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We Can’t Work All the Time
Anne-Marie Slaughter on (finally) bringing sanity to the work/life struggle.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter on (finally) bringing sanity to the work/life struggle.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I’m talking with Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America and the author of the new book, Unfinished Business– Women, Men, Work, Family. Anne-Marie, thank you so much for talking with us today.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: My pleasure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, I want to focus a little bit on the work segment of the book, since that is sort of what we do here at HBR. And in the book, I was so excited to see that you cited a study that I am proud to say that we also covered, and that was by three professors who studied a consulting firm that thought they had a problem with women employees and work-life balance. And what the professors found was that actually, all employees felt like there was not enough work-life balance, and men and women were leaving equally because of the problems of overwork at this firm. And yet, the consulting firm didn’t believe it. So I am wondering why, even in the face of evidence, do we still see issues of work and life and issues with overwork as a woman’s problem, when in fact it affects everybody?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: It’s such a good question, and that particular study is with a firm that operates on data. It prides itself on evidence. But when presented with evidence that men and women are leaving equally, they can’t accept it. So I think a lot of this is well known in social science, where you focus on one variable. You focus on women because you believe there’s a problem with women, so you notice when women leave. But when other people leave, there’s just a million different reasons. Oh, well, that’s just normal turnover.
But when you actually do the interviewing, look at the exit interviews, construct surveys that don’t just select women, what you see is there is a problem with overwork for men and for women. We know this independently, because the Pew studies show that 50% of fathers have the same trouble juggling work and family, 56% of mothers. So we should expect this, but I think what this goes to is firms can’t actually accept that there’s something wrong with the way they’re working. It’s much easier to accept that there’s something wrong with women.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, I think that’s a good point. I think one of the challenges is that we seem to keep getting cosmetic changes in offices and flex time policies that nobody uses, and not real substantive change. What do you think it would take to really get substantive change on this issue?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: I think it’s a number of things. One is just that the economic case will just get stronger and stronger. This kind of turnover means firms are losing people that they invested in. They recruited, and that costs money. They trained, and that costs money. They counted on in terms of having full teams, and when you lose that person, that costs money. And then, I’m a CEO myself. The cost of finding someone new is often enormous, not just in actual trying to identify somebody new, but it’s so hard to do. So I think as firms start looking at this as the cost of turnover rather than the cost of hiring women, the economic case will become stronger.
But the other issue is I do think a lot of this is generational. You have a whole generation, my generation, of boomers, of men who came up with the idea that working longer is working better. That being at your desk means improved performance for more hours. No, that’s not true. It’s demonstrably not true. You burn people out. They’re not as productive after a certain number of hours. Exhaustion and stress takes their toll on health and productivity. But it’s like the doctors who believe, well, I got trained by not sleeping for 36 hours at a stretch, so that surely must be the way everybody must be trained, whereas younger people are looking at this, saying this just doesn’t make sense and the data doesn’t support it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I’m so glad you mentioned that. This is an issue that is close to my heart. I have written about it for hbr.org. I have had the privilege of editing Joan Williams on some of her articles on this topic for HBR– yes, who’s fantastic.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: The best of the best.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes. And, you know, it seems like the data is there, and yet there is something about our relationship with work that remains consuming, even if we believe the data and the regression analyses. Either its because we gave up so much of our lives to it that we don’t want to believe that we didn’t have to do that, or it’s just there is something rewarding and fulfilling. It hits some dopamine center in our brain to answer those emails. How do we deal with that sort of internal pressure to feel like it’s good when we’re always working?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Well, I think individually the way to deal with it is to think to ourselves, I will work better if I actually take time out. I mean, I’ll just say personally, around age 40, I realized that if I get eight hours of sleep, I was far more productive than if I got six. And then I discovered that if I took six weeks of vacation at various points in the year, one big chunk together, I was renewed, and creative, and energetic in a way that, again, allowed me to get more work done than if I just kept trying to slog it out. It’s the old adage of I can get 12 months done at work in 11 months, but not in 12.
So I think for individuals, it’s really reading the data and understanding, hey, wait a minute– not that I shouldn’t work, but that I will work better and I will get more satisfaction if I actually work less, sleep more, take time, and critically, take time for other things as well. And that’s where family comes in, or hobbies, or volunteering.
