In short, no organization can afford to ignore, underutilize, or lose the talents of the cream of the educated workforce. Conversely, those organizations that enable their talented women to rise into leadership positions become talent magnets, attracting and retaining the best and brightest over the long haul and creating lasting competitive advantage.
The ultimate goal of this study, as in our previous one, is to give employers the insights and the tools to effectively compete in—and win—the war for female talent. What more can they do?
What Should Companies Do?
The full realization of female talent over the long haul involves implementing an agenda comprising six essential action steps. We first proposed these steps in 2004, and they remain relevant today. They are:
1. Providing scenic routes
Flexible work arrangements dominate women’s wish lists: reduced-hour options, flexible stop and start times, telecommuting, job sharing, and seasonable flexibility—time off in the summer balanced by long hours in the winter—are among the policies and practices women yearn for. As extreme jobs have become more widespread and as the economic slump has dumped more of the workload on fewer shoulders, flexible work arrangements have become a lifesaver, eliminating the need to quit a hard-won, much-valued job.
One caveat: In far too many organizations, flexible work arrangements are seen as an accommodation to women’s family lives. Forward-thinking companies know to position flex as a business imperative—a powerful weapon in the battle to attract and retain key talent.
Examples: American Express BlueWork, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Greater Returns, Boehringer Ingelheim Workplace of the Future, General Mills Flexible User Shared Environment.
2. Creating flex over the arc of a career
Flexible work arrangements provide flexibility in the here and now—over the course of a day, a week, or a year. But a related set of policies is enormously important to women: policies that provide flexibility over the arc of a career and allow a woman to ramp up after having taken time out of the paid workforce.
Arc-of-career flexibility is a brand-new concept, requiring innovative policies that are both multi-layered and multistep. Enabling talented women to resume their careers involves more than merely increasing opportunities to on-ramp. On-ramping women need access to flexible work arrangements and the ability to reconnect to mentors and support networks.
On a larger scale, reimagining the conventional career path requires conceptualizing work in different ways: unbundling jobs, sharing clients, and redeploying work teams to allow high-value, high-impact work to be done by experienced professionals working in “chunks” or “nuggets” of time and seamlessly handing off responsibilities to designated colleagues and teammates. Examples: Cisco Extended Flex Program, Deloitte Personal Pursuits, Goldman Sachs Returnship, Accenture Future Leave.
3. Reimagining work-life
For many years, the best benefits—and finest support programs—within large corporations have gone to a specific demographic: employees who are married with young children. This doesn’t work for half of all women. A large proportion of highly qualified women are childless, and almost as many are single.
However, these—in fact, almost all—talented women will be confronted with serious eldercare and extended-family responsibilities. The data shows that a significant number of women are already forced to off-ramp because of an eldercare crisis. This is just the tip of the iceberg. An aging population and a fraying healthcare system will inevitably worsen the situation for adult daughters everywhere. Examples: Citi Maternity Matters, Citi Hungary Maternity Leave Coordinator, Deutsche Bank Familienservice, Goldman Sachs U.K. Great Expectations Maternity Strategy, Intel New Parent Reintegration Program, Moody’s Backup Childcare and Eldercare.
4. Claiming and sustaining ambition
Confounded by the escalating pressures of extreme jobs and penalized for taking an off-ramp or a scenic route, many talented women downsize their expectations for themselves. This is a huge issue. An employer cannot promote a woman if she is not enormously vested in this endeavor.
How can ambition be rekindled and nurtured? Women’s networks create a myriad of leadership development opportunities by connecting women to their peers, boosting confidence through teaching presentation and organizational skills, and providing access to senior women who can act as mentors and role models. But more and more companies realize that networks are not enough. Talented women need advocates and sponsors, senior managers and executives who are willing to introduce them to influential contacts, recommend them for high-profile assignments and “use up chips” to guide them to the next level.
Examples: Boehringer Ingelheim Inclusive Leadership Conference, Deutsche Bank ATLAS, EY Board of Directors, EY Leadership Matters Workshops, Moody’s Women’s Network Brown Bags, Siemens GLOW.
5. Tapping into altruism
The aspirations of women are multidimensional, rather than centered solely on money. Financial compensation is important to women, but it’s not nearly as important a motivator as it is for men. While men list money as either the first or second priority of their wish list, women rank other career goals as top priorities: working with “high-quality colleagues,” deriving “meaning and purpose” from work, and “giving back to society” all overshadow financial rewards.
These findings remained solidly resilient despite the economic meltdown. It’s likely that the disillusionment with many corporations, both on and off Wall Street, only strengthened women’s desires to believe in the products they sell and the services they render and coalesced their commitment to give back to their corporate and civic communities. Companies that recognize and reward altruism not only give an important lift to women’s careers but cement loyalty to their employer.
Examples: GE Developing Health Globally, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, Pfizer Global Access.
6. Combating the stigma associated with flexible work arrangements
In many corporate environments, flexible work arrangements and other female-friendly work-life programs are heavily stigmatized. Either a manager openly says that telecommuting will hurt a career or subtler clues emanating from gender-based stereotypes convey the unspoken but unmistakable understanding that someone who has opted for a reduced-hour schedule will simply never be considered for promotion. The message is the same: Flexible work arrangements, no matter how well designed, are a career killer. In focus groups, we found that women—often high-performing, ambitious women—routinely quit rather than take advantage of flexible work options that were on the books but had become stigmatized. In the words of one female executive, “These policies label you as some kind of loser.”
Reducing stigma and stereotyping is the most challenging element in this core package of action steps. Even the most exemplary programs are meaningless unless they are not just supported but celebrated and even utilized by senior managers in the corporate environment. When senior executives take a flexible work arrangement and shout it from the rooftops—letting everyone in the office know they’ve done so—it can have a transformative effect on what is possible for everyone else. Suddenly, flexible work arrangements become a business booster, not just legitimate but desirable. Examples: Best Buy ROWE, Booz & Company Partial Pay Sabbatical Program, Citi Alternative Workplace Strategies, KPMG Flexible Futures.
Providing Scenic Routes
American Express: BlueWork
Work happens in different ways. American Express recognizes the opportunity to drive real business benefit by aligning the way people work with how they utilize their physical real estate footprint—and enhance the value proposition for employees. AmEx workplace