The only constant in life is change…and guess what’s probably changing faster than you realize? Your workforce.
Danaya Wilson, co-founder and CEO of BetterCertify, an environmental safety and professional training company, highlights why companies and HR leaders should adopt more flexible practices for working parents in her recently published book, Changemakers Wanted: Your Blueprint for Lasting Impact and Ethical Change.
Wilson shared insights from her book with HR Brew.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What can HR pros learn from your book?
As I got into corporate America, I was seeing a lot of my friends that were women that had advanced degrees…have their children, and then they would exit the workforce. And, I knew why that was happening, but I wanted to know really what the data was behind this, and then how are we going to have more women in leadership positions and build a pipeline for that…We, as business owners, as CEOs, need to increase the amount of flexibility that we have in our organizations, and then the second thing was we need to have a solution for the childcare crisis.
Specific to HR leaders is this idea of individualized, flexible benefit plans…When I’m hiring you, I already know how much it’s going to cost to hire you. We know what your salary is going to be and then the cost to the organization for your benefits. But, what happens when you decide that you don’t want one of those benefits? Let’s say, a partner already has health insurance you’re covered under. You lose that as an employee…What individualized, flexible benefit plans advocate for is this compensation to actually be realized by the employee.
[This] gives HR managers the autonomy to say, ‘Hey, things aren’t working and doing it the way that we’ve always done it, is it beneficial to our employees? And, how can we change that without costing the employer, quite honestly, anything more than they already were going to offer that.’
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How can HR help workers amid the childcare crisis?
Acknowledge that it’s even a problem, that there’s reasons why people aren’t returning to the workforce, or returning to the workforce as much as they want to. A lot of our workforce is sidelined because of the cost of childcare…What employers can do is, if they can’t do it on a financial level, can they do it on a flexible level? Can they shift their work hours to allow for a mom to do drop off or dad to do pick up?...Are there small businesses next to where you operate and can you guys go into a stipend at a local daycare center? Or can you [start] an on-site childcare facility?
Do you have advice for HR pros in the midst of an RTO?
Resisting return-to-office mandates also impact women [and] people with disabilities. The reasoning is that you want to have wherever your work is happening, you want everybody to be on a level playing field. And, if you just have women coming to the office only some of the time, but yet, let’s say men, who typically favor going into the office a little bit more. They’re going to be going to the office five days a week, where maybe a woman wouldn’t be going to the office five days, [but] two days a week. And, it really starts to [increase] the possibility for an all-boys club.
For HR managers…transparent conversation [and] communication needs to be at the forefront of everything that you do to make sure that you’re not only considering the needs and wants of your workforce, but also that you’re not allowing for something to be systemic, that maybe you didn’t, of course you didn’t mean for it [to happen], but if we make these huge changes that really disproportionately affect one-half of our workforce, it’s going to cause some ripples down the road.