Could the pandemic disrupt the 9-5 office work day forever? Working parents, this is for you.

I have encountered my fair share of trials and tribulations in the last 13 years since I had my first child and wanted to continue in my career, and it has made me always challenge the status quo in a search for a better way of doing things, to somehow try and get balance between my career and personal life. That is where the birth of this whole blog site came from – the business of life. This is my ongoing conundrum. I am a mother of three school aged children, a wife to a husband who has somewhat traditional husband and wife ideologies, a self-employed woman who works beyond full-time because I run a finance business which is currently a male dominated industry, and have done so for the past 9 years. I was once asked, if I had a super power what would it be? I said that I would choose the power to control time, because I never feel that I have enough time to do everything I want and need to do. Apparently Michelle Obama wanted this power too, so it’s probably common for many women.

Right now the world is in the midst of a pandemic, a virus we call COVID-19 or coronavirus, and it seems to be everywhere and is currently changing the way we live and work. We think these changes are temporary, but there are some of us, like me, who think there will be cataclysmic changes to the way we do things from now on. You can see the gradual change that has been happening for a decade now in how we shop and for some of us, how we work. This has been aided by technological advancements which make it easier to do things from the comfort of our home, or even from a cafe or poolside. The rise of the smartphone has allowed us to ride the technological wave, and although parts of it are worrying, like the privacy aspects, it’s still an exciting time.

Since the coronavirus came to Australia a few months ago, I’ve had to rapidly redevelop my business model to allow for a team of staff who were once all centrally office based, work remotely from home without losing productivity. Where we had clients visiting the office for face to face appointments 99% of the time, we can no longer do that. As a result, even those who believe face to face is the best and only method of delivery for an advice business, we no longer have that option for the time being. To be honest I’m not crying about it and feeling defeated. I think this is a fantastic test because now we can trial technology in our business and deliver advice and provide value to our clients with the assistance of Zoom, Facetime, Loom video, phone call and of course still the traditional email in place of the face to face meeting… where some people would travel hours to sit with me for an hour or so. They could better spend that travel time doing something else!

To give you an indication of my search for better, for some time I’ve questioned the email, because traditional mail has now been replaced by email. And I get hundreds of emails a day which I have to manually sort through to pick out the things that need my attention. Sometimes emails get overlooked due to the volume, and the fact this is only one facet of my day and I don’t get enough time to do it carefully some weeks. So I’ve been looking at how we can make things better and more efficient for us so that we can reduce our back-end burdens and be able to spend more time at the coal face delivering value for our clients, and email is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is still early days but already we are having great success without having seen anyone in person for a month – and I’ve worked from home for 3 weeks, not even stepping foot in my office in that time. I am still keeping in close contact with my staff because we use systems such as Slack to stay in touch with direct and group channels. We would not have trialled this had it not been for the pandemic, and it has been game changing in our business! We can now control our interruptions, and we aren’t getting a boat load of cumbersome internal emails.

So these are exciting things for me to evolve as a leader in my business and looking for a way to make financial advice more accessible for people. It is an industry steeped in traditional methods of delivery and it’s well and truly due for change. We are enjoying the changes and I know from other practices that have been doing this for years, that their clients enjoy it too.

But I’m writing this today because I wanted to talk about the family juggle. On a personal front, as a working mother, here for me is the biggest benefit that I can see coming if we can get businesses of all sizes on board. Mums and dads often struggle with working and caring for children, especially once kids start school because of the school hours not exactly working well with business hours. For instance, if you have to drop your kid off at school at 8.30am but you work 15 minutes away and start work at 8.30am, you have a problem. If your kid finishes school at 3.10pm but you finish work at 5.00pm, you have a problem. Most parents don’t want to put their kid into before and after school care, and some get help from grandparents, however many would prefer to see their kids and spend time with them if it wasn’t for that job that paid the bills! Obviously if you’re a builder or a tradesman, you can’t work from home. But what about the council office worker, the lawyer, the Accountant etc. The jobs that we use technology as our daily interface, yet we still think we have to be sitting in an office full of other people within that organisation to be “supervised” when other than the fact the workplace has dictated we start at 8.30 and finish at 5, our work just had to be done by a certain time. It could be due today or it could be due in a week. Nobody said it had to be done between 4pm and 4.30pm. You control what you do in much of that time and work autonomously. My team does this anyway, and to be honest, if you aren’t going to be productive at home and get through your work, any smart employer is going to realise this and you’ll be replaced. So trust should not be a problem when it comes to working from home.

So, if only there was a way to still do 8 hours of work a day but to make it more family friendly. This is what I’ve been experimenting with myself for the last three weeks to see if it works. Mine has been a little more challenging than usual because the kids have been doing school from home due to the virus. Otherwise they’d be at school and my kids catch a bus not far from home, so they’re gone from 8am until 3.45pm on a normal school day. The reason they catch the bus is because their school is 15 minutes from home in one direction, and my workplace is 20 minutes from home in the opposite direction!

Let’s imagine the new work day for a working parent of school age kids. They wake at 6.30am as I did today. Instead of faffing around for an hour while they drink their coffee, they get straight onto their emails and clear that out. By 7.30am that’s done. From 7.30-8.30am it’s time to get kids and yourself organised for the day.

8.30am you’re back at “work” from home in your designated home office. You aren’t constantly interrupted by other workers and in fact your meetings are shorter because you’re not there face to face. What once took an hour to do in a face to face meeting, is now wrapped up in 30 minutes. So you find that you are getting through your work much faster than you do in the work place. You don’t have to go out to grab lunch, you just walk to your fridge and find something. Go hang out some washing if you like for a break!

3.30pm you get organised to pick up the kids. For the next 2 hours or so you are tending to them, being their snack bitch, and getting something together for dinner. By now the kids don’t need you and they are chilling out for an hour. I can jump back on my laptop in my quiet home office and get another hour of work done from 5.30-6.30pm. So then the work day is over. The family sit down together for dinner.

So if you calculate that out, and subtract half an hour for my lunch break/hanging out washing, that was 8.5 hours of solid productive work time for me, an hour more than you actually have to do at the office as an employee if you’re paid for 7.5 hours a day. So you can actually ditch that first hour or that final hour of my home based work day and insert your own personal fun or exercise time! And the kids didn’t miss out on us, you could still do a bus or school run, you were less interrupted due to being at home as opposed to a noisy workplace, and didn’t have to travel very far. I save 45 minutes a day if I don’t drive to my office. That is 7.5 hours a fortnight! I no longer require a house cleaner.

So if you want to be able to have a career that is family friendly, these traditional business models need to wake up and realise that their staff with kids are not happy working 9-5 and missing out on precious time with their kids. Use this time to experiment and iron out the kinks, but then keep on allowing those who want to to work from home! And hey if you’ve got to go to the office one day a week to show your face, that’s ok. So coming from me, a person who employs others, I’m totally on board. As employers, you might be surprised and find that you have happier, more productive employees as a result of this new balance instead of each day being a painful grind for them where they feel like they’re losing the battle between career and family. And that is good for everyone.