Managing Working Parents During the Pandemic | HBR IdeaCast

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0:55Ellen Ernst Kossek:Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nikish.

1:06Ellen Ernst Kossek:It's pretty well known by now that the COVID-19 pandemic has put an enormous strain on working parents. It's also put a new strain on the managers of those working parents. Leading a team to drive results, that's always been the manager's job. But how do you do that when your team members are suddenly managing child care while they're on the job? The pandemic has forced many working parents to stay home. Their kids may be home during work hours too, maybe attending school virtually or because care centers are closed. Hiring help may not be safe. And on top of that, these workers may be sharing a home office with their spouse.

1:42Ellen Ernst Kossek:So working parents are stressed and stretched, and research shows that that increased burden at home during this pandemic is falling more heavily on women. So if you're a manager, you need to understand this reality of your reports, but you also need to hold them accountable. Today's guest has researched this growing challenge and has some advice for managers. She recommends offering working parents two things that might seem to be in conflict, predictability, and flexibility. Here to explain that is Ellen Ernst Kosak. She's a management professor at Purdue University, and she's a co-author of the HBR article, What Working Parents Need from Their Managers.

2:25Ellen Ernst Kossek:Ellen, thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about this. Thanks for having me, Kurt.

2:37Ellen Ernst Kossek:Why is this a management problem and not about individuals basically just trying to hack their own work situations to better manage their time and responsibilities? Well, I think a lot of the way that we've implemented flexibility, for example, has really been where companies have passed policies like you can request flex time, you can be accommodated, you can request to work at home, but whether you could do it or not in America has often been determined by whether your boss approves it. So we really have a lot of manager-driven flexibility and manager-driven support of work and family and the employer sets broad parameters, but it's really approvals depends on your immediate boss for flexibility.

3:30Ellen Ernst Kossek:And those broad parameters that you're talking about, for some managers, that's been something they can point to to not have to work something out with you either. Exactly. And I think what's hard is that, I mean, certainly your functions will vary in a company. So if you're in a sales job that can be done mobily, then the manager is going to be able to support it. But in other parts of our companies where you have frontline workers or even in all hands on deck culture for coding, if you're a tech company, managers haven't really had to think about how to be flexible. because in our culture, we always put work first and the employee is supposed to self-regulate and basically ask for help when they need it on an ad hoc basis.

4:24So COVID's really changed everything upside down.

4:27Ellen Ernst Kossek:So what's the manager's role in improving the situation? Well, what we've found is that the manager should really try and think about two principles of making work as predictable yet flexible. And it sounds like they're two opposite things. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

5:12Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. But they really aren't. Being predictable means that the manager helps the worker think about when are meeting times for face time required and what would be a backup system predictably and then flexible is when something's going south with a child or someone gets sick that the manager helps the employee be able to have a backup system or be able to restructure and maybe do work over six days, maybe working only some shorter days, six hour days, and then working on a Saturday or going back on at night, what's called split shifts.

6:11So predictability and flexibility together. And it's kind of these alternative ideas, but I actually think it'll help managers be better managers down the pike post COVID as well.

6:22Ellen Ernst Kossek:Yeah. Well, let's dig into that a little bit because it does, when you hear about being predictable and flexible, it does sound like a contradiction and something that's hard to manage, right, as a manager. I get the predictability part when you say, you know, know when you're going to have meetings. It's not the time to be like, hey, let's all check in as a team this afternoon for a half hour. Because if two parents are at home, and they're trying to make sure that their conference calls are not overlapping, so that at least one of them can keep an eye out on the kids, whatever age they are. Yeah, that kind of thing that drops in on your calendar at the wrong time can just be really hard to manage and is not very helpful, right?

7:05Ellen Ernst Kossek:What about the flexibility part of it, though? Well, I think a phrase that I love is the idea of learning how to be flexible and flexibility. Being flexible on flexibility is basically where the manager gives the employee some flexible options on workload, in terms of deadlines, on scheduling, and also flexibility on maybe what tasks are the most important. It might force the manager to look at what I call, and others have studied, high-value work and really prioritize what's the most important thing to do. Because today, as busy professionals online, most of us, we could probably work every day, all day long.

7:55So I think it's being flexible on what is done, when it's done, and when it's delivered.

8:02Ellen Ernst Kossek:Yeah. How do you actually communicate that then? to your team or to an employee? Well, I think the manager has to first look at the team as a whole. And that's also something in our culture. We don't often think about the collective. So collective time for core hours for meetings, and then collective time in terms of the overall work of the unit and helping the employee prioritize. And so it's a conversation. So one thing that I do think going back to the predictability time that managers need to do, especially during COVID, is to have some one-on-one check-in time with every employee, particularly the working parent, to find out how things are going and priorities.

