Multigenerational Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Steps Your Organization Can Take Now

Adapting your company’s caregiving culture isn’t always easy. But here are two places to start.

First, offer flexible benefits (rather than simply maternity or childcare leave). This normalizes taking leave for anyone. Care isn’t just something that young women do for their children; a middle-aged man or an older employee may equally need to take time off. Framing the benefit as care leave and offering it as a paid benefit takes away the stigma around both maternity leave and elder care and reduces the stereotype that women should be primary caregivers. Companies may need to encourage their male employees to take parental leave—research has shown that when a few men take leave, other men follow suit.11 Humanyze, a people analytics company, actually requires new fathers to take parental leave.

Second, reduce the stigma attached to care needs and responsibilities. We have been culturally conditioned to refrain from talking about care needs or caregiving responsibilities when we are at work, especially with our bosses. Companies can begin to change this in subtle and explicit ways.

One approach is to encourage employees to self-identify as caregivers—particularly those who typically don’t reveal themselves to be in caregiving roles, such as men, young people, and senior managers. This can start during the training process for new employees. Human resources departments can bring in experts to talk about caregiving, encouraging employees to feel more open in sharing their experiences and how caregiving impacts their work. Companies also can offer access to therapy and counseling as part of employees’ health benefits.

Just as corporate gyms, yoga studios, and lactation rooms are becoming part of the design of many corporate campuses, companies should consider designing workspaces using photos, symbols, and artifacts that emphasize our shared caregiving roles and need for care. For example, managers can have photos of older parents, children, or pets on their desk as a way of affirming these roles. Companies could also host days on which employees can bring grandparents, parents, or children to work, or extend invitations to family members for company events.

One of us (Sarita) took a full 12 weeks of parental leave when she had her daughter, Suraiya. She made a point of disconnecting from work as a way of encouraging other new parents to do the same. Given her own caregiving responsibilities, she frequently uses our policies on remote work, and she takes paid sick days and leave when Suraiya or her parents have medical needs. She has also been mindful of creating a family-friendly office culture, bringing her daughter to the office and her parents to major events. She has pictures of her family on her desk and acknowledges team members’ pictures when they have them displayed, too.

All of these steps can help normalize and affirm care needs and responsibilities in the workplace. This is uncharted territory for most organizations, however, so these shifts should be approached as a series of experiments or small steps before they are codified as best practices.

Of course, companies can’t solve our caregiving problem entirely.

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