I think for firms, so much of this is the idea that the larger society values work above all. I mean, Americans always have prided themselves on being the country that works harder than anybody else. But what we have to start doing is changing our social and cultural norms so that the people we admire are the people who work very hard, and very well, and succeed, but who also have richer lives, and who are also great parents, or great children, or husbands, or siblings, to recover both a moral dimension to what makes a good human being and also a cultural dimension that says people who have richer lives are more admirable and actually better at everything they do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and you have– this is a nice segue to something I wanted to ask you about. There’s a line in the book that really– the first time I read it, I wasn’t sure I read it right. And then I was like, OK, I have to ask her about this. “If family comes first, work does not come second.” Tell me what you mean by that.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Yes. That has been my mantra since I became a leader, since I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School in 2002. I developed this idea that if you let people take care of their family needs– so family comes first, they will not not get their work done. They will actually be more loyal, more responsible, and more committed to making sure the work does get done at the same time that they can take care of their families.
Or the flipside of that is if you’re forcing someone to stay at their desk when a parent has just broken a hip, or a child is in trouble at school, or they are missing some very important thing in a family member’s life, they will be distracted. They will be tense. They will be unhappy. And you will not get as much good work from them.
And I have proven it. I tell everyone who works for me the minute there’s a family issue– you know, an important family issue. They obviously still get their work done on a regular basis. But if they come to me and say somebody is sick, somebody needs help, I have to do this because my family needs me, my response is absolutely, take care of it. But I expect you to find somebody to cover for you on your team to make sure that that presentation gets done, to do whatever it is, because I know that you’re responsible as a family member and as a worker.
And I found it to be true. I found I have very, very loyal employees, but that fundamentally, they are happier, and they can take care of what’s most important to them. And work doesn’t suffer. It just works together.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And one of the things that I really enjoyed about the book and found very refreshing is the way that you talk about your attitudes as a boss and how they’ve shifted in recognizing that occasionally– you talk about an assistant you’d hired who was leaving the office at the end of the day, even if you were still there. At first, that was kind of surprising, but then you kind of got over it. So you’re very frank about how you’ve dealt with these issues as a boss.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Well, in the end, you can look at data. But part of what validates data for us, as we know from organizational behavior psychology, is does it resonate with our own experience? In that particular case, where my millennial assistant was leaving at 6:00 to go work out, or she actually is a fabulous rugby player, so she’d go play rugby– and at first I thought, oh my gosh. You know, wait a minute. I would never have left before my boss. But then, after watching her get her work done– and this is a great example of a millennial who says, OK, I’m going to go play rugby now, but then I’ll be back online afterwards. She always got her work done.
After awhile, I started thinking, why am I still sitting here? Why aren’t I working out? Why aren’t I taking care of my body? And realized that I myself was a prisoner of the, well, let’s just stay and answer one more email.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And that’s another line you have in the book. If you are caught up on your email, your priorities are wrong, which I loved. That really broke me.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: That is just absolutely true– certainly has been in my life. And frankly, many of the most successful people I know, they answer the really important email. It’s not that you can just ignore all your email, but the bottom third of your email is just not that important. And what happens if you are constantly responding to it is you are in respond mode rather than initiate mode. And for most of us– really, pretty much all of us, but certainly anybody in a managerial or leadership position– we ought to be spending some good portion of our time initiating, thinking about what are the things we want to accomplish and what are the emails we want to send that are not responding to others, but that are launching things of our own.
So my point is, really, if you’re always in respond mode, for one thing, you’ll never be caught up because the e-mail will just keep coming. But more importantly, you will not have time to think about and launch the things that you need to get done to advance your priorities.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, I’m also curious to know, given these are a couple of things that you’ve learned through experience, are there other things where, as a leader, you’ve looked back now and said, you know, when such and such employee came to me with some work-life issue, I wish I had responded differently at the time? Are there other kinds of things where you looked back thought, like, huh, if I knew then what I knew now, maybe I would have responded differently?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: The thing I think I wish I’d done most is not so much individually, because I have had the view from the beginning that when people came to me, I always tell them absolutely, do what you need– but, again, I expect you to get your work done. But I wish I’d pushed back harder institutionally, and I think this does go to something many leaders encounter. You want to do it differently, and you can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t let people work from home when they need to work from home, or really be more in control of their own schedules. But you run up against an institutionalized bureaucracy that is very nervous about those kinds of changes.
