Men at Work

Australia's Parenthood Trap

Annabel Crabb

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781743821480
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced her pregnancy, the headlines raced around the world. But when Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg became the first prime minister and treasurer duo since the 1970s to take on their roles while bringing up young children, this detail passed largely without notice. Why do we still accept that fathers will be absent? Why do so few men take parental leave in this country? Why is flexible and part-time work still largely a female preserve?
In the past half-century, women have revolutionised the way they work and live. But men's lives have changed remarkably little. Why? Is it because men don't want to change? Or is it because, every day in various ways, they are told they shouldn't?
In Men at Work, Annabel Crabb deploys political observation, workplace research and her characteristic humour and intelligence to argue that gender equity cannot be achieved until men are as free to leave the workplace (when their lives demand it) as women are to enter it.

CHANGING BEHAVIOUR: SOME CUNNING IDEAS

At a conference a couple of years back, I interviewed Valerie Jarrett, who was Barack Obama’s senior adviser for his entire term in office. She told a fascinating story about the early stages of his administration. At meetings, she said, it became evident very quickly that the senior men had no problem making themselves heard, but the women tended to sit back and listen. Jarrett and Obama both noticed this. The solution? Obama invited all the women over for a casual dinner. After the meal, he told them: “I hired you so that you could make yourselves heard for the sake of the people whose interests you are representing. If you aren’t able to speak up, then you are occupying the space that could be given to someone who can.” Or words to that effect. Quite a brutal approach, on one level, but extremely insightful; in working to correct what is a widely reported female trait (not speaking up), Obama applied pressure using his knowledge of another classic trait (guilt at the thought of letting someone down). Jarrett reported that this intervention brought about a swift improvement to the situation.

Iris Bohnet, in her excellent 2016 book What Works, explores behavioural design as a means of bringing about rapid change even in workplaces thought to be set in their ways. By thinking laterally, she explains, one can often come up with an innovative tweak to workplace design that can change the way people think, and thence change behaviour. Sometimes, these innovations can be incredibly simple and cheap. Bohnet’s book opens with the story of the great orchestras of the world, which had barely any female musicians until the Boston Symphony Orchestra hit upon the idea of having musicians audition behind a curtain so there was no way of knowing their gender. This simple innovation increased by half the chance of a woman being selected, and thus released a vast talent pool that had previously been unexploited.

Large organisations are hard to run. And if they’re trying to turn a profit and deal with myriad changing circumstances – economic conditions, fluctuating markets, layers of regulation – then it’s easy to see how often it’s administratively simpler to assume your workforce is a static and unchanging resource. That people will work as they always have. One of the greatest forces preventing change in workplace culture around flexible work is inertia. Changing people is hard. Changing culture is hard. But Bohnet’s book is an intriguing glimpse of the possibilities of change when organisations take a moment to examine their own assumptions, or come to grips with patterns of behaviour among their employees.

I was at the Women in Mining WA conference a few years back and heard Professor Robert Wood – an expert in organisational psychology who now heads the University of Technology Sydney’s Futures Academy – tell a fascinating story of organisational change. The Tooheys bottling plant in Sydney, he said, had many full-time older men who had spent their entire working lives there. Part-time or flexible work was unheard of for these men, which created a problem: upon retirement, they’d go straight from a full-time work week to no work at all – a shock to the system which can be threatening to general health. So the organisation considered – for the first time – offering flexible work and job-sharing to these workers. And it turned out that there were indeed men who were interested in changing the way they worked. Some had family responsibilities they wanted to attend to, some wanted the flexibility to transition into retirement, some wanted to stop doing night shifts. A spokeswoman for the parent company, Lion Nathan, told me that the company first considered changing things in 2015, when it received a request from a factory employee for a job-share arrangement. “This request was unique for Tooheys and was the first such request across the broader Lion Supply Chain,” she said. “Prior to that, it was considered too difficult to implement due to the nature of shift work at the factory, which has quite rigid hours. There were also some initial concerns around continuity and team dynamics, as well as part-timers potentially missing out on key teamwork activity.”

Tooheys’ workforce is 85 per cent male and 15 per cent female. Around half of the employees are fifty-five or older, so the management of retiring men is a significant issue. Executives and management staff at Lion Nathan had already been informally practising flexible work for some years, and the request from the factory floor led to some examination of the unconscious biases underpinning the assumption that the same couldn’t work for blue-collar workers. It turned out that flexible work was quite manageable, once arrangements had been made to ensure communication lines stayed open. As of late 2016, across Lion’s supply chain more broadly, 35 per cent of male employees and 56 per cent of females had worked flexibly on occasion.

I’m fascinated by stories like these because they demonstrate that, sometimes, baked-in assumptions about how workers will behave can be changed quite quickly, given the right degree of lateral thought.

