unlikely to take care of themselves because they're putting others first, but maybe we can both think of taking care of others and taking care of ourselves in smaller windows of time. You know, you mentioned earlier how women are more likely to carry emotional labor. And one of the things that happened this weekend is I had a really rough time on Saturday. I did a little self-care by lying on the bathroom floor and crying, which was really what I just needed at that moment.

But it also happened to coincide with when we had scheduled a family Zoom call with my extended family. And I was really trying to get myself together. So I didn't look like I'd been crying because I was like, I don't want to distress anyone. And I couldn't be late because I was the one who had, who hosts the Zoom call, right? Like I was just feeling all this pressure to like, get my act together. And I eventually just was like, you know what? They're just going to know I was crying. And if they want to ask about it, they can ask about it. And I think because Zoom was, you know, there were so many of us, no one really noticed, and I was like, you know what?

It's even okay if I'm crying on Zoom. I just need to lower my expectations. Like, I'm sure most of them have cried today. Like, this is a hard time. So that advice really resonates with me of, like, we just have to change our expectation about what we can do. Yeah. Yeah.

And show up where we are. Yeah. I think that's one thing I've been really trying to be better about as well. I think in the past, if I wasn't perfect, like if I wasn't feeling my perfect self, I just wouldn't want to do it. I wouldn't want to show up at all. You know, I'd reschedule or I'd try to pull myself together, hype myself up. And I think now more than ever, we need to accept where we are at and show up as we are, how we're feeling. And I think that if we could have one thing carry forward from all of this, having that be one of the messages, it's like, how can we just show up as our authentic self, feeling what we're feeling and being who we are more often? Yeah.

So Ashley, you've done all of this research and we're in such a weird moment right now. What's the most realistic hope you have for the future out of all this? I think the most realistic hope is that we can bring our more authentic selves to work in the long term, that we lower our expectation for ourselves in terms of what it means to be the ideal worker,

the ideal parent and partner. And this is something that came up in an interview that I think is what my ideal hope is kind of in the workplace, right? So how can we have more conversations around flexibility? So this one person I was interviewing said, at the end of this, what I hope is, and what I've heard is that people will no longer say they wonder what a stay-at-home mom does. And similarly, maybe we will no longer wonder what people who are working from home are doing. And so if there's anything around work that could change as a result of our quarantine and remote

working is that conversations are happening about remote work and what people need from their workplaces to both live a fulfilling life and be a good employee. Ashley, this has been so helpful. Thank you very, very much. Thank you both so much for having me. It's been a really wonderful opportunity to reflect on everything that's going on. So thank you again. I like your suit jacket, by the way. Okay, can I just say that the part I love best about your rituals, Ashley, is that you put on perfume. Yes, I know.

Oh my gosh, that is just wonderful. This is true even when my partner's not here, just for myself. So I did one of those stupid Twitter polls, and the question was, do you put on lipstick for Zoom meetings? And I answered honestly, yes. I may not have showered in three days, but the lipstick's on. I know. I definitely had some fun at WebEx with my students.

They're like, your hair looks so good. I'm like, I think that's just because I haven't washed it in a while. The grease is serving as a nice balm. Yeah, it really straightens out your hair. I have been hearing from so many of my interviews, though. They're like, oh, it's so nice to not have to look perfect on like every day saves me so much time. People are loving it. Yes, it really does. It does. That's our show. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoke, Adam Buchholz, Mary Du, Tina Tobey-Mack, Erica Truxler, and Rob Eckhart.

One more thing. We're putting together an upcoming episode with our friend Allison Beard, who is the co-host of the Dear HBR podcast. And so we want you to send us your questions about any aspect of work. It can be COVID-related or not. Just send them to us at womenatworkathbr.org. We'll read all of the emails you send us, and we'll try to answer as many of your questions as possible on the episode,

with help from Allison. In the meantime, take good care.