And when I was a younger leader, and even to some extent today, you often don’t push as hard as you need to, because your HR department tells you, oh, we couldn’t possibly do that, or managers you depend on, and trust, and need to work with say, well, but my work is different. You know, the work in this department, really they have to be present to do it. In my younger days, I would say, well, I guess that’s right, as opposed to really saying, no, that is a generational view, or that’s just an outdated view, or we are not going to be able to attract and retain the talent we need if we keep insisting on working the old way.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: In a way, there’s a way to extend that conversation and say something like, well, then what would it take to make the work more flexible so we can have the best people?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Exactly. Exactly, and to get people to think about what they need and want. And I talk a lot about how men also suffer, as we’ve talked at the beginning, from this kind of work. But often they’re scared of letting go of the way they manage, for instance. It’s easier to manage based on precedence than performance. But managing on performance means specifying goals, and the time in which those should be accomplished, and the quality, and then really looking at somebody’s work output and saying, well, did you accomplish those goals? It’s more difficult than saying, well, yes, John comes in early and leaves late, and always seems to be at his desk. And so it can be threatening to people.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And I think at this point we’ve talked a fair amount about individual actions and company-level actions, and I feel like I would be remiss not to ask you about some policy actions given that you are the policy expert. And the US, as well documented, is the only industrialized country that doesn’t have various forms of paid time off for either sick leave or family leave. What do you think would need to happen at the state or federal level to give companies a little more breathing room on this issue?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Well, I think companies actually would be enormously helped by government mandates. And what we’re seeing now is there are individual companies that are offering various kinds of paid leave, particularly maternity leave, sick days, etc. There are others that are not, and are not required to. There are now cities and states that are adopting different policies, so Rhode Island, and California, and New Jersey, and now New York are adopting mandatory paid leave through an insurance scheme. Individual cities from Cincinnati, to San Francisco, to the District of Columbia are adopting their own ideas.
What’s happening, then, is a patchwork of different kinds of regulation and policies that is ultimately going to make it much harder for business to function. And also, the good businesses get penalized in the states that don’t require it by still being undercut by businesses that say we’re just not going to do this. So I think government ought to mandate a certain amount of paid family leave. And we can leapfrog all those countries by just bypassing the whole debate of maternity versus paternity, but also adding the idea that people who are taking care of their own parents should be able to have access to paid leave, and to have a bank of paid family leave that is required for every one, for every company, for every employee, but then there can be different ways of financing it. And different states, and maybe even different cities, should have flexibility in how they want to do it, but within overall mandates.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I want to ask also about compliance here, because one of the things that really shocked me when I read the book– I had not realized this– is that already, 20% of companies don’t comply with existing FMLA law when it’s requested by fathers.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Yes.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I mean, the mind reels. How are they getting away with this?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: You mentioned Joan Williams earlier, and she runs a center at the Hastings Law School especially for family discrimination law. And what you’re going to have to have are the same kind of lawsuits on behalf of men that you had in the ’70s and the ’80s on behalf of women. And people don’t like lawsuits often, but this is the kind of public interest litigation that raises these issues, brings them to the attention of the courts, and to the regulatory agencies, and to the public, and let people know their rights so that men can say, wait a minute, you were discriminating against me– just as now a woman can say, I think I was sexually harassed, and the company jumps into action, whereas for many decades, that just wasn’t something a company was concerned about.
But we are going to have to understand that men are just as entitled to these protections as women are, and indeed that’s good for women that this is not a women’s issue; this is a parents’ issue or a caregiver issue, more broadly, and that when government acts, you do need people to know their rights and be able to enforce them.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So just quickly, because we’re just about out of time– and I am so grateful that you’ve given us a bunch of your time this morning. I am wondering– you’ve written this book. This is an issue that you’ve been out in front on for a long time now, notably to a lot of people from that 2012 Atlantic article you wrote. If there is something you were hoping to do with this book, some conversation you were hoping to spark, something you were hoping that people will take away, what is that sort of shift that you’re hoping to see?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: Well, there are two things that are most important. One is that people will understand that to get to male-female equality, we can’t just focus on how many women CEOs there are, or how many women politicians, or surgeons, or whatever– that we must focus on valuing traditional women’s work. That the work of care is just as important as the work of earning an income. And that that is a much more radical shift for us, because we’ve thought, well, that’s women’s work. That’s not that important. So that’s the first.
And the second is that we must have this conversation among men as much as women, and that we are only at the outset of the men’s revolution, of liberating men to be able to have the same range of choices about how much of a breadwinner to be and how much of a caregiver to be that women have– and that society values men and women much more in the round for the work they do for pay and all the work they do on behalf of loved ones or even community members that is unpaid, but every bit as socially valuable.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Anne-Marie, I hope that happens. I hope we have that conversation. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America and the author of the new book Unfinished Business. For more, go to hbr.org.