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What Are You Being Paid To Do? Working Parents & The Impossible Dream
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Jan 25, 2024
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10
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Jan 25, 2024
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10
min read
Want to try Pebble?
What Are You Being Paid To Do? Working Parents & The Impossible Dream
What is your salary for? Is the question I wish I had known to ask 14 years ago when the oldest of my three girls was lifted out of a birthing pool. With her came all the joy in the world. And a career crisis I’m still recovering from.
Before her birth, I’d been defined by work. In theory I led research projects for an advertising network, and rolled the findings out to clients. In reality, I was the always-contactable, chief of staff to the European CEO.
I can make that sound grand but essentially between him, his PA and me, we ran around Europe trying to keep a network of demanding agency heads happy. Or at least not actively shouting. It was emotionally intense, exhausting and often great fun.
But I now know that part of what I was being paid for was being available all the time. Sometimes it felt that this was almost irrespective of what else I delivered on a practical level.
While I was on maternity leave, however, my boss (rather selfishly, as I tell him to this day) accepted another job and was replaced by an American who knew as little about European employment law as I knew about managing a career and a family.
In my account of our first meeting, he demoted me, took away my team and asked me to do his PR for three days a week. In his account, the meeting never happened. Either way, I was the one outside the building hyperventilating against the wall, wondering what the hell I was going to do next.
… … …
To demonstrate how clueless I was, I accepted a fulltime-and-the-rest job at a very intense research agency in another big network. It was an utter disaster from start to finish because, whatever the job description said, I was again being paid to be constantly available.
Partly to clients but much more significantly to colleagues, many of whom were workaholics in different time zones with precisely zero interest in the fact that I was running out of the door at 6pm, with milk soaking through my breast pads.
It was also, I discovered, a toxic working environment which drained people to the point of burnout. My husband started to ask me not how my day was, but how many people had cried that day.
… … …
Since then, everything I have done has been guided by trying to figure out how to be successful and productive at work when you can’t, or don’t want to be, available from waking to sleeping, quite possibly with a discreet 3am check in of messages thrown in. My work has included hundreds and hundreds of interviews, articles, a book and a weekly vlog to try and figure this out.
The one key thing that I’ve learnt which really matters, is knowing what you are being paid for. Let me explain.
If you’re doing a job you can only do from a defined workplace (shop, hotel, dental surgery) you might be selling your skills in blocks of defined time. In the best case, you will be able to manage your hours, make enough money to live well, and detach from work reasonably well. My sister, for example, is an oral surgeon and has always managed to have pretty good boundaries between work and home. A four-day week that ends at 5.30pm can be both what she is paid for and what she does.
But if you work in a knowledge job – law, advertising, management consultancy, finance, sales – you may be paid for both your core skills and your constant availability to clients and colleagues. That is where working and parenting (or caring of any other kind) can get very complicated.
The ongoing rows about office vs hybrid vs remote work illuminate why.
Before Covid, I used to ask people when I spoke at conferences how many of them felt the way they were working suited them and their households really well. I’d be lucky if 10% or 15% put their hands up.
Their stories were similar to mine. When I was in my twenties, I was given my first Blackberry which meant I could always be connected to work. Not knowing any better, we all threw ourselves into adding to our long working days by emailing on the way to and from work, over weekends and holidays.
Our clever bosses had found a way to add masses of overtime while presenting it as a perk and status symbol. Our relationships, home lives and stress levels suffered.
Many who tried to manage it by working a four-day week found they still worked all hours they were awake but got paid less and taken less seriously.
… … …
But then along came Covid and, for all its downsides, it gave many of us a glimpse of another way of working. We could be at home some of the time, pick up kids, drop off kids, make tea and still work hard and be connected most of the time.
But many of those same bosses who handed us Blackberries as perks are cross that we’re not always where they can see us. What about the connection, the relationships, the fun? they ask, as some draft ever-more-hostile memos about the number of days required in the office per week and how it will be monitored.
While the people who work for them work out how to hold onto the time they have gained, many will reflect that, if our capacity for connection, relationships and fun is finite, do we owe it to our households – or to our employers? Or is there a better balance to be found?
It strikes me that, for the first time since I started working in the mid 90s, we have an incredible opportunity to reset our relationship to work and home. To be paid for our technical skills but keep the rest of our time to invest in our own lives and households.
Which is why the question “what are you being paid for?” matters.
… … …
Christine Armstrong is a writer, speaker, and adviser to business leaders on the future of work. She is a contributing editor of Management Today, has three daughters and is, against her own advice, an active member of the PTA. Her 2018 book ‘The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish)’ honestly portrays the struggles of working parents in the 21st century. Find out more about Christine here.