8:47Ellen Ernst Kossek:Is that conversation harder to have if you haven't had it before? I mean, I feel like for a lot of managers, especially at, let's just say nine to five jobs where people come in and then go home, all of a sudden that family life is coming into conflict or at least overlapping with a regular work schedule. And maybe you're a manager who just like, you know, you just haven't talked about or dealt with these issues before. Can you start being this kind of manager at a time like this? Great question. And this is something that doesn't come naturally, as you suggest to managers. And And in fact, our research shows that if you ask managers, Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins.

9:35Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast.

10:10Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. If you're a supportive boss of personal life for anyone, whether or not they have kids, 100 % of managers will rate themselves as supportive, and only half of workers will rate their bosses as supportive. So there is a gap that needs to be closed.

10:32Ellen Ernst Kossek:Yeah, I loved that statistic when I read it. I couldn't believe it, but then I totally could. Yeah. And you know what? Realistically, in the U.S. for years, we were kind of a separate worlds culture, as Rosabeth Moss Cantor, who was at Harvard Business School, once wrote about years ago. And now COVID's really made 100 % overlap of work and non-work boundaries. So we need to teach managers some ways to be supportive. And we've identified four behaviors that managers can do so that someone will feel free to talk about their personal needs. Well, let's get into the practical then. What are those four areas?

11:14Ellen Ernst Kossek:What are some things that managers can do to create the kind of routine instability that you're talking about? Because that might seem harder than flexibility. Well, the first one is emotional support. And it's basically just asking workers how they're doing, saying hello. So having that scheduling, that one-on-one meeting for, you know, 15, 30 minutes once a week, we found that a lot of managers don't even take the time to humanly connect. and that's when somebody's going to tell you about a problem gee my sitter has COVID I need help for example you were exactly right managers don't know what to do they're just told to be supportive but what does that mean so emotional support at least showing that you care about employees as a person and then instrumental support was the idea of just helping people basically with scheduling and availability and that's something that is really regulated a lot now by the each employee and by the the manager and i agree that people are scared today you know some companies are laying off people one interesting thing about availability might be for the manager to be flexible even on whether people use their video camera so maybe somebody can be in a meeting but they're multitasking.

12:38And you don't want to stigmatize somebody like a mom, for example, or a dad that's also has a kid over in the corner while they're trying to be in the conference call, just how we're managing teleconferencing as well.

12:53Ellen Ernst Kossek:What are some other examples? Giving some choice as to when people might want to have team meetings or being able to have a COVID, we call them COVID buddy, somebody that could back somebody up at a meeting when something comes up. That's an instrumental system that the manager can set up. Got it. So with a COVID buddy, you might actually get two workers who are able to negotiate workload and hand stuff off to each other and manage that relationship and sharing among themselves. Exactly, or even for meetings. If you can't go to that 30-minute meeting, you could ask at least your buddy what happened.

13:35And that also helps the team not lag in getting work done. And we actually debated, my co-authors and I, on the idea of recording. And I think it is important to record, but I think you have to be very, first get permission from the team so people know you're being recorded, right? Right. And then I've mentioned role modeling, which is basically just talking about personal strategies you're using or just your own emotions, what you're going through. I mean, it's not like, you know, just in a professional way. And then the last one is this idea of creative work life or work family management where you think...

14:15Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

14:53That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It's about win-win solutions for the parent and the business to get the work done. So maybe your company used to have a policy that someone couldn't work remotely if they lived beyond 75 miles, 50 miles from the office. Some companies had that pre-COVID, but maybe now you might let somebody telework from anywhere. They still get the work done, but they're able to, maybe if they're by grandma, grandma can watch the child while you're working. Or they're able to live with their partner when they had had a commuting marriage before COVID started.

15:36So, you know, it's all common sense, but sometimes we forget these basic ways to support people.

15:45Ellen Ernst Kossek:How can managers make sure that work is still getting done? Because I think many are trying to be sympathetic, not be too harsh, but also want to make sure that, you know, they're not setting up a situation where people don't do the work or get behind on the work in a way that, you know, hurts the organization. How do you strike that balance? once again I think you do want to make sure that the work does get done but I think managers have to help prioritize what's most important and if something is not a tight deadline you can allow say a parent to get their work done over seven days instead of Monday through Friday or even a two-week window.

