In a workplace, helping your employees feel like they belong is often an extremely crucial part of ensuring that they’re at their best. Happy, motivated, and productive employees also bring out the best in your company, and it’s for this reason that it’s in your company’s – and your own – best interest to strive towards an open and welcoming culture within your staff.
In a workplace, helping your employees feel like they belong is often an extremely crucial part of ensuring that they’re at their best. Happy, motivated, and productive employees also bring out the best in your company, and it’s for this reason that it’s in your company’s – and your own – best interest to strive towards an open and welcoming culture within your staff.
Of course, this is true for the women in your staff, too.
In our often male-dominated workplaces, however, it can be difficult to understand the challenges they face during this remote-working pandemic era. In this article, we aim to help you understand a little about the problems women in your companies might be facing, and what you can do to keep them at their best.
Life for many women around the world has changed significantly during the pandemic. School closures and businesses shuttering has brought children and family back home for the foreseeable future. We know many of our readers have families of their own, and you can no doubt attest to how troublesome having a full-house 24/7 can be – especially when you’re trying to work for eight of those hours.
1.7 billion children have been forced to stay inside their homes since this pandemic began. As a result, many women now find themselves caring for their children and performing housework alongside work. Now, imagine a whole day of this routine and repeat it every day of the week, for the two years we’ve been placed on lockdown. Tough, isn’t it?
Remote work and its physical separation of employees doesn’t shield them from the hurdles of discrimination and harassment, but it has helped ease tensions a fair bit. Career paths in the work-from-home era tend to be more gender-balanced, and any inequalities in pay between men and women are reduced significantly – now at just three percent less than men compared to the approximate twenty to twenty-five percent in most western economies, according to the Pew Research Center.
That being said, this doesn’t mean the issue should be ignored. Remote working is a chance to help close the gap even further, and help women feel that little bit more secure in their future as your employees. If you don’t already, check on your staff and the women in your team every now and then and encourage them to talk about issues they might be having during the pandemic. It always helps to know that their boss cares, for both men and women.
Remote working isn’t a silver bullet. Although things are getting better, we’re not quite there yet when it comes to closing the gap between genders completely. It’s our duty as the decision-makers of our respective companies to ensure that our choices don’t negatively affect the people who work for or under us, so we must put in the time and effort to connect with our teams and stay aware of what they might need – to be considerate of their needs and issues.
Business and work during the pandemic is tough, but we can all work towards making it a little less tough for all of us.
