Price of life: when work gets in the way of family

Working from home late at night to make up the hours does not always work.

Mikki Silverman has stepped back from a role in senior management at Coles to take on the CEO position of a small company, where she can work three days a week and still spend time with her son, Raphael, 15 months.

Climbing the corporate ladder can be a challenge for many women, particularly if they have a young family and want to spend time at home.

The Pregnancy and Return to Work national review, released last year, found almost one in two mothers reported experiencing discrimination in the workplace at some point, and it was evident when women were trying to accommodate specific needs when returning from maternity leave.

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures from 2011 show 53 per cent of mothers of a child under two who had a job while pregnant had returned to the workforce; and of those who did not return to work, 88 per cent stayed home to care for their child.

Statistics and studies show it can be difficult to manage a fulltime corporate career that demands extra hours with motherhood, but women increasingly are finding ways to step sideways into senior roles in smaller companies, start-ups and other industries to allow them to have the family lifestyle they want.

Earlier this year Mikki Silverman, 34, left a high-flying job as head of strategy for the Liquorland division at Coles, to take up a role as the chief executive of human resources software company DiffuzeHR.

She has a 15-month-old son and found her long hours at Coles were a barrier to family time.

“Coles is a demanding environment, it’s not atypical to have 7am meetings and 6pm or 7pm meetings,” Silverman says. “That was the same where I was before at Bain & Company, and you’re working a lot and travelling a lot. That’s the way it has been my working life. You work a lot.”

Silverman had consulted to DiffuzeHR and helped the company raise capital, and while on maternity leave considered her options to ensure she could give her family adequate time.

She did not want to give up seniority or the corporate life but accepted the DiffuzeHR role because she could learn from it.

“One of my mentors once told me you can assess the next opportunity in two ways: will I continue to learn and will it open up the next opportunity,” she says.

“I wanted to do something where I had some control and, in corporate, sometimes you don’t get that. You don’t often have flexibility and I thought it was a great opportunity to get that.”

Silverman has scaled back to just less than four days a week and allows herself enough flexibility to take her son to swimming lessons, work from home if needed and hit the computer after dinner.

“It was important to me to find a role where I didn’t feel I was taking a step back, I’m still progressing my career,” she says.

“There are skills in my tool kit that I don’t have yet. Now’s a good time to develop those skills and if you can do that and have that flexibility that’s great.”

Flexibility such as working from home, early finishing times and elastic schedules can help some women manage and have been proven to increase company loyalty, cut sick leave rates and increase productivity.

But working from home late at night to make up the hours does not always work.

And, as Silverman says, there will always be people in offices who look down on or mistrust those who leave before 5pm or work flexibly.

“When you walk out at 5pm you always feel stares but they don’t know that you started at 5am and you’re going to go back and work on your home computer,” she says.

Silverman says taking on the top job at a smaller company can lead to more stress and pressure.

In a big corporation with more than 1000 workers only the chief executive is completely responsible, but accountability is greater in a small business or a start-up.

You Legal founder Sarah Bartholomeusz also noticed the increase in responsibility and stress in her own law firm since leaving Elders two years ago.

Bartholomeusz was a joint company secretary and group solicitor at Elders. She was retrenched while pregnant and already a mother to her young son when Elders sold her division.

“At times there were days when I worked all through the night and we were communicating with people at 11 o’clock on a Saturday night,” Bartholomeusz says. “Sometimes I work like that now, but I’m more in control.”

Instead of stepping back on the corporate treadmill, Bartholomeusz wanted more control and established her own law firm. She now contracts work to 14 staff and has a virtual office but shares a small business space with three other companies in Adelaide.

The move also has means she can retain a senior role but has the flexibility to manage family life, including eating dinner with her husband, David, and children Alexander, 3, and Nicola, 2, each night. “I think of corporate life more as a jungle gym than a ladder because taking a sideways step might be better for your career and your family life,” she says. “Everyone wants something different from their life.”

Bartholomeusz says her idea to establish a commercial law firm was also to create flexibility for top-tier lawyers.

They are not tied to the office and do not have to work specific hours, and she pays only for the contracts they complete.

The move allows her to work from her home on the banks of the River Murray two days a week, and gives others the same employment and flexibility conditions.

“They don’t have to be stuck in an office for 10 hours a day. With technology you can work from anywhere.”

Last month, Bartholomeusz won the best start-up category at Telstra’s South Australian Business Women’s Awards.