16:34And then if people are running into problems, that's when you step in. But you shouldn't manage the whole team as the exception. You should start off with giving people the benefit of the doubt, but a little more what I call time buffers to be able to get work done. So if something does happen with the children at home or your partner has a deadline and can't watch the children if you're childcare sharing, it gives them flexibility and flexibility.

17:05Ellen Ernst Kossek:Do you need to pay attention to making sure that you're not sort of shifting a lot of the responsibility from people who are working parents who have these new difficulties from people who don't have children? I'm sure that's a temptation a bit for managers now to put things on people who don't have children at home and aren't dealing with this. Is that a mistake? Yeah. And so I just tell managers that you shouldn't get into backlash wars where you say that somebody's kid is more important than somebody else's need to have regular time to go for a run or have a pet or a grandma or elder care. So the reality is somebody that's trying to multitask and getting their work done will be at a disadvantage.

18:01I do think that we might want to have some empathy sharing in the team of what people are going through. On the other hand, I don't think you can burn out your non-parents either. And one way to do this might be to have people volunteer. Who would like to do this? Try to use the carrot first rather than the stick and have the team actually help you figure out how to cover. And if that doesn't work, then you may have to be a little more focused and trying to give more work to somebody who is a non-parent. But perhaps you can then reward them with something else after COVID or let them pick a task that they like more.

18:50It's a negotiation.

18:52Ellen Ernst Kossek:Yeah. Can that lead to a situation where people feel like they need to volunteer or they're not going to get promoted? Well, Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

19:33Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You know, I really think this isn't a diversity and inclusion issue. We've not included work-life issues as much as we should into the D &I discussion. I really think this is a 100-year pandemic. You know, we haven't had something like this. And it's trial and error. I think that managers do need to understand their own unconscious bias about this, about who is an ideal worker. And this could be part of a team conversation sometime.

20:20But right now, nobody wants to get on Zoom for another meeting. But I do think that it should be something that is at least talked about, that you don't have to worry about losing your job if you don't volunteer. But once a month, everybody should volunteer. Let's hope that works out. And unless you have a special situation, like you got sick or you have an artistic kid, right, and there's no backup. So I think people understand that.

20:47Ellen Ernst Kossek:I wonder, too, for managers, they're also feeling, you know, this is financially difficult for many organizations, and they're feeling pressure from their superiors who maybe are less tuned into team dynamics and, you know, what people's working situations are and more tuned into sales and productivity and, I don't know, manager superiors may see those choices differently. Well, great point. And in fact, I have some research that we're writing up right now where we found that if a manager's boss, like at the director level, was supportive of the manager's own work life, the manager was actually able to enact support for their workers.

21:36So I think companies might want to intervene at their senior management level because everybody's feeling this. It's just a matter of whether you're in a traditional family or how much money you have. So I would say let's try and socialize our leadership. It's up to the CEOs and C-suite to get everybody on board. And even though I agree that companies are hurting, but what I've been finding from this national study for the National Academy of Sciences is that parents are double paying for school, for child care.

22:13Ellen Ernst Kossek:What does that mean? Well, for example, if you have your child in a child care center and you don't want to lose your spot post-COVID, they're paying for child care in the home or alternative system and they're paying in the center. or a private school. They don't want to lose a slot in the school, but they're also then coming up with alternative teaching approaches. So there's a tremendous financial burden on parents right now. A lot of what we talked about is really helpful when you talk about flexibility for people who can time shift their work, people who are able to move some to the weekends or after kids go to bed, get in several hours of answering emails or heads down productive time.

23:05Ellen Ernst Kossek:What about essential workers or frontline workers who have shifts or need to be on scene? Flexibility is much trickier to try to work out there. What advice do you have for managers of businesses like those? Well, I've actually done a lot of work with manufacturing or healthcare. And one thing you can do is to simply have shift trades possible. In some companies, the worker can't find their own backup. And a company can facilitate this by having formal cross-training. There might be a machine that only one person can do or a certain type of job. Another strategy I've seen companies do is that they hire one floater worker or they have a current employee be trained to just cover wherever work is needed.

24:05If somebody is not able to come in, you know, frontline workers, they might be able to come in and shift their schedule an hour or something with someone else. one other thing that we've seen is the idea of a guilt-free sick time or call-in number so i saw a manufacturing company do this with workers in the winter when you know that schools close because of the snow or cars don't start is that you you staff one extra person that can be on call to come in and that does give workers a chance to to be able to be have time off and not lose their job. So those are simple things, but it really makes a huge difference.