Labour laws and family structure

 

A pic of my home and a glimpse of my childhood in the late 80s.

Mom would leave for work around 8:30 AM and return home by 5:30 PM. She was working as a teacher.

Dad would leave for work around 8:45 AM and return home by 9:30 PM. He was working in the private sector.

My paternal grandma took over the complete responsibility of the house - cooking, cleaning, taking care of us and disciplining us.

My maternal grandparents' house was next door and we would spend most of our time there. Grandpa would have a strict eye on us and catch us red-handed when we were up to some mischief.

My aunt (mom's sister) helped us with school homework.

My aunt and maternal grandma would take turns, plaiting my long hair in the morning rush hours before school.

All of them took turns in dropping and picking us up from school when we were very young.

My paternal grandma would make evening snacks for us when we return from school.

The old saying goes - It takes a village to raise a child.

Having grown up with extended family members, I have observed how everyone took charge of various responsibilities. Since the workload was shared, this gave my parents ample time, bandwidth and most importantly, mental space toward their work commitments.

Many of us born in the 70s/80s would have gone through a similar upbringing.

Fast forward, 40 years.......The village is no longer available, due to shifts in societal norms - moving to different cities/countries, nuclear families, health issues of extended family members and a general lack of willingness to participate in sharing the workload.

As a result, it is now completely up to the parents to manage ALL responsibilities at home between the two of them. Help can be sought externally, but is it possible to outsource the majority of responsibilities? Not practical. Not financially viable either.

There are still exceptions, but most people I talk to are in a similar situation.

The trigger for this post is the latest news regarding the 12-hour work shift that is being implemented in manufacturing units in TN and the comments/posts circulating on how this would impact the workers.

Irrespective of the nature of the job, work demands have gone up over the past couple of decades, speaking from my experience in the IT industry.

The changes in family structure and increased responsibilities play a major role in whether such high work demands can be met reasonably well (without disrupting our well-being and sanity). 

The needs of children keep evolving at every stage of their growth. They look up to their parents at all stages for their cognitive, social, mental, emotional and nutritional needs.

These factors need to be considered when reframing labor laws or defining corporate policies and employee benefits, irrespective of the industry.

A recent report indicates that Indian women are facing a higher burnout rate as compared to their global peers. In my opinion, the spouse sharing home responsibilities isn't sufficient enough to solve this issue.

It requires holistic evaluation of the challenges at multiple levels -

rethinking work demands and job design from the ground up,

measuring work outcomes instead of work hours clocked in the office,

extending maternity benefits beyond 6 months through flexibility, remote work, hybrid work, and project-based outcomes.

The pandemic forced organizations to rethink the working models, but it now seems that prioritizing "what is easy" over "what is right" has taken precedence yet again.

Think beyond the first 6 months

It's really heartening to see technology companies taking the steps to support working mothers by extending the maternity leave upto 6 months. Kudos to Flipkart for thinking beyond these 6 months by supporting flexible working hours and supporting a year off without salary.

But there's also much more that can be done to enable mothers to return to workplace with a confident, happy and motivated mindset. Especially for mothers who do not have a family support system in place.

What happens to the mothers(and their infants) after 6 months? They would need to look for safe and secure day care options. Multiple factors have to be considered in order to narrow down this decision - the location, the care-takers, security, hygiene, food, number of children, child:care-taker ratio, timings etc.

It's extremely challenging to find a daycare that matches all the criteria that works best for the parents. Given the traffic situation, mothers have to spend an extra hour or two in managing commute. Considering these issues, most mothers choose to take a career break atleast for the first two years (if the financial situation at home is manageable).

If the mother chooses to raise the child at home by herself or with the help of a nanny, then it is clearly 4-5 years before the child can become a little independent. As the child starts play-school around the age of two, mothers can get anywhere between 4-6 hours for themselves, which they would love to invest in building their career.

Sadly, there are very few opportunities that can leverage these 4-6 hours of mothers effectively. Many mothers are fine if the career progression is slow during these formative years of their kids. They would like to stay in touch with their working domain/role/technology and continue to build their expertise in the pace that works for them and their family. Committing to a full-time job with typical work hours and a long commute is difficult and stressful at this stage.

I would love to see organizations think of ways so they can help mothers in dealing with these issues post maternity leave. Be it an in-campus daycare facility, flexible working hours, supporting work-from-home opportunities, moving away from in-presence to tele-presence location-independent working models, part-time consulting projects, outcome-focused(than time-focused) projects etc. I'm seriously hoping that initiatives like Sheroes and Jobsforher can bring a change in the way we think about work and enable mothers to find opportunities that work well for them.

P.S. I took a break for 2 years and then managed to find such flexible opportunities in the startup space. I realize that this is an exception and not the norm, as I hear from other mothers who had earlier worked in software development/QA/services/customer support domains.

