Ferland: working from home has been a ‘double whammy’ for women

Mercer CEO Martine Ferland joins Yahoo Finance’s Jen Rogers to discuss the impact the coronavirus has had on women in the workforce and how businesses need to adapt to a more flexible, hybrid working style.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: I'm Jen Rogers. I want to bring in my next guest, Martine Ferland. She is the president and CEO of Mercer.

And, Martine, we have been through a really incredible last 11 months since the COVID pandemic really took hold here, and we know a lot of the data coming out does not show that women have fared very well in the workforce. As we get into this, what are we learning that this year has been like for working women?

MARTINE FERLAND: Yeah, we're at a loss for words for describing that year, and unfortunately looks like 2021 will have some similar characteristics as well. And you're right. You can see in the US, for example, the jobs that were lost, about 55% of them were women jobs, and they make up less than 50% of the workforce. You can see that they've been disproportionately impacted.

And it's on account of two main things. I mean, they're very-- women are very engaged in front-line work, essential working, health-care work, et cetera, hospitality, retail. So these are industries that have been very impacted by COVID. And also just the sheer amount of extra work that was on carers, and it just happens in our societies that women tend to be the one who take on these responsibilities in greater proportion. So we have evidence that some women have just decided that it was too much and they needed to withdraw from the workforce, at least hopefully just temporarily.

JEN ROGERS: So I think there are two different camps, and let's first go with, like, the hospitality industry where we have seen a lot of job losses and travel. Are those jobs-- because we talk about big changes here with automation and technology. Is there any concern that those jobs aren't coming back? Like, are these women going to have the opportunity, if they want to, to go back to work?

MARTINE FERLAND: Well, clearly. And that was a trend that was there before COVID. I would say that automation is impacting many of these jobs, and therefore what we've seen-- and it's a particular characteristic of this crisis whereby we've seen actually an accelerant of some trends rather than slow down. So this is something that we saw before, and we need to continue to upskill/reskill people so that they can bring what human bring to jobs like these and utilize technology to augment the impact of these jobs.

So it's a question of shift. That, indeed, I think has been accelerated through the crisis.

JEN ROGERS: And the other bucket is people that could work from home, more of the white-collar jobs that we've seen. And those, anecdotally, we have heard a lot of stories about people just saying, you know what? I'm done. Like, I can't be in charge of password support for three people and virtual school and trying to do a job.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I think many women were-- excited's the wrong word but thought, maybe this will be better. Like, I won't have a commute. I'll be able to work from home. Does that, on the other side of this, actually come to fruition? Is there a silver lining for white-collar women to be able to have flexibility?

MARTINE FERLAND: Well, this has all been done in such exceptional circumstances with kids not being at school, for example, everybody being at home, sometimes in spaces that were not designed to give everybody their space to do their home schooling or the work, et cetera. So I think when well managed in normal circumstances where the usual infrastructure is working, it is something that can really help people who have extra nonwork responsibility to manage better.

But we've also seen that for everyone, not only women working from home who are actually-- we said sometimes living at work-- has created a different stress as well where people think or see that it's difficult to detach from work. It's definitely something that's going to the fore. So it's a double whammy for the women who have been taking on more of the responsibilities of all of these people being at home whereby they feel that they have to work 24/7. It's difficult to disconnect. The laptop is just there on the countertop of the kitchen or something at the same time as they're managing-- and I think we started to measure the impact of the extra time. And we were talking about 20 hours a week more that needed to be done because the support system, which is not operating.

So I think that as we think about the new normal and the returning to a society that functions as it should, flexible working, if well managed, can certainly be an advantage for women that have these duties. But there are few traps that I'd like to talk about of the return in a more-- in a hybrid world for--

JEN ROGERS: OK, so what's the biggest trap?

MARTINE FERLAND: Yeah, well, see, it's the-- I think we need to also rethink, as we-- most likely all our clients are saying we will come back to our more flexible work schedule, more flexible work arrangements, and I think we'll need to put some better framework around that. Flexible working, remote working existed before, and it's been proven very strongly through the rapid shift that we were able to effectuate.

But if you're not careful, you can fill into this-- fall into this trap of lacking visibility and therefore being forgotten, and therefore you need to really shift your mindset of performance to an output-driven model rather than an input. You don't want the performance to be measured in terms of presence, in terms of visibility in the office. It's about what you can put out there, what you contribute to the outcome, to the job. So that's a first shift.

And what our clients are telling us is that they really need to train the mid managers where everything happens, where the recruitment happens, where the goal setting happens, where the selecting people for different projects happens. And we need to be careful that remote worker are not just forgotten because they could be invisible.

So we need to change the way of working, and we need to think about all the programs and the infrastructure or the framework that we put around that. That needs to shift as well.

JEN ROGERS: Martine, we have to go, so 10 seconds. What do you tell a woman that comes to you right now and says I got to quit? I got to get out of here?

MARTINE FERLAND: I say breath. There's ways we can help you.

JEN ROGERS: All right, Martine Ferland, the CEO of Mercer, fantastic to get a chance to talk with you. Thanks so much for your insights on this really important issue.

MARTINE FERLAND: Thanks, Jen.