Here’s another. Medibank surprised the market in March 2018 by becoming the first large Australian company to formally abolish the notion of “primary carer” and “secondary carer” in its parental leave scheme. On International Women’s Day, the insurer revealed it would offer fourteen weeks’ leave at full pay that either parent could take any time in the first two years of their child’s life. If both parents worked at Medibank, both could take the full leave – at the same time, if desired. And the company would allow parents to take the leave in one chunk, or two – or even use it to work part-time over the two years. Flexibility was the policy’s main selling point.

Group Executive of People and Culture Kylie Bishop said the policy came about as a result of a genuinely open-ended process.

If I’m brutally honest with you, I’m not sure we were completely clear what we were trying to solve for. We just knew our parental leave policies weren’t hitting the mark. Those who were going on parental leave weren’t having a great experience, and their re-entry wasn’t easy. Our retention rates weren’t good – particularly after twelve months. After twenty-four months, we were losing in the region of 70 per cent of those who had been on leave. So we were tinkering around the edges, looking at length of leave, you know, should we pay super on the unpaid part … We kicked it around. We asked around … and what our people kept telling us was, “Look, it’s not that stuff. What makes it hard is the big challenge of shared care, making it all work.”

So we came up with the idea of doing away with the whole notion of primary and secondary carers. How about we just give people choice and flexibility for shared care?

It was a radical idea. “I used to work in banking,” says Bishop. “A few of my former colleagues reached out to say, ‘How did you get the business case up?’ and I said, ‘We didn’t do one, actually.’ I took it to our CEO and CFO. I said, ‘I’m not going to put any numbers in front of you, but I want to talk about “What is the right thing to do? What do we want to stand for?” I wanted this to be an honest conversation, not politically correct, I wanted them to react with whatever they thought.” Management announced the policy internally at first. Some reinforcement was needed. “I remember very early on when we launched Family Flex, one of our senior guys came up to me after the session and said, ‘So … the parental leave policy. Is that career suicide?’” recalls Bishop. “He was about to have baby number four. I said, ‘Great question, and absolutely not. I’d love to get involved with your story.’”

That senior executive was Andrew Palmer, thirty-nine, who was Medibank’s General Manager, Digital. At the time Bishop announced the Family Flex scheme, he and his wife, Christina, were expecting a baby sister for their three young boys, Zachary, Eli and Asher. “My first question was: ‘Does this policy apply to senior executives? And if I do take the leave, is it career-ending? Will my job still be there?’” Palmer recalls of that first conversation with Bishop. “Finding a senior role at an awesome company is quite rare. We moved from Sydney to Melbourne so I could work for Medibank. So I felt quite vulnerable. And I wanted to double-check – is this thing real? Because generally in life if something seems too good to be true, usually it is.” Reassured by Bishop, Palmer agreed to share his story across the firm’s internal communications platforms, becoming a valuable senior role model for other men.

Palmer ended up taking six months off. Because the firm’s policy applies to children under the age of two, he was eligible for fourteen weeks of paid parental leave for toddler Asher in addition to the leave for baby Ivy. For his older children, he had taken the standard two weeks’ paternity leave. “You’ve really got to juggle,” says Palmer of the two-week arrangement. “Do I take the leave while my wife’s in hospital? Do I wait and take it when they come home? And for that time your mind’s still on your work anyway; you’re in a couple of places at once. No matter whether it’s your first or your fourth or your tenth, it’s complicated.”

Leaving work entirely for a lengthy period of time was a confronting experience at first, Palmer explains. “I found a real separation anxiety when I first took leave. As a man, and a full-time working person, my sense of identity comes from providing – to my job, to the community, to my family. That all comes through work. So the idea of not being there really brings up some questions of who you are, and your sense of value. It’s a real fear – ‘Well then, who am I?’ So, yeah, I found the first couple of months a really interesting journey to go through, getting to the point where I’m not just an employee and a boss; I’m more of a partner and a father.”

Others found it hard to understand too. “I was taking our eldest to swimming classes after school. And there were lots of mothers there doing the same thing, and they had a lot of questions that amounted, in essence, to: ‘What are you doing here?’ You know, I’d say, ‘I’m on parental leave from Medibank for six months.’ ‘Unpaid?’ I’d be asked. ‘No, paid, actually,’ I’d say. ‘Oh. Is Christina at work then?’ And I’d say, ‘No.’ Every question I answered, there’d be another one. And I had some mates saying, ‘Well, you’ve managed to rort the system.’ I had some people internally saying, ‘Well. You won’t be back.’ There’s still a stigma around it. I think for women it’s expected to take time off. For men it’s still viewed as a privilege – it’s unusual.”

