PepTalkHer Founder & CEO Meggie Palmer spoke with Have Her Back Founding Partner, Caroline Dettman about reinventing and accepting work-from-home life. She talked about their study on #WFH trends and its disproportionate impact on women.
Meggie: Caroline, thank you so much for joining us for the Daily Power PepTalk. We're really looking forward to this. You are one of the founding partners from Have Her Back consultancy and you're going to be talking to us today about all things working from home and the new reality. How is your working from home experience going so far?
Caroline: It's a hot mess. You're talking to someone who, let's be honest, have been actually working from home a little bit, one to two days a week for 20 years. But certainly never, ever, under the circumstances that we all find ourselves in today if we are lucky enough to actually be able to work from home, without any of the resources that we've had, with all of our families slash partners slash pets and everything else that comes with it. So, it’s certainly a new day for all of us.
What do you think are the top pieces of advice that people can put into practice when working from home?
Caroline: I have to be honest. I think I'll tell you what advice that I'm still seeing and it's absolutely infuriating to me. I don't know if you would agree with this. This week, I saw an article saying to make sure that you're the most productive, make sure you have a separate space set up for working from home during COVID-19, that family members really understand. Apparently, those writers don't have small children or loot box apartments where that's just not an option anyway. It's not an option.
And you know what's funny from my own personal circumstance? I'm working from home full-time. My husband's lucky enough to be working full-time at home. He's got a loud booming voice which I don't think I realized so much until now. Then, we have three teenage boys who are home e-learning in our Chromebooks and doing their video chats or what have you.
Seven years ago, we moved to the suburbs. We were so excited to rehab an old home and we had this open concept. We were just so excited about it. Now, that open concept is not seeming like the best choice, the widest choice, not ideal, but it is the reality. And until the curve flattens, this is the situation that we're in.
What has helped you cope with the circumstances that you're in, given that your husband and three kids at home?
Caroline: What I've realized is we all have to lean into it. And actually, the best thing that we could ever be doing, first of all: these human moments can be really touching in a world with little actual touch these days. So, there's that nice part of the humanity of it. But more importantly, all the interruptions and all the disruptions that we're having in our day to day working from home is actually going to disrupt the workplace in the best way possible. It's going to help end some real biases that have really held particular women back in the workplace.
So, hear me out. I think the wonderful thing is, Have Her Back the consulting agency that I founded with my two partners, we actually did a study two weeks ago that really looked at this. We got to look at and talk to American workers at mid to large companies about what their companies are doing well for them, what they're not. We were able to really study this. So, this was a premise that we had.
The good news is that the results actually bore this out. I'll get into that in a little bit. But, I think to do that I've got a backup. I mean, I think first and foremost, like everyone else, day in, day out, you're on call after call after call, and everything from a cattail flying by.
My partner has a four-year-old and a one-year-old. You can just imagine we're on the call. We're on multiple calls every single day. Four-year-olds don't understand mommy's working now can you go do something else? They don't understand it. So, she often is disruptive. And I gotta be honest in the best possible way, if you are not too young enough to remember Jerry Maguire, it's literally like these moments where he comes bounding in and he's like the human. He says, “the human head weighs nine pounds.” And you're like, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” That's a reality that we're dealing with.
I have two teenage boys. I've got a loud husband. I've got a puppy who's 100 pounds, who needs a lot of attention so I'm often barked at. I'm often barked over, not just by my dog but also by my loud boys and husband. It's just the reality of what we're dealing with today. But as I mentioned, I've been doing this work from home, in some way, shape, or form for 20 years. And of course, I did that not in the situation that we're in now. I had my kids at school. My husband was not in the house working as well. So, it was probably a lot more efficient, yet, I always covered it up.
I always covered up the fact that I was working from home. That is because legitimately of caregiver bias that's a legit bias. And working from home is a legit bias. There was always this notion that “Oh if you didn't give that FaceTime that would hold you back.” Or that you weren't actually working when you were working from home. I often found myself covering up so I would be on calls. And when my kids were younger, if they were being loud, I would like to escape to the garage or anywhere that I could go to not admit that I was working from home.
I think, as women, there was that fear of discrimination and reprisal in the workplace. Maybe there was a lack of promotions if you publicly talk about the fact that you have children and that you have to juggle.
I worked to places that had remote working policies, yet I still felt a real need to cover up the fact I was doing it for those very valid reasons. I'm learning now and what I've done. In fact, even the zoom calls that I schedule in now, I'm often titling them: kids, partners, pets, all welcome. People need to understand that we all should be bringing our whole selves to work. We can't not right now.
