Organizations

Make organizational culture more empathetic and caring to keep diverse talent. Employees are an organization’s most valuable assets. Therefore, organizations must cultivate an empathetic and caring culture to prioritize employees. A caring culture places employee wellbeing, needs, and human development at the top. Leaders and team members consistently act to help each other build resilience and thrive (Wilson & Ferch, 2005).

• High turnover rates among women during family prime time at certain management levels can point to dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Utilize engagement surveys, exit interviews, or focus groups to learn what employees need. Ask women about their needs. What would they need to stay in the company? How do they assess their development opportunities? What barriers might they encounter? What could be done so they know their employer cares about them and their wellbeing?

Identify and eliminate toxic practices. Many of these practices (rooted in white- and male-dominant business management culture) are invisible, subconscious, and reproduced in most workplaces. Dismantling them requires deep introspection and (self-)education. The talent pipeline will remain leaky if organizations do not dismantle these practices.

• Educational material such as “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change” calls out things present in nearly every organization, such as perfectionism, a sense of urgency, power hoarding, and fear of conflict (Jones & Okun, 2001).
• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and Diversity Advisory Boards give employees the agency to call out patriarchal practices in the organization. Once organizations recognize these practices, they must hold leaders accountable. All leaders should role model a healthy culture, redefine social norms, and alter the organization’s work design to “detoxify” the culture (Sull & Sull, 2022).

Support employees with caregiving responsibilities so they can stay. Though we focus on parents as caregivers in Call to Action 3, the caregiver also means employees who care for adults, such as dying parents and seriously ill spouses. Due to a lack of support, these caregivers often feel they have no choice but to quit or are prone to hide the significant strain of balancing paid and unpaid work because of social stigmas. Offer paid-leave policies to include time off for workers to care for family members with severe health conditions. Make sure to define “family” broadly to include non-heteronormative family units or non-western conceptions of who is considered close family. (Tyler, 2022)

Managers

Express authentic emotions to employees every day. As a manager, your mood creates a cultural blueprint for your team (Barsade & O’Neill, 2014). Be willing and open to show vulnerability and emotions to your employees. If your company has a mental health program in place (which we recommend!), be a role model for your team and utilize that resource.

Give your employees their seat at the table. Be an ally to employees from underrepresented groups in a way that gives them agency. Invite them to ask questions, speak up, and join activities. Understand their needs and be willing to listen and be present. This allyship will inspire your employees to stay because they know you include and respect them. 

Individuals

Speak up when you see an issue. If you witness disparaging remarks, discrimination, microaggressions, or other problematic behavior towards a colleague, say something. Contribute to creating caring conditions that keep other employees engaged, not the conditions that make them want to leave.

Utilize curiosity about new colleagues’ identities to show that you care. Listen to others’ preferred pronouns when they refer to themselves. Likewise, be proactive in introducing yourself with your name and pronouns. You may also ask the individual how they want to be addressed. Show that you are curious yet caring to make colleagues from all backgrounds feel welcome.

• For example, you might say, “Hi, my name is Sarah. I go by she/her pronouns. How should I refer to you?” It is better to keep these interactions one-on-one versus in a group setting to not draw additional attention to the conversation. (Learn more here)

Organizations

Regularly measure progress on the 5 “C’s”: communication, coordination, connections, creativity, and culture. Create communication channels where everyone can speak up and be heard, regardless of location or time, by practicing transparent top-down communication. Use tools for effective coordination between team members with different work schedules. Build social and professional connections between employees in teams without fault lines between remote and in-person employees. Foster room for creativity even through screens. Don’t lose sight of the organizational culture that makes your organization unique (Haas, 2022).

Plan capacities based on employee and labor market needs. Resource flexibility in dealing with job percentages (FTE) enables more diverse hiring in the recruitment process. Working with a global budget per area (instead of headcounts) gives you more freedom to allocate the budget to different workloads, e.g., experienced employees or junior staff. In addition, encourage part-time workloads or job-sharing positions if tasks can be distributed. We recommend you think in terms of functions per area, which allows redistribution of tasks (even within the team) and sharing among several people

Enable your employees to work the way they know best. If employees can do their work flexibly, this can increase satisfaction and reduce stress (Godart et al., 2016). It also signals trust in employees (Williams et al., 2018). However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for diverse employees regarding flexible work design issues. Therefore, flexible working also challenges managers and employees alike. To best allow employees to work, shift from a culture of presence to one of results.

• Offer a “menu” of flexible work options: Part-time? Flexible working hours? Ability to do a 100% job in 4 days a week? Work from home? Make sure you enable your employees to work how they work best without making the final decision contingent on individual managers. Instead, make sure your managers have the skills to lead hybrid teams.

Rethink leadership to make it a true team sport. Topsharing – also known as leadership tandem, co-leadership, dual leadership – holds the potential to shape a new kind of leadership. It offers the opportunity to combine leadership responsibilities and part-time work, thus reconciling career and private life demands. Topsharing can also mean two full-time employees share responsibility, giving them a chance to bounce ideas off each other, reducing managers’ stress levels, and having built-in deputies on hand, among other key advantages (in German).

• Create facts and check feasibility: evaluate whether topsharing fits your organizational culture. For example, if employees are always expected to work overtime, this may be detrimental to implementing a topsharing program. Learn more about preconditions for topsharing here (in German).