Was the fourth child experience different? “Completely different. I had a few milestones in the six-month period. My second-eldest started kinder, my third started daycare, and I was actually there for those things. Even the small things – taking them to school, being there to talk to them, doing pick-ups and drop-offs – just being an active participant in my children’s lives. The biggest benefit was to my wife. Because I was around, she could get back to being more active, and she was able to have a routine.”

Palmer is now back at work, but he’s changed the way he structures his day. “Now I leave early in the morning and I’m home by 4.30 so I can do the crazy dinnertime, bath, bed routine and my wife can go to the gym. And when Christina’s had a tough day at home with the two at home, just knowing she’ll have that time out provides a light at the end of the tunnel for her. She says, ‘The days are long, but the weeks are short.’”

The arrival of Ivy has been instructive for Palmer in many ways. “To be absolutely honest, before the six months off I kind of knew it was hard but I really didn’t know how hard. I’d come home at night and it’d all be done. The boys would be in bed. But that’s all changed now. Also, I’d say I’m much better equipped now to deal with mothers who take time off. There’s a level of isolation there that I understand much better now.”

Back at Medibank, the results of the new policy are startling. Under the old parental leave scheme, only 2.5 per cent of employees taking “primary carer” parental leave were men. “Now, we’ve just crunched the numbers and it’s 28 per cent of those people taking parental leave who are males,” says Bishop. “The average time they take is eight weeks.” The success of the policy, however, wasn’t simply a matter of making the decision and putting out a press release and waiting for the men to sign up. Far from it. Without expressly meaning to, Medibank had prepared the ground by first creating a company culture of openness to the concept of flexible work. When the new parental leave policy was announced, 76 per cent of the workforce was already participating in some kind of flexible work, whether working from home or with flexible start and finish times, or working a compressed week. The company was careful not to associate flexible work only with parents; it promoted flexible work with healthy living, encouraging workers to make time for exercise, or extracurricular interests that kept them happy and motivated. But it wasn’t easy. “Flexible work was harder than the parental leave – by a country mile,” says Bishop.

Medibank was publicly owned until 2014, when the Abbott government made good on a long-term Coalition promise to privatise it. On 25 November 2014, it was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company moved to a new building; this created an opportunity to change the design of the workplace. “In the old building, everyone had their desk, their plant, their photos of the kids,” Bishop recalls. “And the more senior you got, the better office you got, and then when you did really well you got a water view. I came over from the banking sector, and I thought – goodness me.”

But then we moved. We became a listed company and we moved buildings. We were very open in saying that we were moving to flexible work. “No one’s going to have a desk. No one’s going to have a plant. You’ll have to make your own arrangements for your snacks!” And really, the first few months were all about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we had to address food, shelter and water before we got anywhere near work routine. But then we started talking about flexible work. And we started at the beginning, which meant addressing, quite openly, the basic questions people had, like “How will I know if you’re working, if I can’t see you?”

These were stubborn perceptions to shift. Bishop brought in an external company to conduct role-playing sessions literally acting out people’s concerns. “We made the sessions compulsory, which is something we don’t do very often,” she says. “My view is, if you don’t flush out the conversations, then all you’re doing is burying it, and what you end up with is a counterculture.” So participants were encouraged to be frank about their concerns: “Someone would say, ‘I want to see Joe Bloggs and know that he’s at work.’ And we’d say: ‘Okay. Well, that’s a performance issue. Not a flexible work issue.’ And so on.”

Several issues emerged beyond the basic ones of trust and the convention of presence in the workplace. Some workers felt ostracised because they didn’t have children and worried that they’d have to work harder to compensate for parents working flexibly. They were encouraged to draw up their own plans for flexible work, based around other interests or fitness goals. Surprising pockets of resistance emerged. For instance, support staff in the organisation – personal assistants and executive assistants – knew a lot about who was working from home on any given day, or who was dialling in to a meeting rather than attending it. Hot-desking had removed the phenomenon of co-workers eye-balling a colleague who frequently left work early, but there were still gatekeepers who kept tabs on staff movements and passed this information upwards. Bishop realised that extra work needed to be done to win this powerful group of influencers over to the principles of flexible work. “I don’t think you can genuinely introduce flexible work and then expect that someone’s going to be available to you 24/7,” she says. “You’ve got to try and work out how that’s consistent across the organisation.”

A great employee for us is someone who’s very comfortable bringing their whole self to work. Who says – I’ve got these family commitments, or these health goals, and here’s how I’m going to make it work so I can be the best Medibank employee I can. This stupid discussion about work–life balance. It doesn’t actually exist. As a leader, I would try to customise to make sure I know as much as I can about an individual. You’ve got to provide a safe environ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Natural Way of Things
• Who Cares?
• Permission
• Primary and Secondary
• Northern Lights
• Changing Behaviour: Some Cunning Ideas
• Backlash or Breakthrough?
• Afterword
• Sources
• Back Cover