Modernising UK workplaces to retain talented women

Jessica Brannigan at Culture Amp argues that to avert the further loss of talented women, UK organisations need carefully designed strategies

 

Since 1990, women have taken an increasing proportion of the most demanding and highest paid jobs in Britain’s economy. By 2019, their employment rate had hit a historical high at 72%.

 

Fast forward to 2022 and these trends have slowed, owing to the pandemic, economic crises and labour market shifts - even though in May this year, a record 1.3 million job vacancies were advertised.

 

One of the reasons for this decline is that many organisations are missing opportunities to modernise their workplaces to better support and inspire female employees.

 

Women contribute more

Workplace research shows the pressures women face. Studies by the UK Office for National Statistics found that during the pandemic, women were more likely to prioritise family life and care-giving over work than men: gender equality charity the Fawcett Society estimated that 35% of working mothers left jobs for this reason.

 

Research by Bath University showed that this issue cuts right across both pay and seniority bands: higher-earning women take on an even greater degree of the family/care-giving burden than men.

 

Women are not only under pressure to balance professional and personal responsibilities. Their overall mental health is also affected more negatively by today’s economic climate. Culture Amp’s UK research earlier this year found that 84% of women are worried about rising living costs against only 57% of men, while almost half of women (44%) find workplaces stressful compared with fewer than one in five men (17%).

 

We attribute these differing perceptions to unequal demands outside work, the higher likelihood of being the primary carer, and needing to look after children during lock-downs. But this divide is also a result of women’s over-representation in lower paid work (57% of such jobs in 2021).

 

Doubtless some of their dissatisfaction stems from not being promoted in line with their effectiveness. In our separate research looking at manager effectiveness ratings by direct reports, women consistently outperform men (regardless of the report’s gender), but this higher managerial competence is not resulting in higher representation in manager and manager-of-manager groups.

 

Despite — or because of — these radical workplace changes, many employers are unaware that the fundamental challenge is not women employees themselves but outdated workplace thinking that is constraining their careers.

 

Avoiding ‘brain drain’

To avert further loss of talented women, UK organisations need carefully designed strategies such as:

 

Effective listening. First, they need to implement strategies for listening more effectively to employees, including introducing (or increasing the frequency of) employee surveys. More regular polling of employees enables HR to apply demographic lenses to their data and identify deep-seated patterns in women’s engagement with work at an earlier stage.

 

Using these tools also enables employers to apply intersectional analytics to more closely examine women’s widely-differing experiences by considering factors such as race, disabilities and caregiving status, and act on the insights.

 

Modernised performance management. Second, as organisations re-appraise their core values after 24 months of change and determine whether their service delivery or employee experiences still align with them, there is considerable scope for UK firms to rethink tired HR processes to broaden career opportunities, especially for women.

 

When Culture Amp studied companies that had made their employee performance reviews fairer, all the organisations achieved a 4-6% improvement in employees’ perceptions of these processes’ fairness. And women employees should benefit the most because these updated performance reviews now evaluate them properly and reward them with promotions in a more proportionate way. This modernisation process has also seen bosses identifying more rewarding career opportunities for women employees.

 

Making management processes fairer is a smart way to reaffirm employees’ faith in a company’s corporate vision as well as the value of processes like performance reviews. It can also be the catalyst for women fulfilling career ambitions, promotions, and enhanced workplace status.

 

Development opportunities. Third, we are at a juncture where personal development can be tailored to individual ambitions, to help achieve new, or wider career opportunities.

 

The UK’s rapid and pragmatic acceptance of hybrid work has, for example, hastened the end of ‘classroom-style’ learning in favour of more flexible, people-centric development. Virtual learning tools and wider learning content options make learning and development (L&D) a practical proposition despite increasingly complex daily workflows or hybridised working.

 

HR teams that gain deeper insights into employees’ workplace experiences, from light-touch surveys and bigger employee data sets, will be well placed to provide the outcomes-focused L&D opportunities that women need. Companies that provide individual learning strategies will fully engage women employees and open up more exciting career opportunities for them.

 

Unlocking potential

While employers always need to listen effectively to employees and ensure their management processes are unbiased, the difference now is that they can access better data sources and smarter L&D tools to deliver fairer and more exciting job opportunities.

 

While the pandemic’s upheavals undermined many women’s ability to succeed at work, UK firms’ pragmatic responses to all the changes have nevertheless created practical ways to further unlock women employees’ career potential and restore the upward trajectory of their contribution to our economy.

 

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Jessica Brannigan is lead people scientist at Culture Amp

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com