Managers

Build trust among your employees! A working relationship built on trust does three vital things: 1. Encourages cooperative behavior 2. Reduces conflict 3. It makes employees think well of their manager (Dirks & de Jong, 2022). But how do you build trust?

• Trust that your employees know what they need – and what they need to do their best work, even if they are not physically present or working during times when you are not online.
• Be consistent and keep your commitments to your employees: For example, if you promise weekly check-ins, do check in every week.
• Practice transparency and honesty: Explain your reasoning and answer your team’s questions truthfully. Sometimes, this can be uncomfortable (for example, if restructuring is planned).
• Listen to your employees and implement their ideas and feedback, giving them credit where credit is due. In turn, give them honest feedback on both their good and bad work

Set your team up for hybrid work success. Hybrid working, i.e., a form of working independent of time and place, promotes inclusion if it considers the different needs of employees and their diverse life models. At the same time, the hybrid model poses risks: For example, perceived inequality (between people who are more in the office and those who work more remotely) can negatively impact a sense of belonging or foster a sense of having to be “always available.”

• Move away from a culture of presence to a culture of performance: (Re)define clear criteria for performance evaluation and involve employees in this process. Use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) method to formulate goals.
• Intentionally plan in-person meetings and encourage collaboration. To foster belonging, connectedness, and psychological safety, you must physically come together as a team.
• Cultivate a “check-in” culture and show availability. Set up regular check-ins with your coworkers, ensure a shared meeting agenda, and always make yourself consciously “virtually visible” by setting your status to available with a message like “I’m open to chat” messages.

Define the structures and parameters for your team to succeed in a hybrid setting. Ensure expectations, norms, and etiquette around meetings, communication, etc., are set clearly and aligned with the needs of your team (Cookson, 2022).

• Ask yourself: Are you building your team members’ skills, such as self-management, autonomy, and personal responsibility? Do they have the requisite decision-making competencies? Are they fully trained and comfortable using the tools necessary for hybrid or remote collaboration?

Individuals

Clearly express and enforce your flex-work needs and boundaries. Articulate your flexible work needs and what they would ideally look like (Kossek et al., 2022). Make sure your manager is fully on board and in the loop. Be honest and express if you are reluctant to use flex work because of a perceived lack of job security (Bontrager, Clinton, Tyner, 2021). Communicate your availability regarding place and time to team members, stakeholders, and clients.

• Tip: If you only work on certain days, consider putting a disclaimer in your email signature and set an out-of-office notification when you are unavailable for work matters (“I work Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and will gladly attend to your request then”). This helps manage expectations.

Respect your colleagues’ work boundaries and flex work arrangements. Manage your work streams with colleagues who work part-time, remotely, etc., so that work can get done when the person responsible for a specific task is available. The key to flex work is reciprocation.

Do the Work-Life Balance Check. How well are you able to balance work with other life spheres? What concrete action steps could you take to improve? Are there concrete accomodations to ask for in your annual review? (The tool from Fachstelle UND is only available in German)

Organization

Entitle and communicate that you expect all fathers to take parental leave. Make caregiving fathers visible role models in the organization and expect managers to initiate conversations to understand “why” their direct reports do not take paternity leave. In European countries, increasing paternal leave can strengthen women’s positions in the labor market by breaking caregiver stereotypes through greater equity in childcare (Farré et al., 2022). In Switzerland, Novartis helps incentivize parents by offering learning modules so they understand their workplace options and support.

Create equitable parental leave policies for all parents (including same-sex couples). Gender-inclusive parental leave policies will allow couples to take the leave needed for their children. Ensure your parental leave policy does not ostracize same-sex couples looking to start a family. Your policy’s language needs to be as inclusive as possible and not assume a child to have a birthing mother and a biological father. Your parental leave policy should not make assumptions about which parent (birthing or non-birthing) is the primary caregiver. With a new collective employee agreement in 2023, Swisscom is an example of allowing more leave for all.

Transition responsibilities so parents are not penalized for taking leave. Leave policies should reduce employment barriers for both parents and go beyond strict coverage during parental leave. Most babies sleep through the night at around 35 weeks, so it is to be expected that parents need more support at work during these early days (Antonini et al., 2022). Create succession plans that enable the transition of responsibilities from full-time to part-time to leave and back. See parental leave absences as an opportunity to develop younger talents to help maintain the talent pipeline. Once parents return to work, support their childcare needs by providing or subsidizing it.

Managers

Make it abundantly clear that you support “share the care.” This is not to say you should be asking your employees directly about their family plans. However, if an employee reveals to you that they are planning a family, support them. Rather than force them to face the “child penalty”, help organize a succession plan for their role. This continuity will help maintain team cohesion, unity, and care. Also, ensure employees know all benefits available to them for family care.

Avoid the “maybe baby” bias (Gloor, 2021) and support your employees who may be planning. A female employee who has not yet had children but may be planning on it should not be considered a risk. Rather than seeing a risk, be proactive to overcome a potential “maybe baby” bias by seeing what employees may need as they approach and manage parenthood.

Individuals

If you identify as a parent, do your fair share and take leave, regardless of birthing status.

If you are a mother, create a balanced plan with your partner that allows you to consider a long-term view for your career.