Long ago, maybe two or three lifetimes back, I remember wearing heels and business attire almost every single day. It was expensive, sometimes uncomfortable, and it meant dressing and acting like one person while on the clock and then getting to be ME on my off time. Ugh.
I spent hours in traffic commuting to an office – where I would mostly work at my desk and stare at/ work via my computer.
When I became a mom, It wasn’t uncommon for Vivian to be the first kid dropped off at daycare at 6 am, and the last kid picked up at 6:30 pm. My life was scheduled down to the minute, and I was stretched thin.
Being a working parent is hard enough. Adding my long daily commutes to an already stressful balancing act of motherhood and career made me feel like I was one unexpected slow-down on the highway away from catastrophe.
Writing this made me think of the two years I spent lugging a breast pump to and from the office, along with a cooler… This memory is probably better revisited in a post of its own. What I will say here is: it’s terrible, awkward, weird, and stressful to have to do all of the things needed to ensure your baby will be fed while in an office, surrounded by co-workers. I remember being teased by a clueless co-worker about how I must have thought I was a “very important person” to carry my leather briefcase everywhere with me. He went on to ask what kinds of top-secret documents I was keeping in there. His red face when I explained it was not a briefcase, but a breast pump was a small victory at the time.
We started transforming our company so that our teams could work remotely back in 2007. We went through MANY iterations and plenty of bumps, and I’m so glad we stuck with it.
Working from home gives us all more time each day. We have also grown and scaled across borders, oceans, and time zones with relative ease. We are more globally connected, diverse and inclusive because the barriers created by having physical locations are gone.
We connect and collaborate with a click of a mouse and invite voices from around the globe into the ongoing conversation about improving. Back in the days of physical offices, conference rooms, and thermostats that were always too low for me to want to remove my jacket, I didn’t connect with nearly as many people as I do now that I work from home.
Now, I get to be me around the clock; I don’t need a unique wardrobe just for work, and I am free of notoriously sexist and discriminatory office dress codes – hopefully forever!. My feet are also eternally grateful for what these changes have meant for them!
I don’t always wear neon sweatpants and animal print shoes, but when I do, it’s probably a Monday – and if you meet with me over video, you’ll never know because I still keep it classy and appropriate within the field of view!
I understand that not all jobs can be done from home. Still, there is more we can do as leaders for our teams. Let’s face some facts:
🎯Most jobs can offer more flexibility than they do.
🎯Job seekers expect their career to work with the rest of their established life.
🎯If employers want to attract and retain great talent, they need to be willing to change and evolve.
🎯It’s time to lead with our heads and our hearts. We should throw out our old handbooks and policies and re-write them, based on what we know now and who we want to be, (as individuals and as organizations,) next.
🎯Humans deserve more time with their people/hobbies/pets/couches and less time on the roads commuting.
Not only is remote work and increased flexibility good for people, but it’s also great for the environment, and countless business cases prove that it’s good for productivity and profits too.
It’s time to reimagine what work can be like, where it can happen, and where it can take place.