by Kate Evert | May 13, 2020 | Competencies, Human Capital, Productivity, Work Place
By Lisa Aggarwal
Photo Credit: ©Angelina Zinovieva
Looking for a new job? Many people have gotten one they didn’t ask for. Parents fortunate enough to remain employed have the additional unpaid role of providing full-time childcare, entertainment, and assisted education to their children. Schools are closed. Daycares are shuttered and an estimated 50% will not return to operation in the future. Try working while a two-year-old tugs on your sleeve for 8 hours…it’s great!
Many professionals are tending to their children’s countless needs during waking hours and then working all through the night. If you work outside the home, you may have no choice but to entrust your children’s care to someone else. If you are among the growing number of unemployed workers, finding childcare for when job hunting activities or once re-employed poses another real challenge. Not every household has a reliable caregiver available to remain home. Affordable and available childcare isn’t a hallmark of American culture.
There are some options for working parents, however. A recent Time Magazine article outlining worker rights during the pandemic highlights that in companies who employ 50 or more people, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) could provide a solution. “The FFCRA was intended to prop up the U.S. economy during the pandemic, and includes some new or expanded worker protections that last through Dec 31, 2020. The FFCRA also extends up to 12 weeks of paid ‘expanded family and medical leave’ at two thirds’ pay to employees unable to work (or telework) because they are caring for a child whose school or place of care is closed because of coronavirus. It’s subject to caps and requires that employees have been at their company for 30 days before taking leave.”
Once areas emerge from the pandemic, will parents even feel comfortable sending their children to school and those daycare facilities that economically survive? New reports are surfacing of COVID-19 symptoms affecting children, and aggregate group settings are undoubtedly of higher risk. Childcare solutions are critical to having a population able to return to work. According to the Pro-Market, the blog of the Stigler Center at U of C’s Booth School, “While there is scope for a large rebound in employment even if schools and daycares remain closed, the economy will remain 17 million workers short of normal employment in this scenario. Furthermore, many of those working when schools are closed will only be able to do so if a spouse or partner or who would typically be working instead remains home.” It’s a tightrope we will all walk in finding a safe, yet economically viable way to proceed, and parents will likely continue to have a two-year-old tugging at their sleeve while we walk it. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | May 13, 2020 | Competencies, Human Capital, Productivity, Work Place
By Lisa Aggarwal
Photo Credit: ©Angelina Zinovieva
Looking for a new job? Many people have gotten one they didn’t ask for. Parents fortunate enough to remain employed have the additional unpaid role of providing full-time childcare, entertainment, and assisted education to their children. Schools are closed. Daycares are shuttered and an estimated 50% will not return to operation in the future. Try working while a two-year-old tugs on your sleeve for 8 hours…it’s great!
Many professionals are tending to their children’s countless needs during waking hours and then working all through the night. If you work outside the home, you may have no choice but to entrust your children’s care to someone else. If you are among the growing number of unemployed workers, finding childcare for when job hunting activities or once re-employed poses another real challenge. Not every household has a reliable caregiver available to remain home. Affordable and available childcare isn’t a hallmark of American culture.
There are some options for working parents, however. A recent Time Magazine article outlining worker rights during the pandemic highlights that in companies who employ 50 or more people, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) could provide a solution. “The FFCRA was intended to prop up the U.S. economy during the pandemic, and includes some new or expanded worker protections that last through Dec 31, 2020. The FFCRA also extends up to 12 weeks of paid ‘expanded family and medical leave’ at two thirds’ pay to employees unable to work (or telework) because they are caring for a child whose school or place of care is closed because of coronavirus. It’s subject to caps and requires that employees have been at their company for 30 days before taking leave.”
Once areas emerge from the pandemic, will parents even feel comfortable sending their children to school and those daycare facilities that economically survive? New reports are surfacing of COVID-19 symptoms affecting children, and aggregate group settings are undoubtedly of higher risk. Childcare solutions are critical to having a population able to return to work. According to the Pro-Market, the blog of the Stigler Center at U of C’s Booth School, “While there is scope for a large rebound in employment even if schools and daycares remain closed, the economy will remain 17 million workers short of normal employment in this scenario. Furthermore, many of those working when schools are closed will only be able to do so if a spouse or partner or who would typically be working instead remains home.” It’s a tightrope we will all walk in finding a safe, yet economically viable way to proceed, and parents will likely continue to have a two-year-old tugging at their sleeve while we walk it. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | Apr 8, 2020 | Productivity, Work Place
You may have recently seen this funny take on that BBC interview a couple of years ago, or this recent piece in the New York Times. In any event, I think that women who have been working from— and at—home for years, if not decades, are finally having our moment to shine.
My husband would often bluster, “I just can’t work from home; I need to be at the office.” With our current enforced stay at home orders, my husband has been coping by commandeering the desk in our daughter’s now abandoned bedroom. The other day, he found me curled up in the bedroom window seat, hyper focused, engrossed in a project. He very excitedly announced that he had just done his first Zoom call with video. I peered over my glasses and said, “You’re joking?” He replied, “No, why would I have done one before? You know I prefer face-to-face.”
Well, because sometimes…face-to-face isn’t possible.
I have done calls (at kids’ practices) in the rain
And in the dark. And on a plane and a train.
And in a car. And (at other practices) under a tree.
