Have you ever felt the strain of juggling roles as a worker and a caregiver? Ever wondered how your work-life balance impacts your overall health and well-being?
This episode of 'The Hearth' is an eye-opener on work-family harmony and the stressors that could be affecting your overall health. We dig deep into the common workplace stressors and how they relate to cardiovascular disease risk, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, and more.
In the second half of our conversation, we pull back the curtain on some startling figures about wage trends and how they've changed since 1979.
We delve into the all-too-common conflicts between work and family duties and debunk some media stereotypes about working mothers. We round off the episode by exploring strategies for enhancing job quality and striking that elusive work-family balance.
From fostering healthier psychological work environments to setting clear performance expectations and making a case for affordable childcare – we unpack it all.
Tune in and let's rethink work-family harmony together!
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
Have you ever felt the strain of juggling roles as a worker and a caregiver? Ever wondered how your work-life balance impacts your overall health and well-being?
This episode of 'The Hearth' is an eye-opener on work-family harmony and the stressors that could be affecting your overall health. We dig deep into the common workplace stressors and how they relate to cardiovascular disease risk, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, and more.
In the second half of our conversation, we pull back the curtain on some startling figures about wage trends and how they've changed since 1979.
We delve into the all-too-common conflicts between work and family duties and debunk some media stereotypes about working mothers. We round off the episode by exploring strategies for enhancing job quality and striking that elusive work-family balance.
From fostering healthier psychological work environments to setting clear performance expectations and making a case for affordable childcare – we unpack it all.
Tune in and let's rethink work-family harmony together!
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, candice Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore, and when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together.
Speaker 1:Hello brave souls, welcome back to the hearth, to this week's episode, where we are going to be talking about work-family harmony and how we can support people both as workers and as caretakers. In some of the research that I've been doing, there are 10 workplace stressors that come up as key factors. One of those is unemployment, another is lack of health insurance, another, exposure to shift work, long working hours, job insecurity. There's also work-family conflict, which is what we're focusing on today Low job control, high job demands, low social support at work and low organizational justice. So I've already touched on quite a few of these this season. We've talked about working hours and schedule control. We've talked about job control, job demands and social support at work. We've also talked about dignity and fairness in the workplace. So we're kind of working our way through this list.
Speaker 1:So work-family conflict is one of the things that is higher in the US than in other countries. It's an increasingly important issue and is linked to negative health outcomes mental, behavioral, physical. It includes cardiovascular disease risk, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, burnout, issues of workplace safety, obesity and addictive behaviors like smoking and alcohol use. Work-family conflicts are also related to employee productivity, turnover, absenteeism, well-being and engagement. As if you've been listening to this season so far We've talked about quite a bit.
Speaker 1:So how did we kind of get to this place? There's a woman, dr Joan C Williams, who has done quite a bit of research in this area, and so I've pulled a lot of information from one of her reports, and then there are a bunch of other reports too, and we'll link all of them. So something to kind of understand is that currently, the typical American middle income family puts in an average of 11 more hours a week than they did in 1979. Additionally, in 1960, only 20% of mothers worked and only 18.5% of mothers were unmarried, and so we have this huge shift in the number of mothers who are working. Currently, I believe it's 70% of children live in a household where both parents work. At that time, back in the 50s and 60s, the design of work was created around this idea of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother, and companies shaped jobs around that ideal, and even though it didn't work for families that didn't fit that mold. At that time, it still was the model that was used for most families and it is the model that really continues to this day, even though that is not what most families look like at this time. I'm talking about families, but we also have other trends that are happening where people are. There are less people who are getting married, there are less people who are deciding to have children. There are people who are waiting a lot longer to do these things, and some of that is impacted by the unsustainability of these workplace systems that we all have to live in.
Speaker 1:If we look at low-wage earners, in 1979, they were making about $27,000 a year. Now, if you adjust for inflation to 2008 numbers, which is a little some years ago, what you find is that low-income earners are actually earning less. They're earning the $19,000 instead of $27,000. You find that the same thing is happening with middle-income earners where, relative to 1979, middle-income earners are earning less than they did previously, but you find that high-income earners are earning more, and this is backed up by all different kinds of analyses and studies, and it is something that is actually continuing to exponentially increase and get worse. I mean, I did a compensation analysis last year that completely confirmed this. We had high inflation, paired with organizations trying to figure out how they're going to get through, paired with an update to compensation that resulted in these kinds of changes happening. So it's baked into the way that we're making decisions about pay. So we've got kind of all these different converging trends that are happening, and it's no wonder that 70% of people report some interference between work and non-work responsibilities, and the conflicts that are reported are time-strain, missing work or family activities, the spillover of stress from work to home or vice versa from home to work.