Meggie: And it's not practical. I completely agree. I don't have children, but we had my nephews the other day looking after them. And it's kind of the same thing. All of a sudden, there's like running steps through the zoom call. So, I completely agree and I do. We're like, “well, that's just not gonna work.”
Do you think remote working is actually practical, as well as the right thing to do?
Caroline: I think longer-term right now, in the here and now, when you got all the schools that are essentially in e-learning mode. In fact, today, I saw the news about schools in Washington and in other places are actually gonna end early because e-learning’s not working. So, even if you have that small distraction for your kids, you're not going to have that necessarily. Right now, in the current circumstances, these distractions and interruptions are here to stay.
I think this is going to have a really good impact on the long term. Because men are experiencing caregiving, like working while parenting. When I say men, it’s at all levels. This includes the leaders who make the policies and enforce the policies. They are experiencing caregiving and parenting while working in ways that they never had before.
It's interesting when we did our study. Right now, all working parents are finding working at home while parenting difficult. That's not a shock. To some degree, everyone is finding it difficult but 31% of dads said it was extremely difficult, extremely difficult versus 14% of the moms. So, they're really feeling it. The other thing that's really interesting is that 38% of dads (this is a very high number) reported that they are the primary caregiver during COVID-19, which was surprising. It was higher than we would think.
I was surprised by this. But then of course, when you start to look into it, it's a lot because a lot of women are really on the front lines. They're the essential workers of healthcare. So, they're actually really having to go to work and a lot of men are really having to be the primary caregiver. But, even if you are sharing the caregiving, this is a new day for men. It's like what we call a nice way to earn empathy. They are really now understanding how hard it is.
Coupled with that, there is acceptance not even just an acceptance, but essentially a demand that remote working is here to stay right now. It will always be here to stay whether you don't have resources. We are going to get back to a time where schools are going to have to reopen in some way, shape, or form. And you will have resources to be able to do that. In the here and now, for remote working, everyone is saying, “Okay, this is something that we're going to need for the long term". So, there's an acceptance to remote working in ways that there weren't in the past.
We found that 87% of all workers expected to be able to work remotely way beyond this pandemic. That's everyone who felt that way. And so, because of that empathy, and also the acceptance of remote working, I think one of the most interesting and the most startling response that we got was that 90% of dads reported that women particularly after having children would benefit professionally and would climb the career ladder faster because of the acceptance of remote working.
Meggie: That's a real positive to come from this awful situation if we can move towards that transition way more?
Caroline: I was quite surprised but in a very good way. What's gonna be interesting for us, is we conducted this study a couple of weeks ago. We want to conduct it again. Can you just imagine with more time doing this under their belts, how it will continue to go forward?
I think the acceptance and the demands of remote working are really interesting. I think it likes to want to try to get this right. It was millennials, people of color, women, and all ranked the ability to work remotely going forward as the number one reason why they're going to switch their jobs. For your company right now, you have to be thinking about retaining and including more talent and this is going to be a huge way in which to do that.
Meggie: I couldn't agree more. To be honest, I think, a lot of men and women start their own company in the first place so that they have that flexibility and that capacity to steer the ship in their own direction. I think that is a great way. In terms of the cost of living, there are so many positives if you can be remote. At PepTalkHer, our team is entirely remote. We work across three countries and four time zones, which is always fun trying to work out the team meeting. But it's a small concession to have the team meeting at 6 pm or get up at 7 am for a meeting, if it means that for 365 days a year, you can essentially be working from wherever it's convenient for you and your family which is why I think of it this way.
Caroline: You were at the forefront of something. And now you are probably concerned expert in what every company is trying to harness and figure out right now which is such an incredible opportunity. I think it's wonderful. I think it's also incumbent upon us. This isn't just about working parents.
I think it's really important for everyone to welcome and encourage this right now, because of the long term impact that will have. It’s interesting. My husband, in one of the first weeks that we were working from home again, I overheard him. He was talking to a sports league executive and I overheard him saying very earnestly, “Hey, listen, go watch frozen with the girls. We can finish this conversation tomorrow.” And I thought to myself at that moment, that would have been unheard of prior to that. That would have been just an unheard-of way to end that conversation. And he earnestly meant it.
So, I actually made a point to say to him, I was so impressed with that. I think it's incumbent upon all of us to really share how much that means when you are working with colleagues or co-workers and they have their kids come in because you still feel the need. You want to cover it up just like that BBC dad. We all watched that. We were all hysterically laughing. We were all sharing that and we were all thanking God, it didn't happen to us. I think now we all need to encourage it because of the long term potential positive impact.
Meggie: This has been awesome, as always, talking to you. I'm so excited to read the rest of the study about working from home trends and how that's going to shift the trajectory of workforces all around the world.
You can check out Caroline’s awesome work here on Instagram & website.
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