Working Parents During Covid-19

Are you a working parent? Do you manage working parents?

During the pandemic, many working parents have been faced with resources being taken away. It has been a struggle for many families to find balance working with children at home.

Often, parents are a misunderstood group of the workforce. Collectively, as a society and as leaders, we have a shared responsibility to better understand what working parents are going through and to understand what we can do to challenge the system, to create the change we want, and to stand for reformations, acceptance, and empathy.

Dr. Dana Sumpter joined me on Allowed: Conscious Leadership and Personal Growth . Dana is an associate professor of organizational theory and management at Pepperdine University. Her newest project is researching the experiences of working mothers during Covid-19.

Watch below or listen to the episode, Working Parents During Covid-19 , as we talk about tactical recommendations for both parents and managers to maximize growth, improve communication, increase support and optimize productivity, especially in remote working and remote learning environments.

Highlights:

• 12:09 — Meet Dr. Dana Sumpter
• 15:49 — Gender inequity in academia and women getting the proverbial second shift through playing the role of house manager.
• 24:48 — It is vital for managers to identify the difference between performance issues and situational challenges faced by external circumstances such as COVID-19. The cognitive load that is required for parents is increasingly overloading in work from home environments. It is very simple to fall into a “below the line” victimhood role in these situations.
• 34:49 — Employers and managers have a great opportunity right now to leverage one of the largest demographics in the workforce.
• 46:19 — Being aware of benevolent sexism and stereotypes is vital at this moment for managers in order to make sure we are supporting our employees while simultaneously not disempowering them. Also in a time of job security crisis managers have the opportunity to communicate job security and help avoid overwork and burnout that results in this anxiety.
• 54:59 — We are in a vital and empowering time of post-traumatic growth with new opportunities and creative ways to move forward if we choose to be open-minded and flexible.

Conscious leaders strive to learn about how we can better manage, lead, influence, and support our teams, our colleagues, and ourselves, and how we can best lead, especially through crises or change such as COVID-19.

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Dana Sumpter about a leverage-point that has great relevance for any manager in the workforce. In particular, we will be focusing on one of the most valuable and essential segments of the workforce — parents.

There’s a lot of evidence that especially in this COVID era, with the shutdown of schools, working parents are feeling the pressure and scarcity of resources. They are a misunderstood group.

Collectively as a society, and as leaders, in particular, we have a shared responsibility to better understand what this group is going through, and to understand what we can do to challenge the system, to create the change we want, and to stand for reformations, acceptance, and empathy, and how can we reorganize ourselves in a way that is creative and from above the line.

In this episode, we talk about specific tactical recommendations for both parents and leaders of working parents to maximize growth, improve communication, increase support, and optimize productivity, especially in remote working and remote learning environments.

You may be one of those who is needing to be better understood, better supported, or you may be not part of this demographic segment and yet it’s very important that we better understand what they’re going through right now so that we can move into a place of greater awareness and we can make conscious choices as leaders about how we might adapt our approach to be more in service of that to which we are most deeply committed.

Originally published at https://caneel.com.