Speaker 1:The main causes of this are unexpected overtime, job pressure perceived as overload or intense workload, job stress and then also psychological demands of the job, such as working fast or having a lot of interruptions. When you look even further into who is experiencing work-family conflict, 90% of mothers report work-family conflict and 95% of fathers do so. There's a real conflict that happens between parents, basically, and work, or they experience a conflict between their work responsibilities and their family responsibilities. In sort of the popular media or how we think about mothers and work, there are kind of these two extremes that often are the ones that are talked about. One is the highly educated mother who opts out of the workforce in order to care for her children. The other is the woman who is on welfare, who has a whole bunch of kids and there's a lot of judgment against her like why she having all these babies if she can't afford them? But really neither one of these is accurate for most families.
Speaker 1:Most families are fitting somewhere in the middle there. For example, in my family, I have a master's degree, I own a business I now have at the time of recording this, I'm about to have my second son and I have also benefited from all of the social support that there is available to mothers. I mean parental leave. We have been on CalFresh, which is food stamps in California. We have had different kinds of like rental support through COVID and all kinds of things. So most families find themselves in some kind of a middle right.
Speaker 1:Me and my husband have had to have like really tough conversations about how much I work, how much he works. There has been conflict between each of our work and each of our family. You know our family life and it creates stress and you know we both of us have mental health challenges and physical health challenges, and so we're navigating all of that right and it's not made better when there is suddenly a whole bunch of overtime that needs to happen or you know a variety of different things. We have a lot more control over our schedules than most people do, especially because I have the flexibility as a business owner to be able to shift my schedule. But not everyone has that. So these archetypes of the professional woman who decides to leave her career because she wants to take care of her kids, and then the welfare mom who's having all these babies and can't support them most families, most women who are mothers, do not fit into either one of those stereotypes. So the problem in the public sphere is that, rather than looking at what is actually happening in families, we're basing decisions off of these two categories that are really slim margins on the two ends. So what happens in these instances I mean a part of this is that we lose key, highly trained workers because the workplace does not allow for them to hold all of their responsibilities Right.
Speaker 1:The mothers who stay at home full time to care for their children but are doing it because there aren't enough childcare subsidies or because they literally can't earn enough in order for it to make sense for their children to be taken care of. I mean, that's a huge struggle within my own family. The cost of childcare in my family is the same as our rent. Our rent is $2,800 a month and it's right up there, and it's likely that that will increase actually, before it decreases when the kids go to school, and so my husband, who is the lower wage earner. We have had really tough conversations. Does it actually make sense for you to be earning less than we're paying our nanny in order to be able to take care of our kids so that you can work? We've had that conversation a lot of times and it's. Every family makes their own decision, and ours has been that he will continue to do his job because it's important for him to be involved in our community and to have things going on outside of our family life. But in many families that's not the decision that's made.
Speaker 1:So you have both highly skilled but also skilled workers who are pushed out of the workplace, not just because of conflict between work and family and the way that work is designed, but also because of a lack of public support for the increasing costs of childcare and the disparity between back in the 60s, when there was a person at home to take care of children or elderly, versus now, where there isn't. And then the increasing costs of everything not keeping up with wages. In conversations that I have with employers, often what comes up is this feeling of needing employees to work more, like. I need my employees to work longer hours, I need them to be available all the time. I need all of these things from these people in order to be competitive in the marketplace. But that is out of sync with the reality of people's responsibilities outside of work and it doesn't allow people to both participate fully in their work and participate fully in their family. And it's because our systems are built on an outdated business model that does not actually fit the way that our society works, and so there's a mismatch between work and life that leads to expenses for businesses.
Speaker 1:But these are hidden costs because we don't really see them right. It's absenteeism, like when people are late for work or they don't show up for work, or like the whole quiet quitting phenomenon that we've been talking about. Attrition, so like turnover, when people leave jobs, like the whole thing that happened at the pandemic, where everybody quit and started doing other work, and then also decreases in productivity. You know just so people are not as engaged in the work that they're doing and so they're not as productive. And so there's this case to be made for workplace flexibility, and that if you're able to create flexibility for your people at the microeconomic level, that means, like in your business, you're actually going to end up being more competitive in the long run. And even though you may have some costs that come up front, you're not dealing with all of these hidden costs that are happening that are really at the core, at the root of why both people and businesses are struggling. So some steps you can take, because I always like to leave us with some action items.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about this before this season, but there's this term that's called job quality, and this comes from the job strain model that I've referenced in the past. But when we're thinking about job quality, we should be thinking about both employees' conditions at work and then also conditions that facilitate employees' ability to manage dual responsibilities, such as paid work and family or personal obligations. So that means that as you're designing a job which is what you do when you create a job description or when you add a new position to your company or when you reorganize things is that you think about people's responsibilities, both at work and outside of work, and how can people have autonomy related to how their work is being done and the ability to kind of shift between these different worlds, right? I mean one way is the ability to shift between the different worlds. Another way, which is more how I have gone in my work, is how to integrate the worlds. How do you integrate the work and the family In a way that is sustainable for everyone? So, when you're doing this design of jobs, or like design of culture in your company, a thing to think about related to job quality.
