Corporate America was never built for Working Moms

Moms are looking for less-than-full-time work. Here's why it doesn't exist.

Society is not set up to support two-working-parent families. As a toddler and infant mom, I used to think things would get easier as my kids aged out of daycare and into school age. I was planning on sending my kids to the local public school, which was supposed to significantly reduce my out of pocket childcare expenses.

I’ve had a kid in elementary school going on three years now. What I can tell you is that one of those hypothesis was correct, and one was not.

Yes, my childcare cost burden decreased. I used to spend about ~300/week on childcare for my Pre-K kid, and I spend about $80/week on after-elementary school care (plus camps in the summer). This is a significant savings, and honestly it’s a big reason we can financially afford to have more kids.

However, my childcare situation did not get easier. I am now left with many days where school is out, but I still need to work. I naively thought these days would be only major holidays, but there are a lot of teacher work days and end of quarter days and school breaks, too. Funny how teachers also need to be child-free in order to get some work done.

With corporations pushing a return-to-the-office mandate, working parents are left holding the bag. Unless they have family close by (who is also not giving away the majority of their waking hours to corporate america), working parents are left to scrape together babysitters, PTO, sick days, and the random work-from-home day in order to care for their elementary aged kids.

I found the corporate America schedule to be manageable when my kids were in full-time daycare. Now, I struggle to manage the corporate schedule with the elementary school schedule.

Photo by Gaining Visuals on Unsplash

If you are a toddler mom, you may be thinking: but can’t the children just hang out in the house while you work. And I, too, thought this would be the case. But actually 5 and 6 year old kids are honestly just as needy as 4 year old kids with the exception that they can now wipe their own butt and reach the good snacks in the pantry. They are constantly asking me to play with them or see their new trick, jump, or lego masterpiece. I’m not saying these are annoying interactions at face value, but when you are knee deep in a spreadsheet, its really annoying to break your concentration to see a poorly executed off-the-couch jump.

Often this piece-work of childcare is left up to the women. I interact with hundreds of women everyday on my Instagram who say that their husbands get to plan their work life without consideration of the children’s schedule. Women who are tired of playing calendar jenga with childcare and work projects.

For many of these women, their roman empire is part time work. I get so many questions about part time work and how it would absolutely change their life.

But part-time work doesn’t really exist in corporate America for many reasons…

We must first acknowledge that Corporate America was set up to support a one-working-parent household. The structures, hours, and benefits require that the employee be dedicated to business and someone else (often the stay-at-home-mom) is taking care of everything else.

Structural and Economic Incentives are maximized with full-time roles

Managing full-time headcount is simpler with respect to operations and management. If part-time work was the norm, companies would have to invest more in onboarding, training, and managing workers. For example, if a full-time role is split between two individuals who are expected to be fully trained and informed on the work, the company would need to pay for the hiring, onboarding, and ongoing training for two people. In order to get the maximum return on the investment, corporations want to have workers be contributing at full-time capacity.

Productivity is often measured on a per-headcount basis, and having “half-headcount” is not really a thing. So by offering part time options, the company’s reporting looks significantly worse for productivity.

Employees need access to company systems which typically are sold as a SaaS license, a cost which is a per-user-expense. If companies allowed many roles to go part time, their licensing costs would significantly increase beyond the current allocated amount. This can balloon the budget for a company very quickly.

Am I saying these costs are a showstopper? No. But it is just another issue with managing a part-time workforce that needs to be solved.

Workplace cultures value “face-time” over everything

Many workplace cultures are driven by old-school perspectives that time at work, in the office, and face to face is the primary driving factor of employee success. I’m not here to argue whether that viewpoint is founded or unfounded, because frankly it does not matter. Whether you are actually more productive at home or at the office is not the main point here, but the more important distinction is “what does your workplace culture value?” Because if your workplace values face-time above all else, then you could be the most productive part-time employee and you will never be successful.

Many workplaces view being “available” synonymous with being “committed” which honestly impacts full-time workers who are parents unfairly. Kids are humans who require dentists, doctors, eye, orthodontists, and therapy appointments, too. When you are an adult who is supporting two tiny humans, your schedule is at the mercy of others. And as a mom to four kids, there are very few work weeks where I don’t have at least two kid appointments during traditional working hours. For workers without flexibility, this will eat their entire PTO bank quickly.