What Are You Being Paid To Do? Working Parents & The Impossible Dream
What is your salary for? Is the question I wish I had known to ask 14 years ago when the oldest of my three girls was lifted out of a birthing pool. With her came all the joy in the world. And a career crisis I’m still recovering from.
Before her birth, I’d been defined by work. In theory I led research projects for an advertising network, and rolled the findings out to clients. In reality, I was the always-contactable, chief of staff to the European CEO.
I can make that sound grand but essentially between him, his PA and me, we ran around Europe trying to keep a network of demanding agency heads happy. Or at least not actively shouting. It was emotionally intense, exhausting and often great fun.
But I now know that part of what I was being paid for was being available all the time. Sometimes it felt that this was almost irrespective of what else I delivered on a practical level.
While I was on maternity leave, however, my boss (rather selfishly, as I tell him to this day) accepted another job and was replaced by an American who knew as little about European employment law as I knew about managing a career and a family.
In my account of our first meeting, he demoted me, took away my team and asked me to do his PR for three days a week. In his account, the meeting never happened. Either way, I was the one outside the building hyperventilating against the wall, wondering what the hell I was going to do next.
… … …
To demonstrate how clueless I was, I accepted a fulltime-and-the-rest job at a very intense research agency in another big network. It was an utter disaster from start to finish because, whatever the job description said, I was again being paid to be constantly available.
Partly to clients but much more significantly to colleagues, many of whom were workaholics in different time zones with precisely zero interest in the fact that I was running out of the door at 6pm, with milk soaking through my breast pads.
It was also, I discovered, a toxic working environment which drained people to the point of burnout. My husband started to ask me not how my day was, but how many people had cried that day.
… … …
Since then, everything I have done has been guided by trying to figure out how to be successful and productive at work when you can’t, or don’t want to be, available from waking to sleeping, quite possibly with a discreet 3am check in of messages thrown in. My work has included hundreds and hundreds of interviews, articles, a book and a weekly vlog to try and figure this out.
The one key thing that I’ve learnt which really matters, is knowing what you are being paid for. Let me explain.
If you’re doing a job you can only do from a defined workplace (shop, hotel, dental surgery) you might be selling your skills in blocks of defined time. In the best case, you will be able to manage your hours, make enough money to live well, and detach from work reasonably well. My sister, for example, is an oral surgeon and has always managed to have pretty good boundaries between work and home. A four-day week that ends at 5.30pm can be both what she is paid for and what she does.
But if you work in a knowledge job – law, advertising, management consultancy, finance, sales – you may be paid for both your core skills and your constant availability to clients and colleagues. That is where working and parenting (or caring of any other kind) can get very complicated.
The ongoing rows about office vs hybrid vs remote work illuminate why.
Before Covid, I used to ask people when I spoke at conferences how many of them felt the way they were working suited them and their households really well. I’d be lucky if 10% or 15% put their hands up.
Their stories were similar to mine. When I was in my twenties, I was given my first Blackberry which meant I could always be connected to work. Not knowing any better, we all threw ourselves into adding to our long working days by emailing on the way to and from work, over weekends and holidays.
Our clever bosses had found a way to add masses of overtime while presenting it as a perk and status symbol. Our relationships, home lives and stress levels suffered.
Many who tried to manage it by working a four-day week found they still worked all hours they were awake but got paid less and taken less seriously.
… … …
But then along came Covid and, for all its downsides, it gave many of us a glimpse of another way of working. We could be at home some of the time, pick up kids, drop off kids, make tea and still work hard and be connected most of the time.
But many of those same bosses who handed us Blackberries as perks are cross that we’re not always where they can see us. What about the connection, the relationships, the fun? they ask, as some draft ever-more-hostile memos about the number of days required in the office per week and how it will be monitored.
While the people who work for them work out how to hold onto the time they have gained, many will reflect that, if our capacity for connection, relationships and fun is finite, do we owe it to our households – or to our employers? Or is there a better balance to be found?
It strikes me that, for the first time since I started working in the mid 90s, we have an incredible opportunity to reset our relationship to work and home. To be paid for our technical skills but keep the rest of our time to invest in our own lives and households.
Which is why the question “what are you being paid for?” matters.
… … …
Christine Armstrong is a writer, speaker, and adviser to business leaders on the future of work. She is a contributing editor of Management Today, has three daughters and is, against her own advice, an active member of the PTA. Her 2018 book ‘The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish)’ honestly portrays the struggles of working parents in the 21st century. Find out more about Christine here.