Speaker 1:It's not that job quality is inherent in a certain set of tasks, right. It's not. Like you know, my job quality is better when I am the roaster of the coffee at the coffee shop versus the barista who's making all the drinks, right? Or the reverse. What changes the quality of a job is the rules of the game and the everyday practices that sort of reinforce expectations and assumptions. And so the same people doing the same jobs, who are able to gain control over their time and the timing of their work and then to be able to participate more fully in their community, their family, their participate in activities with their children, take care of their elderly, that this can happen. It's not like you have to change jobs in order for you to get this right. You can keep doing the job that you have, or you can keep people doing the jobs that they are doing, and then you can also create shifts around expectations that help to decrease the amount of conflict that people are experiencing between work and home life.
Speaker 1:So some of the things to kind of think about. Within that realm, there's this interesting study that was done by Joel Goh and others, but it's called Workplace Stressors, mortality and Health Costs. So it looks at how workplace stress is related to both mortality and health and then also what are some ideas for mitigating the health costs. So one key thing is to foster a healthy psychological work environment by preventing stressors in the organization of the workplace that can lead to work-family conflict. So what does that mean? I mean one that we talk about a lot is like scheduling or unexpected needs that come up. It could also just be extreme demands on time, right? So thinking about what is causing stress for my employees in my particular workplace and you can even ask people this you can do a survey and you can ask what is stressing you out about work Like what are the things that are difficult for you about this? You can make it anonymous so that nobody is outing themselves for anything, but you can collect data and find out. Is the Slack channel working for people? Are they stressed out by getting text messages or whatever it might be? Are they stressed out by the content of their work?
Speaker 1:I had a particularly difficult project that I had to work on today where I was updating a safety plan with a plan for if there's an active shooter, right, and it just like it was a very stressful thing to do, but I mean that doesn't mean that I don't want to do it. I want to do it. I wanna make sure that there's a plan in place if there is an active shooter. But the process of doing that project was really taxing on me, right. So that doesn't mean that I don't want to do it or that I don't have the skills to do it, but it did mean that I needed to take a little bit of time after I finished it and it did mean that it took me longer to finish it than I thought it was going to, which is fine for me because I can manage my own workload, but if it were a thing where and you know there was a lot of time pressure put on it and when it needed to be done, that would have just increased the stress even more, the psychosocial stress even more.
Speaker 1:There are some things that you can do around, you know, schedule control. So just clear, consistent, well-defined schedules and performance expectations. So improving the design of the work processes and the culture so that you're supporting a results orientation, like getting to the results, not focusing on all the minutiae and the details of how you're going to get to the results unless there's, you know, mentorship, feedback, training. That needs to happen. And then also the removal of low-value work. So if you have work that is happening in your company that isn't valuable to your clients or isn't valuable to your company, you can look at what to do about that right, can get rid of it, you could automate it. There are a lot of different options if that's the thing that's happening for you.
Speaker 1:And then another thing is to support supervisors to learn how to support their employees when work-family things come up, so that the supervisors are able to help employees better manage both their work and their family roles. So like, for example, maybe summertime comes around and you have a mother who's working for you and it's going to be her responsibility to drop the kids off at their various summer camps and pick them up, which means that you know she's not going to be able to come to work at the time that she normally does when she's dropping them off at school, because camp is opening later than school and she's not going to be able to stay fully through to the end of the day because there is no school aftercare program, right? So it's figuring out ways to work with people through these challenges rather than just, you know, punishing them for being absent. So this, in this way, especially with supervisors, it's helping to provide direct support to people who are, who have responsibilities outside of work, people who are experiencing physical or mental health issues and people who are caretakers. Within that realm, you can be looking at your paid time off, sick pay and leave of absence policies and the culture that there is around taking time off. You can, as a CEO or a manager, start to model the ways that you are caring for. You know, if it's your family, then family or elders, or you know time away to decompress, time away for illness or sickness of different types. And then the last sort of piece of this that business owners uniquely have a place to well, a voice business owners have a voice is with elected officials and to write elected officials and to lobby for high quality, affordable childcare and updating our basic labor standards. I mean our last, you know, family forward workplace policy was the Family Medical Leave Act, and that happened in 1993, almost 30 years ago. There's another again I'm recording this in the earlier part of 2023, I believe there is some legislation that may be passed between now and when this episode actually comes out, and, if it, if it does, then that's wonderful, but there's a lot that we can do to support the caretaking and work roles of individuals who are also employees.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you so much for joining me today. I know that I shared a lot of information with you just now. If you have any questions or comments or if you wanna just chat about anything that I brought up today as it relates to your work, please feel free to reach out. I would love to talk to you about it. Okay, take care and I will see you next week. I'm gonna do that.
Speaker 1:One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family, or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first. Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave soul, catch you next time.