Return to office threatens to undermine advances for women

Cracking down on remote work could send stress fractures through women's advancement, pay equity and corporate returns.

Full-time remote work?

No problem, not at Merit Financial Advisors. Senior leaders and support staff whose roles don’t demand the presence on site can fashion their schedules around personal priorities and workplace preference.

The pivot to remote work brought about by Covid-19 coincided with Merit’s expansion, enabling the firm to integrate remote work as a pillar of self-directed career growth and thus retention, said president Kay Lynn Mayhue. Aspiring advisors now have several ways to grow into those lead positions, including routes that are compatible with hybrid work. Not coincidentally, such plans especially appeal to women, who love being able to mix and match elements of advancement and autonomy to maximize both earnings and flexibility, Mayhue said.

Merit appears to have reconciled clashing expectations that are undermining retention at American workplaces, especially of ambitious women.

The battle lines are drawn between employers who want to drive everyone back to the office and workers who refuse to relinquish prized remote work.

A study in winter of 2023 conducted by the Future Forum found that workers with flexible arrangements are 57% more likely to report that at their workplace, culture is improving. But 25% of executives attribute deteriorating workplace culture to flexible work.

And the just released 2023 Deloitte Women@Work study found that 97% of women perceive that making the most of remote work would undermine their chances of promotion. Inflexible work requirements are the No. 1 reason why women now are considering a job change. Flexible work retains women: Two-thirds of those with autonomy expect to continue at their current workplaces for the foreseeable future, Deloitte found, compared to 19% of those who do not have workplace autonomy.

NEAR IMPACT OF REMOTE WORK

The return versus retention conflict has implications for corporate performance, if rising women leave due to draconian remote work policies, and take with them those companies’ potential gender-driven performance advantages, according to the analysis in a first-quarter report from Parallelle Finance. Parallelle links corporate policies that support workplace flexibility, among other factors, and the higher proportions of women in leadership that buoy better returns, sustainably.

“Study after study show that more flexibility helps with retention. And you’re not sacrificing productivity,” said Angela Atherton, principal of operations and strategy at Parallele. “This seems like a great opportunity to figure out different ways of working together that work for everybody.”

Resistance to remote or hybrid work seems to rest with senior business leaders for whom the “traditional workplace is the norm,” Atherton noted. Experienced and highly skilled workers know their worth, she added, and aren’t hesitating to explore their next career moves when remote work falls out of favor with their current employers. In the long run, Atherton predicted, workplace flexibility will become a key performance indicator that she believes “will support that that this is good for individual businesses and the broader economy.”

Retention is one foreseeable casualty of hard-line return-to-the-office policies. The risk of potential pay discrimination is another.

Prioritizing workplace autonomy forces some women employees to consider how much pay they’re willing to forgo to hold on to cherished flexibility. Women prize flexibility over earnings, according to this year’s Women in leadership report by IBM, which found that about 50% of women are open to a pay cut of 10% to ensure dynamics that extend workplace flexibility, include a schedule they control and better childcare.

Employers claimed in a recent Rand survey that they would pay an employee up to 60% more to comply with a work schedule that required them to be in the office a minimum amount of time or full-time. Such policies could undermine pay equity by forcing women to choose between autonomy and compensation. Not incidentally, say consultants, such policies also decouple pay from performance, potentially fueling discrimination risk.

ENDING THE TRADE-OFF

Neither are working women willing to trade away tomorrow’s financial security for today’s work-life balance. A national survey conducted by KeyBank online platform LaurelRoad found that about a third of women feel that they’re behind on retirement, citing as pivotal factors first “not having enough money” closely followed by “too many other responsibilities.”

The forced choice is a dynamic that in itself weakens workplace loyalty. According to the LaurelRoad study, women don’t think they’re paid enough, and report that it’s first more money, then better work-life balance and remote work opportunities that would dissolve loyalty to their current employers.

Cued in by her early career years in the corporate world, Paula Nangle knows that skilled, experienced employees are perfectly capable of managing when and where they work — and that autonomy is fundamental to retention, and retention, to sustainable firm revenues. “Longevity has a lot of value in it for the firm,” said Nangle, president and senior wealth advisor of advisory firm Marshall Financial Group.

Nangle said she increasingly finds herself counseling clients to think holistically about how much they earn, how they earn it, and the emotional friction of reconciling work with personal responsibilities. And increasingly, women clients are rebalancing all those elements to forge sustainable momentum. “Women advisors bring so much life experience to client relationships. You’ve been down those roads — raising a family, taking care of aging parents,” Nangle says.

One client recently lamented that she felt handcuffed to a frustrating job because she was nearly fully vested in a lucrative pension. Marshall sketched out an alternative financial future based on the retirement income she had already secured. Two months later, the client abandoned the suffocating job for another that allowed slightly lower earnings but much wider vistas as a result of flexibility.

And flexibility works both ways, Mayhue said. Three of her five children are too young to drive, so on Fridays, their school schedules dictate her time behind the wheel. Professionals who crave the structure and spontaneous connections of onsite work need that option, too. Schedule transparency is integral to converting remote work policies to measurable retention.

“It’s important to show that we can work really hard and also have our families as a priority,” said Mayhue, who’s on the road several days each week. Flexibility, she added, includes ensuring that staff who need the organic benefits of side-by-side work can capture that, too.

“We have young advisors who really need that person right down the hall” for quick consults and coaching, Mayhue said. “For them, there’s some magic that happens in person.”