What Are You Being Paid To Do? Working Parents & The Impossible Dream
What is your salary for? Is the question I wish I had known to ask 14 years ago when the oldest of my three girls was lifted out of a birthing pool. With her came all the joy in the world. And a career crisis I’m still recovering from.
Before her birth, I’d been defined by work. In theory I led research projects for an advertising network, and rolled the findings out to clients. In reality, I was the always-contactable, chief of staff to the European CEO.
I can make that sound grand but essentially between him, his PA and me, we ran around Europe trying to keep a network of demanding agency heads happy. Or at least not actively shouting. It was emotionally intense, exhausting and often great fun.
But I now know that part of what I was being paid for was being available all the time. Sometimes it felt that this was almost irrespective of what else I delivered on a practical level.
While I was on maternity leave, however, my boss (rather selfishly, as I tell him to this day) accepted another job and was replaced by an American who knew as little about European employment law as I knew about managing a career and a family.
In my account of our first meeting, he demoted me, took away my team and asked me to do his PR for three days a week. In his account, the meeting never happened. Either way, I was the one outside the building hyperventilating against the wall, wondering what the hell I was going to do next.
… … …
To demonstrate how clueless I was, I accepted a fulltime-and-the-rest job at a very intense research agency in another big network. It was an utter disaster from start to finish because, whatever the job description said, I was again being paid to be constantly available.
Partly to clients but much more significantly to colleagues, many of whom were workaholics in different time zones with precisely zero interest in the fact that I was running out of the door at 6pm, with milk soaking through my breast pads.
It was also, I discovered, a toxic working environment which drained people to the point of burnout. My husband started to ask me not how my day was, but how many people had cried that day.
… … …
Since then, everything I have done has been guided by trying to figure out how to be successful and productive at work when you can’t, or don’t want to be, available from waking to sleeping, quite possibly with a discreet 3am check in of messages thrown in. My work has included hundreds and hundreds of interviews, articles, a book and a weekly vlog to try and figure this out.
The one key thing that I’ve learnt which really matters, is knowing what you are being paid for. Let me explain.
If you’re doing a job you can only do from a defined workplace (shop, hotel, dental surgery) you might be selling your skills in blocks of defined time. In the best case, you will be able to manage your hours, make enough money to live well, and detach from work reasonably well. My sister, for example, is an oral surgeon and has always managed to have pretty good boundaries between work and home. A four-day week that ends at 5.30pm can be both what she is paid for and what she does.
But if you work in a knowledge job – law, advertising, management consultancy, finance, sales – you may be paid for both your core skills and your constant availability to clients and colleagues. That is where working and parenting (or caring of any other kind) can get very complicated.
The ongoing rows about office vs hybrid vs remote work illuminate why.
Before Covid, I used to ask people when I spoke at conferences how many of them felt the way they were working suited them and their households really well. I’d be lucky if 10% or 15% put their hands up.
Their stories were similar to mine. When I was in my twenties, I was given my first Blackberry which meant I could always be connected to work. Not knowing any better, we all threw ourselves into adding to our long working days by emailing on the way to and from work, over weekends and holidays.
Our clever bosses had found a way to add masses of overtime while presenting it as a perk and status symbol. Our relationships, home lives and stress levels suffered.
Many who tried to manage it by working a four-day week found they still worked all hours they were awake but got paid less and taken less seriously.
… … …
But then along came Covid and, for all its downsides, it gave many of us a glimpse of another way of working. We could be at home some of the time, pick up kids, drop off kids, make tea and still work hard and be connected most of the time.
But many of those same bosses who handed us Blackberries as perks are cross that we’re not always where they can see us. What about the connection, the relationships, the fun? they ask, as some draft ever-more-hostile memos about the number of days required in the office per week and how it will be monitored.
While the people who work for them work out how to hold onto the time they have gained, many will reflect that, if our capacity for connection, relationships and fun is finite, do we owe it to our households – or to our employers? Or is there a better balance to be found?
It strikes me that, for the first time since I started working in the mid 90s, we have an incredible opportunity to reset our relationship to work and home. To be paid for our technical skills but keep the rest of our time to invest in our own lives and households.
Which is why the question “what are you being paid for?” matters.
… … …
Christine Armstrong is a writer, speaker, and adviser to business leaders on the future of work. She is a contributing editor of Management Today, has three daughters and is, against her own advice, an active member of the PTA. Her 2018 book ‘The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish)’ honestly portrays the struggles of working parents in the 21st century. Find out more about Christine here.
Jan 25, 2024
•
10
min read