See, it’s really all the same for me.
So I will do them in an old call box.
And I will do them in comfy sox.
I have done them at my parent’s house.
I can control Zoom without a mouse.
And I can host them here and there.
Say! I can do them anywhere!
by Kate Evert | Mar 18, 2020 | Productivity, Work Place
COVID-19 has forced many companies to adopt new and expanded work from home policies. But remember—commuting is a 200-year-old fad—previously most everyone worked where they lived. Long before the Industrial Revolution, farmers, carpenters, blacksmiths, teachers, and shopkeepers typically made their livelihoods where they lived. About two decades ago, corporate America got the memo on flexibility. Those companies that have become adept at remote working will have the most ease at adapting to our new set of circumstances and keep a large chunk of the business world operating through the current crisis.
Online tools such as Slack, Zoom, or Skype allow for companies to stay connected while physically distant. CHRC has relied heavily on Zoom, a video conferencing tool, as a communication platform for years. We not only use it for meetings with clients, but also amongst ourselves when collaborating on spreadsheets or reports. Stella Garber, product marketing lead at Trello also uses Zoom to manage a team spread across the country. A recent Chicago Tribune article shares how Garber “spends much of her day in meetings on Zoom…whose stock is up about 60% since the start of the year, which can be configured to show everyone’s face like a ‘Brady Bunch’ grid so colleagues can see each other’s reactions.”
Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, believes that this global pandemic will allow companies to see that working remotely “can be done successfully” and also “demonstrate the benefits beyond disaster preparedness.” In order to make working from home successful, Philippe Weiss, president of Seyfarth Shaw at Work, suggests that “managers must set clearer expectations, offer more frequent praise and have more purposeful check-ins on progress when their workers are remote. They should overcommunicate, but not too much.”
We predict that the true test will be of management skills and disciplined and purposeful communication. Investing in training for these capabilities right now will result in a much healthier organization long after we’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | Mar 4, 2020 | Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Leadership, Work Place
As we begin Women’s History Month, we should acknowledge that long before Rosie started riveting in relatively clean and safe surroundings, her forebearers were working (mostly unpaid) for millennia.
Too often, people associate women’s history solely with the image of Rosie the Riveter or suffragettes winning the right to vote in 1920. But we tend to forget that long before that, women worked for centuries in cottage industries, producing gloves, lace, and woolen goods in their cottages or homes. A huge leap occurred when women took these “handy” skills and transferred them to large looms run by steam power in the north of England and then New England. Often, the women working in these roles were on the lowest end of the social spectrum, and thus had no voice.
The First World War was a major shift. Now women were patriotic to take on paid roles outside of the domestic work that they had always done outside the home. By the end of 1918, American women made up nearly 20% of the workforce. Like their British sisters, once the American women had a taste of autonomy and contribution, they were not content to return to the farm or the home and lose the voice, and perhaps the pay packet, that they had gained once the men returned home. The “average” American woman then realized that the best way to make her voice heard was the ballot box.
So this Women’s History Month, let’s reflect on the contributions of the women before us and continue to celebrate their impact in our world every day. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | Feb 5, 2020 | Leadership, Performance Reviews, Work Place
We are just finishing our holiday puzzle. You know that puzzle that you do as a family so that you have a legitimate excuse to sit around for hours at a time in your holiday pajamas? Well someone (me) had a brilliant idea this year of selecting a 1,000 piece puzzle of the Sistine Chapel. Pazzo!
I think most people have strategies for doing puzzles: find the four corners first, then segregate out the edge pieces, and once the structure is completed, then start looking for colors or patterns. Most of us are set in our way of solving puzzles. Our family has traditionally had its roles set. My husband and son have extraordinary spatial development skills—and we have overly relied on these. I might have been staring at a section forever, desperate for a piece in one area, and my husband would come, stand over my shoulder, nonchalantly pick up the one piece I’d been searching for, and silently snap it into a gaping hole. Infuriating—yet this skill completes the puzzle at a much faster pace.
This year the tables were turned. Once the perimeter was finished, our traditional go-to guy’s secret weapon was of no use. Why? Because Michelangelo’s genius required color recognition to solve this puzzle, and no spatial development skill was going to help. My spatial development genius husband is very challenged when it comes to nuances in color.
Our son returned to college, our daughter (quite smartly) refused to help, and every time my husband wandered back to try again, frustration took over. I think I must have changed tactics five different times and employed entirely new ones. There was no one way to solve this puzzle.
This really made me think about the way we approach problem-solving at work. How often do we have a project or problem and our first response is to ask the office go-to guy? How often would the go-to guy admit this is a problem he can’t solve? That he’s never done a 1,000 piece puzzle before or that he is terrible at color recognition? How often does a boss or colleague tell the go-to guy that he doesn’t have what it takes to solve THIS problem? It’s time to recognize that sometimes, someone who has traditionally never been the strongest player for the typical problems tackled, just might have the required skill set to lead the team in solving a new puzzle.
I think there’s a lot of food for thought that anyone in an organization or leading a team should ponder. Anyone in the midst of performance reviews should definitely be thinking about team members as a collection of all of their strengths and perceived weaknesses. You could be overvaluing one person’s spatial development while overlooking someone else’s color recognition—an ability that someday might be the key to solving the team’s biggest challenge.
