The pandemic has exposed the fallacy of the ‘ideal worker’
The pandemic invites us to update a 50-year-old model of perfection.
With most of us working from home these days, Americans’ workday has increased by 40 per cent — roughly three hours a day — the largest increase in the world. Yes, I fact-checked that. I couldn’t believe it either.
The problem with all this busyness and productivity is that it comes at a huge price. Many employees are now doing the work of three or more people. They’re doing their own jobs, their childcare workers’ jobs and their children’s teachers’ jobs. Yet many employers seem oblivious. I hear reports of companies cheerfully assuring their employees, and themselves, that everyone is working at, or close to, 100 per cent. Why don’t more managers see the problem here?
It’s because there’s still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker”. We commonly define the ideal worker as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues, full time and full force, for 40 years straight. The concept reflects a breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and functioned fairly well through the 1960s, until women began entering the formal workforce in greater numbers. But the ideal worker norm has long exacted a higher toll from women — who not only did their day jobs but also were expected to deal with responsibilities for their families and households.
However, it’s not just women who suffer under the burden of the ideal worker norm. According to a recent survey, 14 per cent of women are considering quitting their jobs because of work-family conflict related to COVID-19. Perhaps more surprising, so are 11 per cent of men.
My organisation runs a hotline for workers who encounter discrimination based on family care responsibilities, and we frequently hear from men whose organisations have outdated leave policies that give the “primary caregiver” months off but give far less time off to the “secondary caregiver”. We’re all seeing how the pandemic can serve to level the playing field as some men take on more domestic responsibilities than they used to. This is not to deny that women are doing more; the point is that very often neither men nor women are the ideal workers of times past.
Taboo has shifted
Today, a key divide is between parents and non-parents.
“I’ve noticed that there is a huge split among my trial-lawyer colleagues,” says Gordon Knapp, a lawyer in San Francisco. “Those without children are, for the most part, getting a lot done. Those of us with kids at home are litigating as if sinking in quicksand.”
To be sure, we’re seeing the erosion of the ideal of an employee whose family responsibilities are kept tastefully out of sight.
Before COVID-19, many parents skulked off to attend the school play or coach a soccer game, workers nursed their babies in cars parked outside factories and adult children slid away unobtrusively to take elders to the doctor. Now there’s a lot less of a taboo because you can’t hide it.
In fact, that taboo has shifted: men who are old-fashioned enough to be embarrassed when their kids walk in, like the BBC dad, now are ridiculed (perhaps unfairly, if he was reflecting others’ expectations of him). COVID-19 has made visible the conflict between an older generation of ideal workers and younger men who see the good father as someone who is involved in his children’s daily care. An in-house lawyer at a large company told me: “It has really humanised our leaders because they are all sending messages about how they are coping with their kids, dogs and 72-year-old mother, trying to make it clear that we are all in this together.”
If there was ever a time to put to rest the old-fashioned notion of the ideal worker, it’s now. Post-pandemic, let’s re-sculpt workplace ideals so they reflect people’s lives today — not a half-century ago. If you are focused on employee engagement, this is the path forward. (If you aren’t, you should be: a recent study found that disengaged employees cost employers 34 per cent of their annual salary.)
The first step is to institutionalise telework. I and other advocates have long known that the main barrier to widespread adoption was a failure of imagination. That’s over. Under COVID-19, many jobs that were “impossible to do remotely” went remote with little transition time and modest outlays.
The unthinkable is now thinkable
Three things happened in the past few weeks to make the unthinkable doable. Companies have invested the time and money necessary for seamless remote access. Older employees who were not as tech-adept have invested the time to figure it all out. And supervisors have figured out how to supervise people without physically breathing down their necks. The unthinkable has become not just thinkable but mundane.
But we have to recognise that long-term telecommuting is different from the crisis-related working from home that’s now widespread. Telework requires having childcare in place during work hours and a set-up that allows for undistracted attention to work. For hourly workers in states such as California, it also requires employers to ensure statutorily mandated worker protections such as meal and rest breaks. Most employers will also want controls to set limits on overtime.
At a deeper level, companies need to get analytical about the optimal role of remote work. Lots of research shows telecommuting typically makes workers more productive — not surprising given the amount of sports chatter around the water cooler. Remote work also makes people more engaged and satisfied and less likely to quit. Remote workers also often work longer hours — not surprising since the average American spends 54 minutes a day commuting.
Don’t assume telework is an all-or-nothing proposition. The challenge will be to find the right balance of telework and on-site work. What many knowledge workers need is spurts of unstructured interaction, followed by hours of quiet time to execute — time that’s often more productive spent away from the office. Finding the optimal combination will vary from company to company, job to job and person to person.
As a smart person once said, never let a good crisis go to waste. Let’s not waste this one. Instead, let’s work together to ensure that a silver lining of this vast and frightening pandemic is a new definition of the worker as someone who’s ambitious, focused and committed — but who must also balance work obligations with care-giving responsibilities. When 30 million kids are out of school, employers can’t just ignore that
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Joan C. Williams is a professor and the founding director of the Centre for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. Her newest book is White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.
Copyright Harvard Business Review 2020/Distributed by New York Times Syndicate