When workers are invisible because they are working part time or they are working from home, managers will overlook them for promotions, growth opportunities, high-visibility projects, etc. I truly feel in a lot of cases that this is not malicious on the part of the manager, but it is truly a function of less visibility equaling less opportunity. But this perpetuates the idea that less visible leads to more frequently overlooked which means less impact on high-importance projects.

It’s a self-fulfilling cycle where working fewer hours ends up equaling fewer contributions over time, which leads to less impact, less promotions, and less serious interest in supporting part-time work.

Employee benefits are disproportionally reduced for part-time

In the United States, most employees receive access healthcare benefits through their employer. Employers subsidize plans and offer a few packages to employees. Typically when you reduce hours to go part time, you are no longer eligible for access to healthcare benefits. In my experience, the company will not even offer you the ability to take advantage of the plan at all if you are part time.

PTO is typically accrued at half-rate or less, and you may not even have access to PTO at all as a part time employee.

Part-time is harder to manage

I have managed a part-time salaried employee before, and one of the costs that I did not forecast is how many of the part-time hours would be spent on weekly team meetings and updates. I already feel like corporate America is too meeting-heavy, but when you only work 4 hours per day, you can easily spend 2 of those hours in standard weekly meetings. As a full time employee, thats only 25% of your working hours, but as a part time employee, its 50% of your working hours. And let’s be honest many employees work more than 40 hours, which means they are really only spending 20% of their time in weekly meetings.

Finding open spots on everyone’s calendar for an update or team meeting is already hard, and with part time employees the available windows are even narrower. Honestly, it can be difficult to run your team with this calendar limitation.

In a company that is managing a lot of change, going part-time can mean that you feel like the company is completely different when you miss one or two days due to your schedule.

Part-time as accepted path instead of an exception path

Perhaps you want to go part-time, or you are an employer who wants to use part-time work as a talent retention strategy. If you are looking to make part-time successful, here are the tips I have:

Redesign the role

Don’t assume you can just do your current role at less-than-full-time. Many employers are constantly shifting role responsibilities, reducing headcount, and restructuring the org. A current role already has an expected set of outcomes and availability. Break the momentum of that and instead create a new role that has new expectations and synchronous availability. Then the employee can use a “new role” announcement as a way to communicate new availability and expectations to others.

Consider the type of work and if it naturally lends itself to part-time. If the role is project or strategy work, it can be completed fractionally. If the work is to support a daily operation, it is less likely to work as a part time role. Set a clear vision for “what success looks like” together with your team.

Set a schedule

Part-time employees still need to be up-to-speed on the company, team, and priorities. Make sure to set a repeated schedule that enables their availability to join key meetings. For example, if you have your leadership team meeting on Monday afternoons, make sure those hours are included in the part-time schedule to keep that member up to date.

Offer access to pro-rated benefits

If the company cannot afford to subsidize the entire benefit package for part time employees, then consider pro-rating the subsidy so that part-time employees still have the option to use the benefits. Part-time employees need healthcare, too.

Job Share

If you want to keep the current role structure, can you find two people to do a “job share.” A Job Share will allow the same role to be performed during all business hours, but by two different people. This can be challenging if their schedules do not perfectly align, if they have different work strengths or styles, and if there is poor documentation or role handoff between the two job sharers.

Redesign the company

If you want to support less-than-full-time work at scale, you’ll need to redesign the company. Stop worrying about “headcount” and instead consider measuring FTEs (full-time-equivalents) where two part time employees would only equal 1 FTE. Rethink your SaaS expenses and your onboarding and training requirements. Consider how you might support workers who want to work 15-30 hours per week instead of the typical 40+ hours per week.

Corporate America has a bias toward full time that is embedded deep within our financial targets and ways of working, but many workers who are great contributors are looking for part-time options. You can attract great talent and retain them if you can demonstrate less-than-full-time to be an accepted path at your company rather than just the exception path.

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