Critical Questions For Leaders To Stop The Attrition Of Female Talent

This year, in 2021, United Nations International Women’s Day (IWD 2021) has been designated with the theme Choosetochallenge. It’s completely fitting that in a year where the world has been completely upended, we have lost any semblance of life and business as usual that we recognize the need for change. In the last year, countless organizations have opened up even more conversations among women and people of color to share their experiences of their professional and personal lives. In sharing these stories, we create powerful experiences that create greater awareness among colleagues, particularly in creating a more effective approach to leadership. Sharing stories can be viewed as a knee-jerk reaction to a specific event. Still more powerful, these conversations become the basis of transforming leadership and management relationships. Every story will provide clues and insights for any manager to understand what they can do to improve their teams. 

In a previous Forbes article, I discussed how leaders need to prepare for the next normal to navigate ongoing uncertainty and turbulence in the workplace and society. In essence, this means managers and leaders need to be better prepared to think differently and find new solutions to the challenges of scaling up work again. This may be about the basic principles of where and how we work, responding to the changing nature of work, and how roles and jobs have transformed. There will also be the impact of juggling domestic demands and work impacting mental health and stress. 

Research by Boston Consulting Group across Europe highlighted how the global pandemic has affected the careers of women. The survey with 2000 respondents identifies stark findings for men and women returning to work. The key results show women bearing double the workload of unpaid domestic work due to the lock-down periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact on stress is differentiated by identifying more caregivers (predominantly women) feeling the stress in response to three areas; their career perspectives and physical and mental well-being. The main western European countries in the survey, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, showed respondents who had caring responsibilities were far more likely to leave their current employer. Individuals caring for an adult were more likely to leave their current employer; with responses in Germany at 25% and France and UK at 20%, parents of children aged 12 and under followed closely behind. 

The survey findings paint a bleak picture for women’s careers particularly as organisations navigate the minefield of physically returning to offices. In adapting to ways of working during Covid, a substantial amount of effort has focused on the practical elements of working from home and providing flexible working; 45% of male managers view the news of working positively on driving diversity in their leadership teams. This is contrasted with 29% of women who feel the same way. What are the projections of these results? In France, for example, 60% of women who have reduced their working hours as a result of family obligations do not intend to return to full-time working after Covid, and 40% of women are not confident about their future employment.

The practical elements for effective working from home are important. Still, these are not always solvable if we are honest – short of upgrading or substantially changing living arrangements. If we are not careful, the narrative becomes women need to fix the problems they are facing. There are echoes of a throwback ten years ago. In the UK, during the launch of the Lord Davies review on women on boards, the well-intentioned but misinformed solution was to ‘fix the women.’ The necessary pivot to fixing the organizations requires intentional and sustained effort to change the culture and behaviors embedded over decades. The real challenge emerges from male leaders and managers’ attitudes who don’t recognize their need to step into this situation. In the same survey, 86% of male managers do not believe that gender parity is an issue in leadership teams. The ambivalence from male managers creates further challenges in getting to the crux of the problem facing women at work. 

Rebecca Scott, Resource Manager at Jacobs and Highspeed2 (HS2), and D&I lead for HS2 shares her perspectives on the what needs to be addressed. Jacobs has been running a series of ‘courageous conversations’ since last year for colleagues to share their experiences. The catalyst for the conversations started with the Black Lives Matter Protests in 2020 but slowly expanded to cover other areas. Scott explains, “These conversations are powerful so that people can build an understanding of each others’ perspectives and experiences. We need to allow everyone to listen to others. We’ve talked about everything, racism, gender, domestic violence, sexuality, and the impact of the pandemic. We need to have this awareness to notice what’s happening. When you are working under pressure and up against it, you don’t really stop and think, and you get on with it. But we need to stop, and we need to move the focus towards generating solutions. Focusing on flexible working is essential, but the solutions don’t stop there.”

Where organizations have rolled out courageous conversations, the next natural step asks the questions – what next? Well, the data from Boston Consulting Group shows us the big problems we need to answer; 

1. How might we create new ways of working to minimize the attrition of women in the workplace? 
2. How can we move beyond policies around flexible working to change our culture and behaviors? 
3. How might we get everyone behind this thinking, so men and women recognize women’s value in the workplace and continue to invest effort in this agenda? 

In my conversation with Scott, a big part of the conversation centered on empowering individuals, team members to line managers, and senior leaders to proactive think about the solutions they can provide and how they take action in this area. Scott explains why everyone needs to be part of this effort; “We can’t keep pushing the narrative of just women. We need men at the table, and we have to believe that we can do something to retain our talented women and men. We need a more nuanced understanding of how we solve these challenges and recognize that it’s not just one size fits all.”

As we celebrate IWD 2021 and consider what it means when we Choose to Challenge, the starting point is our choice to challenge the narrative emerging from the research on women returning to work after the lock-downs lift . We can challenge the narrative but refuse to accept the inevitability of attrition of women, and we can challenge the narrative by not focusing on fixing the women. Instead, we can choose to challenge the assumptions that we have done everything we can, but recognize everyone can find solutions working in their teams, with colleagues to understand and provoke conversations to push even better solutions to retain more women in the working world of our next normal.