Decommoditize your product

One of the best books I have read recently is "Rework" by the 37signals' founders. This book is filled with many interesting and innovative ideas on how businesses should run and adapt. One of the many phrases that left me thinking even after finishing the book is "Decommoditize your product".

The chapter in the book uses this phrase in the context of "Competition" and how you can protect your product/feature from being copied. The example of Zappos and it's obsession with excellent customer service is a good case study of creating a unique product experience.

"Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too. Competitors can never copy the you in your product"

I started thinking about the relevance of this phrase to web products or mobile apps. It doesn't refer to differentiating your product alone, but rather investing more effort in giving a unique product experience and taking care of all the little details in every touch point - product discovery, on boarding, engagement, purchase, customer service, feedback, communications, content and more.

This is where I believe the practice of setting a vision, organization values and culture come in extremely handy. Many startups dismiss these ideas in the early stage, thinking these are just for the paper and that it's better to focus the energies in getting product-market fit and designing the right product. But these aspects can help a great deal in defining your identity - what makes you unique among the different startups in the same problem space. These can also serve as guiding light in the early discussions around everything you do (or intend to do) around your product experience.

I'm proud of having worked for an organization like Cleartrip which truly believes in its vision of making travel simple. This vision permeates down every single decision related to product design, communication, messaging and customer service. While competitors can get "inspired" by the interface flow, the basic driving factors need to be rooted in their organization's DNA to create any impact.

"One can steal ideas, but no one can steal execution or passion." - Tim Ferriss

The organization's vision and values serve as inputs to setting product principles. In the book "Inspired", Marty Cagan talks about the importance of setting them and how they can speed up the product discovery process.

"The product principles are a public declaration of your beliefs and intentions. It serves as a framework for evaluating the many alternatives and to get the team on the same page"

A few examples of product principles:
- Simplicity
- Accessibility
- Speed
- Reliability
- Friendly

Going through these 4 steps of setting your vision, values, culture and product principles help you to define your organization's identity and to ensure your offering is unique. And please, let's not treat this exercise as a one-day offsite discussion and leave it at that! :-)

Perspectives on organization culture

I was going over the recently published HubSpot's culture deck a few days ago and was mighty impressed and inspired by it. Many points resonated with my thinking in terms of building and maintaining organization culture.

I always believed that vision/mission/values statements shouldn't just be something that a firm creates for the sake of it, with some jazzy words and jargon laden phrases, stuck on the walls of every conference room in the office premises. It has to mean something and represent in everything the firm does.

I highly recommend you to go over this deck. Some of the points which I noted down for my future reference:

"Solve for the customer, not just their happiness but also their success"

This statement is relevant not just for organization culture but also while envisioning a new product. Understanding customer's problems and creating a solution through your product is just not enough. We should take a step forward in empathizing with the customer and understanding how the solution can help him/her to succeed in his various walks of life.

 "Power is gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it"

Quite true. I have seen many people, especially veterans in software development teams who wouldn't want to share/disclose knowledge that they have gained over the years to a new software developer in the team. It could be an architecture overview, high level code walk through or simple tasks like setting up your development environment and build processes. Hoarding information doesn't make one superior or indispensable to the organization. Many man hours get spent when a new developer has to learn everything related to a product from scratch. If organizations incentivize senior developers/technical leads to share knowledge, it helps new developers to come on board faster and pushes the team to perform effectively.

 "We don't penalize the many, for the mistakes of the few"

This is exactly how I felt, when Marissa Mayer announced a ban on work-from-home policy for all Yahoo employees. There could be a few who might have misused work-from-home options to take care of their personal work and not even logged onto VPN. But there could be many who seriously had to be at home to attend to their sick child or elders in case of an emergency.

I agree that collaboration and interactions happen when teams are physically present in the office premises. But there could also be days when there are so many ad-hoc meetings and random discussions that prevent any focused attention needed for some tasks like research, coding a piece of complicated functionality, designing wireframes or writing product specs. Under such circumstances, I usually prefer to work from home the next day to get some quiet, peaceful time to make progress. A change in environment also helps if one is stuck with some issue or a nagging bug that needs to be fixed.

"Results matter, more than the hours we work"

"Results matter, more than where we produce them"

These two statement echo my hatred towards "clocking" certain hours everyday irrespective of whether you have work or not. Software development is not like a machine assembly line where work steadily keeps coming in from one side. Sitting in office just for the sake of getting through 8-9 hours is so unproductive. Most importantly, rewarding people who stay in office based on the number of hours they hang around is even more disastrous. Individual productivity should be measured based on the results they produce and the positive impact they have on the team and the organization.

One of the five attributes that HubSpot values in people is being humble. I'm glad that humility is still being valued in the world. This statement in the deck perfectly describes what humility actually means - "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less"

The other interesting points worth noting down are

"Don't hire to delegate, hire to elevate"

"We would rather be failing frequently, than never trying new things"

"Remarkable outcomes rarely result from modest risk"

"Simplicity is a competitive advantage"

"Influence is independent of hierarchy"