It is no secret that women were given a jolt in their handling of the pandemic. Now a study by the advisory Deloitte has found that women around the world face a higher risk of burns. According to its 2022 Women@Work report, more than half of all respondents to a survey said they would leave their current job in two years. The main reason cited was the feeling of reaching a burnout. The term refers to exhaustion so severely that it leaves one’s job skills beyond recovery. Even though it is rare, the growing concerns among women because of it—poor pay and low motivation are other pain points—should be flagged for action. This is especially so in a country that suffers from the tendency of women to withdraw from their workforce, as is India. A Deloitte study released this week shows that Indian women are feeling slightly more burned out and stressed than their global counterparts. This was a thin-slice sample, of which only 46 of the 482 respondents were located in India, but were likely to represent a larger number. This also echoes a recent LinkedIn survey that found that 82 percent of Indian professionals are considering changing jobs this year.
Under its influence, COVID has been a crisis of the four H’s: health, sanitation, home and hearth. On all four, the unpaid burden of time and labor spent on extra care became enormous. A toll is then calculated to manage them all – in units of energy if not money – even though it has become difficult to combine work and household essentials. For many working women, later teaching children and taking care of adults are two challenges with a high degree of uncertainty, given the constraints of remote lessons and a virus on the loose. Amidst all this pressure, Work-From-Home (WFH) was designed as a lockdown response by most offices which believed that what was done in the office could be done online at home. Yet, for the most part, the work routine was not adapted to the changed living conditions. Spatial flexibility was rarely extended to temporal flexibility. Caught in rigid schedules, many employees simply over-excited, overloaded women bore the brunt of the hardest times.
The hybrid work model, with workers going to the office two or three times a week, is a relief to women who find their autonomy restricted by domestic expectations. Some others, on the other hand, enjoyed the space they found to do their best, away from male-dominated places of work. The way organizations can hope to reconcile the diverse WFH experiences would be to embrace all-round flexibility to maximize individual preference and resumption of operations. In a LinkedIn study, flexible work arrangements were cited by job seekers as their top priority. What is clear from the Deloitte report is that women’s voices must go into the shaping of every strategy. An IBM scan last year reported that while more companies were drawn to gender equality, globally, it did not result in more women in workplaces. Office nursery and mental health support can help remedy this to some extent, but sensitivity to the need for work-life balance is often the missing part. Broadly speaking, it comes down to the freedom offered by the employers. An ambiguous factor in this may be the aggressiveness of the work assignment. WFH saw micro managers as well as leaders in charge of work outcomes; All else remaining constant, burnout would have been less of a risk under bosses relying on diligence and self-motivation rather than command and control. To address gender inequality, increase resilience, and prevent burnout, we need elasticity.