Management Insights
Is Your Company Single-Friendly?
We have come a long way since senior executives, mostly men with stay-at-home wives, reluctantly caved against the pressure to offer work-life policies. Viewed as an unavoidable hassle, organizations started offering flexible work times, onsite daycares, and remote work arrangements to retain talented female workers with children.
Today, work-life policies are viewed as a strategic asset rather than a nuisance. Flexible work arrangements and parental leave are often accessible to men and women now that it is generally accepted that many men want to care for their children. In this positive trend, however, the focus is on employees who are married with children. This begs the question of what policies exist for single, childless employees. They too, surely, have a life outside of work that needs support.
Why Working Long Hours Can Hurt Your Work Performance
Professionals often take pride in working long hours. Others work excessive hours because their supervisors reward only those who are always at work. In many organizations, there is a silent understanding that more hours equate to high performance. Research, however, tells a different story. Here is what the numbers say, followed by ideas for limiting your work hours.
The Dark Side of Work-Life Perks
In the battle for talent, organizations introduce new work-life policies each year: laundry services, shopping assistants, mindfulness workshops, and onsite climbing walls. Big tech companies such as Meta and Google are now offering nap pods for employees. Especially in Silicon Valley, there is no limit to the lengths organizations will go to, to attract high potential. The question is whether work-life policies also retain talent because some policies do not result in better work-life balance, but rather, in working more hours.
Why It Pays Off To Be a Kind Leader
In many workplaces, masculine traits are celebrated and encouraged. The best leaders are thought to be strong, decisive, and agentic. When describing leaders, we are less likely to use feminine traits such as communion, communication, and kindness.
Yet kindness is often precisely what is needed at work. There is a clear business case for kind leadership. To find out how kindness drives results, I researched what kind leadership is, its return, and how we can practice it.