Time for flexible work to become a man’s issue

It’s been seen as death to women’s careers, but a new report urges a broader view.

Greg Kiddle, an executive at Stockland, is working flexibly. Picture: Ryan Osland

When Greg Kiddle joined the property group Stockland 18 months ago, part of the deal he struck was two months extra annual leave.

As general manager of performance and reward, Kiddle takes three months leave each year in small and large blocks, plus a day of leave every week or fortnight.

Kiddle decided to “buy” more leave so he could help his wife with her business and pursue interests in music, writing, languages and community work.

While he dropped salary for time off, Stockland will pay him extra if he is unable to take the full amount of holidays each year.

Kiddle says Covid has shown companies that remote work can often work better than the old models, for example by cutting out the daily commutes.

“It has become normalised very quickly,” he says. “It is going to settle somewhere, I don’t think it’s finished yet but there has been a paradigm shift.”

Kiddle is unusual: all the evidence suggests that few men take advantage of flexible work opportunities even when available, apparently for fear that they will be marked down by their bosses and regarded as lacking in commitment to their careers.

A new report, Equitable Flexibility: Reshaping our Workforce, argues that senior male executives must model flexible work in order for it to become accepted practice and not a “women’s issue”.

The report released this week was prepared by Chief Executive Women and Bain & Company, and includes practical exercises for companies to develop more systematic approaches to managing flexible work and collect data on how various options are operating.

One suggestion is a flex scorecard to measure whether staff are using flexibility options such as late start and early finish times, nine-day fortnights, and working from home.

The assessment tool could be used to benchmark progress and compare use of flex in various departments, as well as develop new processes.

At a forum to launch the report, the need for men to be comfortable about flexible work was emphasised by Business Council of Australia president Tim Reed, and CEW president Sam Mostyn.

Both spoke of the need to get to a stage in the debate where men, as well as women, were able to discuss the value of flexible work and the economic benefits of increased participation in the workforce by educated women.

The forum also heard of the need for companies to be courageous in experimenting with various options and ready to admit when they did not work.

The report cites several examples of companies that are trying innovative models.

In New Zealand, Unilever has a 12-month pilot across the country of a four-day working week. It’s being promoted by executives as “100 per cent pay, 80 per cent hours, 100 per cent productivity”.

Atlassian, the hi-tech company, says that after Covid, it will allow staff to work from ­wherever they like, and focus on “outcomes, not clock hours”.

But, highlighting some of the complex issues around working from home, when Atlassian carried out a three-month study during the pandemic it found “43 per cent of its employees were more concerned about their job security when working remotely; those employees were anxious to demonstrate their effectiveness and worried their managers would not see their value”.