Towards a gender-equal recovery from COVID-19?
This essay by Work After Lockdown co-investigator Zoe Young was first published in May 2021 Essays on Equality: Towards a Gender-Equal COVID-19 Recovery by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London
Lessons from lockdown for resilience and recovery
Prior to the pandemic, working from home was simply one of many flexible working options made available by progressive organisations seeking to promote work-life balance. Typically it was an option used by women in combination with other adjustments to working hours, to reconcile maternal responsibilities with paid work[1]. Informal use of working from home on a Friday by many became characteristic of British office culture; a way of easing into a weekend. It was far less common in the UK to work from home all the time: only 3% of employed people worked in this way[2].
One year into the UK’s pandemic response, and the working from home is a business continuity lifeline. Around 30% of employed people across the four nations’ were doing their jobs from their homes during the first pandemic peak.
Will it stay, will it go? Will people want to continue to work in this way when COVID-19 restrictions ease?
What are the implications for women’s employment and labour market opportunities arising from continuation, cessation, or adoption of the much discussed ‘hybrid’ location model? Who will benefit and who might lose out?
These are the very good questions the ESRC funded Work After Lockdown project will answer.
Since the Summer of 2020 researchers on the Work After Lockdown project, led by the University of Southampton Business School with Half the Sky and the Institute for Employment Studies, have been engaged with this question:
how is enforced working from home in the UK changing how people want to work in the future, and how organisations respond?
The research team is walking alongside four case study organisations in commercial and public sectors as they adapt and adjust to the tightening and easing of the restrictions that have necessitated all or a portion of their workforces shifting from office to home. A national worker well-being survey repeated through time is tracking change and continuity in employee wellbeing and working pattern preferences; and we are using national datasets to explore and quantify changes in appetite and adoption of this and other flexible working practices.
The lasting impacts of crisis-driven working from home can only be assessed with time. But, as people and organisations across the UK navigate a third period of national lockdown our research offers important learnings from the first about motivating employees and sustaining performance vital for resilience, recovery and growth[3].
Working from home works, provided the conditions are right
The shift from office to home was rapid in March 2020, and for some organisations it was comprehensive with 100% of the retained workforce suddenly ‘out of the office’. Productivity was good. By self-report measures, almost nine in ten (85.5%) employees we asked felt they had got at least as much, if not more, work done at home as in the office. Good news for organisations and impressive under testing circumstances. But at what cost comes high productivity? Maintaining it during successive weeks and months of the pandemic takes its toll, with employees’ responses on mental health and well-being on our survey ranking relatively low – at 47 out of 100 - measured against the World Health Organisation (WHO-5) global standard[4]; well-being is an area where employers need to act.
Women are in the middle, again
There is little doubt from our research that working from home is most productive for people with access to adequate desk space, technology, privacy, and uninterrupted time. Access to these vital components of effective working from home was not universal, and it was parents and carers who felt a time squeeze most acutely.
Women make up the majority of this group and were uncomfortably yet familiarly positioned in the middle of a collision of caring with crisis.
For women with very young and school-age children at home all the time, working time was broken time; often fragmented and frequently interrupted. We found that not only were parents and carers less likely to work from home under conditions conducive to high productivity, they were also more vulnerable to anxiety, stress and burnout. It is clear from our research and that of many others, that maintaining work performance through successive lockdowns and school closures has come at high cost to women’s cognitive, emotional as well as financial resources.
Poor workforce health and well-being threatens business continuity. Well-being - physical, mental and emotional health - should be prioritised for organisational stability and performance. Continued reliance on individual ‘coping’ is not a sustainable strategy to maintain and improve productivity, and focus must be given by employers to interventions and practical adjustments to workloads and working practices that remove burdens and ease intensity.
Pivotal role of line managers
Line managers played a pivotal role sustaining employee performance during lockdown. Many embraced the challenges and made immense efforts supporting their colleagues practically and emotionally. On the downside, working from home has also exposed managers who lack empathy, have little insight into diverse workforce needs, and possess limited interpersonal skills.
Line managers are on the frontline of organisational responses to change in their translation of corporate messaging and policies into practical ways of working for their teams, and yet only a minority received any guidance on how to co-ordinate the different working patterns necessitated by lockdown. Organisational stability and future growth will be assisted by reviewing managers’ suitability for the task, and by developing training curricula that strengthen the new people management competencies that workforce diversity and the future shape of work demands.
Working from home after lockdown?
Despite the challenges there have been some individual gains from working from home, in the cost and the time saved by not commuting for example, although social contact has been greatly missed by many and could fuel an immediate surge back to the office when confidence returns. That said, seven in ten (73%) employees wish to continue working from home when pandemic restrictions are lifted either some of the time or for specific work tasks, under what has been termed a ‘hybrid’ model. Our survey findings mirror national data from the Understanding Society COVID-19 Study, where 75% of employees across a broad range of industries want some working from home once things return to normal; 13% would prefer home working all the time, and 12% do not want to work from home at all.
Time to re-engage with flexible working
It is clear from our research that being able to adjust the time and timing of work has proved as much if not more significant as place in retaining parents and carers in employment through the pandemic. Few will want to reverse the situation and give up the task and schedule autonomy that has sustained them under lockdown. This situation requires employers to re-engage with flexible working. Seriously. With positive intent to discover ways of working that will not only retain and sustain, but also boost individual and team performance.
Shaping a more equitable future of work requires an intentional strategy to test and to learn about what flexibilities work in different roles and teams, and for people in different sets of circumstances because one model is unlikely to suit all in the future of work after lockdown.
[1] Young, Z. (2018). Women’s Work: how mothers manage flexible working in careers and family life. Bristol: Bristol University Press
[2] Work After Lockdown calculations using: University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research. (2020). Understanding Society: COVID-19 Study, 2020. [data collection]. 6th Edition. UK Data Service. SN: 8644, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-8644-6
[3] Parry, J., Young, Z., Bevan, S., Veliziotis, M., Baruch, Y., Beigi, M., Bajorek, Z., Salter, E. and Tochia, C. (2021) Working from Home under COVID-19 lockdown: Transitions and tensions, Work after Lockdown: www.workafterlockdown.uk
[4] Bajorek Z, Mason B and Bevan S (2020), Wellbeing under lockdown: Results of a survey of British homeworkers, Occupational Health at Work, 17(2):29–34. 4
