What if you could start over: if you could design your workplace – including its location, hours, technology and HR policies – according to how you actually live today.
Sure, keep your new design within existing possibilities – we’re not on the Starship Enterprise here – but really imagine how you’d redesign structures and processes in order to better suit the way you live. We are no longer in the industrial era, where factory life destined work to become a place we go rather than something we do. Nor is this the earlier part of the last century where Dad could go to the office and not worry about the home and kids because Mum would be available to do what needed to be done.
Could you design your future workplace in such a way that it would improve your own life, as well as the bottom line for your employer? Would your level of productivity be raised as a result of the re-worked physical and non-physical structures you’d include?
Would your redesigned workplace make you happier? Less stressed? More willing to continue in your current job? More able to get on with your work and then back to your life when needed?
Completely rethinking what we know about the workplace was an idea that WGEA director Helen Conway brought up yesterday at the launch of CEDA’s new report, Women in Leadership: Understanding the Gender Gap.
It followed earlier research released by CEDA that found 93.2% of women believe barriers to equality in the workplace still exist for women. Women got the education to access working opportunities – and have been graduating in equal numbers to men for three decades now – but the look and feel of the workplace failed to keep up with the shifting demographics of its employees.
“If I gave you a piece of paper and said, ‘design a workplace that fits the way we live today’, I bet it wouldn’t look like the workplaces we have today,” Conway said in Sydney yesterday.
And so I got mentally scribbling and quickly confirmed she was right.
For me, it would start with job design and hours worked. We’re stuck in a Monday to Friday, nine to five (if you’re lucky) mentality. We view Wednesday as ‘hump’ day because it indicates we’re edging closer to the end of the week. We think of life in seven-day segments, where we struggle through five days of getting up early to get to the magic two when we can get up late. We work days that align with the school week, but hours that don’t match what the kids are doing. And school holidays present a whole new range of problems.
Recruitment practices would be completely overhauled in this redesigned workplace. Selection criteria rewritten, language such as ‘part time’ and ‘full time’ removed from job advertisements. New job design specialists would enter the human resources departments, highly-skilled individuals able to work with employees on designing roles that fit the employee and available salary accordingly – based on performance indicators and key deliverables rather than time. Productivity would no longer be measured on sitting at a desk in the office, but rather direct project outcomes.
Meanwhile, we have access to incredibly powerful technologies that we simply could not have imagined when women first started entering the workforce in large numbers. These too would be better utilised in the redesigned workplace. New research released by Deloitte Access Economics and Google finds a link between flexible IT policies and employee satisfaction and retention at work.
In line with that same report, the redesigned workplace of the future would also include better use of collaborative technologies, social media access, ability to bring own devices to work and, most important of all, enable a more seamless transition between accessing data and resources in the office and while working remotely. We’d make better use of video-conferencing technologies in the redesigned office, enabling more virtual meetings from wherever we happen to be – and eliminating the need to jump on a plane to see a client interstate.
Current stereotypes regarding who makes a ‘great leader’ would also disappear – you wouldn’t get there on the basis of tenure alone, nor by being technically brilliant at what you do. Different ‘styles’ of leadership would be incorporated at the top, something that’s truly valuable for making the most of gender-based diversity and yet something a 2011 Bain study found plenty of women don’t believe is appreciated – with 80% of those surveyed saying a woman’s collaborative style is less valued than the more self-promoting styles of men.
This workplace would go a long way in expelling social myths regarding the roles men and women should play at home. Caring responsibilities would not be seen as ‘women’s work’ but rather responsibilities that both men and women take on. Dad in the playground wouldn’t be a novelty, but rather the norm – about 50% of the time.
And policies that apply to women would be equally applied to men – another suggestion by Conway, and a means to ensure that any bias or assumptions about women embedded in such policies are stamped out. This could mean that even paid parental leave is offered in equal amounts to men and women.
This redesigned workplace would be one where you don’t discuss diversity initiatives for seeing women achieve leadership positions, because women would already be there. Meritocracies would actually work.
As Conway noted, if we’re going to truly address workplace barriers that still exist for women, we may need to challenge ourselves on doing things differently.
So how big would you go? What would your redesigned workplace look like?