Do company cultures really support working parents, with Jane van Zyl

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Lucinda Quigley: Hi there, everybody. Welcome to our podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us and listening. My name is Lucinda Quigley. I’m Head of Working Parents at Talking Talent and today I want to explore the question: do company cultures really support working parents?

To do that, I’m joined by Jane van Zyl from Working Families. Jane is the Chief Executive there. Welcome Jane and thank you so much for being with us today. Do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about Working Families and the work that you do at the charity?

Jane van Zyl: Love to. Hi Lucinda, really great to be here. Working Families started about 40 years ago and over the years has changed and morphed. But fundamentally we still exist to do one thing: to remove the barrier that working parents and carers face in the workplace. And we do that in three ways. We provide a free legal advice line to empower working parents and carers to understand their employment rights and negotiate with their employers to be able to use those employment rights. Then the second thing we do is we support employers to build, create, sustain flexible and family-friendly workplaces. And through that, we impact about 650,000 employees here in the UK.

And then the final thing we do is we take those two views, those two voices: what we know can work in the employment’s sphere, working with our employers, and what we know is not working, and we get that from all of the parents and carers who contact us. So last year we had 1.6 million unique views of our advice pages, and we individually helped around just over 3,000 people. So they call us, or they email us. And those two views, we use them to drive positive policy change. So for us, one of our big things this year is going to be the employment bill coming up. We want to be able to really positively impact that. And currently, we’re on the government flexible working taskforce and the government is currently consulting with the general public, all of us, on the changes that they want to make to flexible working. At the moment you only have the right to request once you’ve been somewhere for six months, 26 weeks. Whereas the government is saying, should we, as citizens, have the right to request, doesn’t mean the right to have, but the right to request flexible working from day one for employment. And then there are a couple of other changes about the number of times you can apply.

But that’s the big thing really that for us at the moment, we are working with the government on, along with a whole bunch of other people on the flexible working task force.

Lucinda: Wow. That’s amazing and so definitely one to watch or listen out for, I suppose, to all our listeners today, thinking about when that comes up and what the outcome of that is. That’s fantastic. Fantastic piece of work for all those working parents and carers out there. So, I suppose we know that working parents have faced a lot of challenges over the last couple of years and we’re entering this new phase of work and employment and quite still unknown about what that is going to look like. In your role and with what you see and hear, I suppose, from those people, particularly that are seeking your support, what do you think are currently the biggest challenges that working parents face?

Jane: What we’re hearing on our helpline is right now, working parents and carers are being asked to change their hours or change where they work with very little consultation. And that’s having a huge impact. Good quality employers are having much different conversations with their employees, working parents and carers are included in that. But for us right now, working parents and carers have found that the flexibility that they have been offered over the last two years is something that’s really benefited them and it’s something that they want to continue with. They also have been very positively impacted. We did a survey recently where what they’re telling us is that mental health is a topic of conversation within the workplace in ways that it hasn’t been before. So, that’s a really positive change.

However, working parents and carers are telling us right now that they are still being held back for promotion. Their caring responsibilities are getting in the way of their accessing promotion. So that is a significant challenge. And we’ve always known that there’s been a motherhood penalty, but now we’re hearing more and more men say that their caring responsibilities are impacting their possibilities of promotion. And the other thing that working parents and carers are telling us is that still within most organizations, a long hour’s culture is the thing that makes you stand out. If you have caring responsibilities, that’s obviously just not something that you can do. So those are the challenges. What we would say back to employers is this is a challenge for employers because it means they are not getting the best out of the people they’re employing, but much more importantly, they are going to be losing out in terms of talent.

Working parents are 13 million strong in the UK. That’s a big chunk. I mean, that’s 40 something percent of the working-age population. So that’s a big chunk of people. And what we’ve seen coming out of COVID, one of the good things that have come out of the pandemic is that we are hearing more and more men applying for shared parental leave. And we did a survey over the summer where we talked to parents and carers, and a little over 40% of those parents and carers were saying that the changes they’ve made at home, in terms of the ways in which they share chores, both child-caring responsibilities, but also the daily grind of putting the bins out and making breakfast, that is being shared much more equally between the two of them, between couple households. Clearly, if you’re a single parent, it’s a nightmare but within a couple of households, it’s much clearer sharing, which is fantastic. So, of course, more and more working-age people want flexibility and if employers aren’t able to offer that, employees will go somewhere else.

Lucinda: Yeah. The two things that I’m hearing from you there around the impact was around this idea of what obviously the mental health side of things, but also the fact that people will choose to leave. But the bit that I’m wondering about is you mentioned the consultation side of things, which is really important. What else do you think employers can do to support the flexibility of working parents? Because there is this culture, isn’t there, of in a lot of places, the expectation to work long hours, and even if that expectation isn’t explicit, it’s often seen and demonstrated by other people. We know that working parents often feel like they have to prove themselves more and do extra and kind of go the extra mile to get the promotion. I’m just wondering what else do you think, and maybe you see this in employers that are doing really well, but what else do you think employers can do besides the consulting bit to support working families and working parents, in particular, to thrive in this time?

