A guest blog
Back when I was young and innocent, there was a woman in my department. We'll call her Emma (on the basis that that will narrow it down to approximately 100,000 women of my generation). Emma was whip-smart, hard-working and generally an all-round great person to have on our team. She often worked late, took on extra responsibilities and looked after the new graduates. Emma was also the first person at my professional services firm to work a four day week; in an office of mostly men, in the 2000s, this was A Big Deal. I vividly remember the raised eyebrows about "Emma's day off" on Fridays. Emma had a three year and a one year old. Even in my inexperienced state, long before I had any knowledge of life as a working parent, it was clear to me that Emma was not having "A Day Off". It was also blindingly obvious to me that anyone who thought as much had clearly never spent the day with two toddlers. It seemed more likely that Emma was elbow deep in mushed carrot and was walking around the block for the 14th time, trying to get the baby to sleep whilst fielding endless and indignant questions from her three year old about why it's impossible to lick your own elbow. I felt a rising sense of unease about how I was ever going to manage a career in this environment and have a family. As I looked around my firm, I saw with new eyes how few female partners sat at the desks around me.
I'm very lucky that by the time my own children were born, that world was changing fast. A four day week was something for which we still had to argue the case, but remote working was no longer a shocking concept. And the metaphorical earthquake that hit the world of work in March 2020 only accelerated the revolution. Professional services firms may not historically have been famous for their progressive views on flexible working, but now they were sadly at the mercy of the pandemic, just like every other workplace. And do you know what? It worked. Accountants and management consultants and City lawyers - these people who were drawn mostly from a pool of relatively academic people, who had spent years at school and university hunkering down in their own rooms and hitting the books - were able to hunker down in their spare rooms and hit, er, their tax advice documentation and share purchase agreements. I know! Who'd have thought it, right?
I'll concede - this is a group of people who are relatively well paid and so were better placed to concentrate on work throughout lockdown; the financial freedom to employ a nanny, for example, was a luxury that not everyone had in those dark days. But in the longer term, the pandemic brought about a hugely beneficial sea change for these industries - one which involved huge strides forward for diversity and equality in the workplace. In a world where financial and legal roles could be carried out from home, professional opportunities suddenly expanded for people with disabilities; new and beneficial perspectives and skills could be brought to the table. My female friends are now routinely becoming equity partners in their 30s and 40s, whilst their children are still at primary school. I see them at parents' evenings and school concerts and Saturday morning football practice. I can't explain to you how unlikely this would have been twenty years ago. We didn't leave the office in London until 8pm; a parents' evening would often have been a pipe dream. Saturday mornings were spent recovering from a week's worth of long commutes, or indeed, jumping back on that train into central London to work a sixth day in the office. Little wonder, then, that so many women resigned in those first, intense, years of parenthood, believing that they had to make that difficult choice. The last four years, and the flex they've brought, have opened up professional possibilities beyond our wildest dreams. We celebrated - we thought that that glass ceiling was well and truly cracking...
At a domestic level, too, these developments have worked wonders. In the last few years, I've witnessed a definite shift in the two-professional-parent families I know - since remote working has been normalised, I'm just as likely to see dads doing the school run each morning as mums. Many of the dads at my children's school have jumped at the chance to spend more time with their children, to get to know their friends and to hear at bedtime the woeful tale of how Little Johnny stole their imaginary horse at playtime. After all, for a five year old, this is the stuff that really matters in life. I'm not for a moment claiming that there are no more feminist battles to be fought - sadly, we know that that's untrue - but it's also important that we recognise and salute each step along the road. It's not just the world of work that's seen a movement towards greater gender equality - it's society.
And so it's with a sinking heart that I've been reading the news reports in the last few weeks and months about some banks, accountancy giants and law firms insisting their employees spend more time in the office. Don't get me wrong - I think it's definitely beneficial to get people together in person regularly to build relationships, to bounce ideas off one another and to enable junior members of the team to get the experience that they need. Professional service employees do sometimes need to meet clients face to face, to develop trust and understand their clients' needs. But how often does this really need to happen? It's recently been reported that Barclays are requiring their London bankers and traders to return to the office five days a week from 1 June. A number of US law firms in London have allegedly been asking their employees to come in for four days a week and making bonuses conditional on in-person attendance. While other professional service firms are still requiring their people to come to the office for fewer days each week, there are reports of EY, Slaughter and May and Citigroup monitoring and then "naming and shaming" employees who work from home too often. At a time when the professional service industries are trying hard to improve their EDI profiles, this feels counter-intuitive. Surely in this day and age, we should be bending over backwards to break down barriers to access? For those who have physical disabilities which may mean that they struggle to commute. For people who are neurodiverse and who may find an office environment difficult. And for women, who despite everything we've mentioned above are statistically still more likely to assume greater childcare responsibilities within a family.
It seems unlikely that the large corporate firms are going to move to a fully remote model any time soon - and perhaps that wouldn't be feasible for all professional service roles - but the demands that teams return to the office full time seem rather short sighted. After all, surveys have consistently shown that workers want to work remotely and the removal of this option may make it very difficult to attract - or keep - the best people. And in a professional services environment, especially, your people are your product. In this arena, a reputation as an inflexible employer can be a risky thing.
I hope that if my children follow me into this world, they'll have a range of diverse senior colleagues to whom to look up - I still have a little spark of hope that their managers will come from a wealth of different walks of life. But if we want to walk forward together into our new and enlightened future, full of colleagues from different communities, we can't be complacent. We do need to speak up for equality in and accessibility to our workplaces - in all its forms. Some days, it may feel that we're walking a bumpy road to keep that small spark alive, but it'll be worth every step.