Five men will take a six-month challenge to work flexibly or part time as part of a Workplace Gender Equality Agency initiative designed to show that flexibility benefits all workers – not just women.
The program, called the Equilibrium Man Challenge, asks five men who are currently struggling with work/life balance to make a change – they are either reducing their hours, changing their hours to be more flexible or spending more time working from home.
These self-diagnosed workaholics are challenging themselves to better understand the benefits of working flexibly and prioritising work/life balance by spending six months doing so – and all in front of a camera. The men’s journeys towards flexible work will be filmed as part of a WGEA documentary.
Meet Equilibrium Men Tom Faulker, Development Manager at Mirvac, Simon Quartermaine, Surpervising Counsel at GES Legal Telstra, Adrian Cory, General Foreman at Mirvac, Reid Johnson, Director of Telstra’s Customer Service Unit, and Michael Chaaya, Partner at Corrs Chambers Westgarth.
The men are each spending six months trialling a different working arrangement. For Falkner, a competitive beach volleyball player, this means leaving his desk at Mirvac early on a Friday afternoon in order to fit in an intensive training session with his coach. For Chaaya, this means avoiding this long commute to work one day a week working from home with his three year old daughter. For Quartermaine, the new arrangement will mean both working part time and doing some of these hours from home in order to spend more time with his family. Johnson is taking a salary cut and trailing a nine-day fortnight, compressed into eight days.
The men all recognise that their current working arrangement does not allow for an adequate work/life balance and, in many cases, does not allow them to spend as much time with their partners and young children as they would like to. But even while recognising this, for years these men have been reticent to ask for a more flexible arrangement. Why?
Because the stigma around flexibility for men means that they are seen as ‘uncommitted’ to their work, the men explained at the launch of the Equilibrium Man Challenge on Tuesday.
“You don’t want to be the one who isn’t at work in the afternoon because he is spending time with his family. You don’t want to be that weak link,” Cory said.
And that’s exactly what the challenge is for – to show these men, their companies and their peers that flexible work can increase – rather than decrease – productivity by creating a workforce that is more equal, more balanced and less exhausted.
At the launch of the Equilibrium Man Challenge, short videos were shown of each participant’s current working arrangements. The audience saw Quartermaine’s wife describing him coming home each night at seven, eating dinner with her and their young daughter, and then promptly going back to work until very late at night. She told the camera she desperately needed him to work fewer hours, but she didn’t think he would ever change.
Enter the Equilibrium Man Challenge. Quartermaine said he’d known for a while that he needed to make a change but did not have the courage to ask for a flexible arrangement – but now he is going to try it for the first time in his career thanks to the challenge.
The aim of the challenge is to move the focus on flexible work into the mainstream, and include men in the need for different working arrangements. But studies cited at the launch show that many men are already aware of the benefits of flexibility – 18% of men and 29% of young men have seriously considered leaving their jobs because of a lack offlexibility, GM of Telstra Business Will Irving pointed out at the program’s launch.
WGEA’s new acting director Louise McSorley described the challenge as a “unique campaign aiming to accelerate the take up of flexible working practices by showcasing exactly how it can be done”.
“Over 6 months, we get to witness these men navigating changes to how, when and where they work, and we see first hand that flexibility is essential for improving work for both women and men,” she said.