On Working From Home…Post Covid….

Thinking outside the box?

I ALWAYS thought working from home on a LOT of jobs made sense for the boss, company and especially workers….

No travel time and costs….

Smaller foot print and cost for office space ..

Less childcare costs….

Flex hours….

Etc.?

 

For people whose jobs can be done at different places and times — mostly college-educated office workers — a lasting effect of the pandemic has been a newfound flexibility, which had been hard to find in the increasingly demanding American workplace. Today, 26 percent of parents still work remotely some days of the week. And like Ms. Donovan, workers describe a new attitude at the office about family, as something to be accommodated, not hidden.

But after six years of this natural experiment, American workplace culture seems to be at a crossroads. Some employers are cutting back on benefits that have supported working parents, including remote work. A movement on the right is pushing for more mothers to stay home entirely.

Yet there’s evidence that a more flexible and family-oriented environment has benefited caregivers of all kinds, including fathers, people caring for aging parents, and especially mothers. In interviews, some said they wouldn’t have had children otherwise. Others said they might not have continued to work.

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As the birthrate falls in the United States, some women said the new flexibility was what enabled them to become mothers at all.

Christine Mealey, 40, knew that having a baby on her own would be hard. She had her son, now 4, only after getting a fully remote role during the pandemic, doing human resources investigations for a pharmaceutical company in Boston.

Child care is expensive — around $30,000 a year — and when he’s home sick, she can’t work. But working from home while he’s at day care “helps in every aspect of my life,” she said — she can change laundry or run errands, freeing up time when he’s home.

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“Many of the challenges for working parents, and the solutions, are about the structure of work, not people’s individual effort,” said Corinne Low, an associate professor at the Wharton School at Penn.

Employers and policymakers have the power to reshape work for more people, researchers said.

For jobs that can only be done in person at certain hours, for example, predictability in employees’ schedules is vital — to arrange child care and backup plans for emergencies. Hourly workers, though, often don’t have predictability.

What if the corporate American workday were aligned with school hours? What if office workers had certain hours each day when they were expected to work synchronously, and could choose their other hours?

What if part-time work were a right, and didn’t mean losing health insurance or the chance to return to the same career track? What if hourly workers were required to get their schedules well in advance?

What if parents had six months of paid leave after a baby was born? What if child care were paid for by the government — including after school and in the summer — and people who took breaks from employment for caregiving got stipends?….

More…