Jane: So, for us, there are a number of things. You’ve got to start off with good quality job design. So the job has got to be designed to be done in the hours that are allocated it, and that includes full-time working. If you’re going to design a job that needs full-time hours, then it should be the full-time hours that are in the contract. We all know that there are going to be times where we have to put in a bit of extra effort because there’s some form of crisis, or there’s a really interesting project and you just want to get it over the line. There are all kinds of reasons why you might work extra hours, but actually good quality job design means that the job can be done in the hours that are allocated it.

Then the second thing is that you need to look at the outcomes. What actually is it that that role is designed to do, to produce, to achieve? And that again has got to be the focus of the organization. Whether or not you are sitting at your desk or stuck to your chair for the hours that are allocated to your role, should be much less important than have you actually produced what the organization wants, at the end of the day. So it’s about outcomes.

It’s about trust. This leads me to the idea of culture within the organization. You have to trust the people that you employ to do what you’ve employed them to do. There are always going to be management issues, always. There’s always going to be somebody’s having a crisis, or actually, they just are not interested in that particular role anymore, or they’re going through a bad time, or there’s a personality clash. I could go on for hours, but there will always be the odd challenge which needs to be managed. And we can’t run away from that. It happens. Predominantly people want to do a good job, they want to keep their jobs and they want to deliver what the organization wants. If your culture is around trust, that will be incredibly helpful, not just for you as an employer, but for everybody and particularly working parents and carers.

Then you have to model, you have to real models. We use the phrase real models, not role models because you have to be able to see what you want happening within the organization. So for me, one of the big changes that would be fantastic is if men who are going to collect their children, coming in late because they’ve done the drop-off, or leaving early to do the pickup, or going home for bath time or whatever it happens to be. If the men in the environment would talk much more about that, then that gives permission for everybody to take account of their responsibilities outside of work – and everybody has those responsibilities and interests. It’s not just parents and carers.

Obviously, for them, that’s the most important thing for right now in their lives. But you could very well easily have somebody in their early twenties who’s passionate about their sport and actually wants to really put some effort into improving their sporting ability and for that they need time and that will be at different times of the day. But for us, there is that job design and looking at outcomes, there’s the issue of trust, and then there’s the culture and having real models within the organization. Those are the things that we think are going to really positively impact working parents and carers.

Lucinda: I think that’s fantastic and I really like that, I’ve not heard that before, real models. When we talk a lot about role modeling in lots of different ways as coaches at Talking Talent.  And when you talk about real models, what springs to mind for me is that reality that people have real lives outside of work, whether they be working parents and carers or not, as you say. I think that isn’t there something around that, actually, managers being empowered to have those conversations with their teams as units, as to how can everybody do the things they need to do outside of work that allows them then to focus on being the person that they want to be at work as well. And that includes the managers themselves, that sense of managing the whole person rather than just the person that they see at work.

As a leader, what advice or thoughts do you have around, because this is something that sometimes comes up when I’m talking to people around that worry sometimes that someone might not be, and this comes down to the trust point I think, that someone might not be performing in a way or not having knowledge of whether they are performing or not. And that question of whether it’s is it about performance or is it just about that they have a different working pattern. Does that make sense? What are your thoughts, kind of around as a manager how do you approach that?

Jane: For me, it’s one of the most interesting conversations because it’s the thing that’s coming up quite a lot now. Because flexible working is being talked about so much, I’m hearing from my peers, that they are very anxious because how will I know if somebody is not performing. I don’t think it’s any different to how it’s always been. If they’re not producing what needs to be produced, then they’re not performing – and that’s not going to be any different if they’re doing it at home, if they’re doing it part-time, or if they’re doing it in an office. You can easily sit in an office and have on your computer screen something that doesn’t have anything to do with work, but it looks like you’re busy beavering away.

So for me, it’s about those regular check-ins. Everybody has different performance management processes that they use. Generally, those performance management processes are about checking in regularly with people. So how we do it is we have a monthly check-in and then we do two twice a year when we look at the whole overarching piece of the organization and where your particular job fits in, and we will always be having a look at the outputs. But in terms of managing somebody, and this is something that we all need to relearn all the time, or certainly, I have, get the best out of everybody. When they are happy doing their job, they like their colleagues, they’re enjoying working. Liking your colleagues isn’t the most important thing, I’ve worked very well with people that wouldn’t have been my friends outside of work, but we’ve been able to get a really good quality job done and that’s obviously the most important thing.

But it’s understanding: where do you have to performance manage? Where are the things where you have to be saying, why is this not working? Is this because somebody doesn’t have the training, they don’t have the skills, they don’t have the confidence, they don’t understand what it is they’re supposed to be producing? And being able to have that upfront conversation with them.

There’s a fantastic book called “Radical Candor” where the author talks about one of the first employees that she worked with, who was just doing so incredibly badly. But instead of talking to them about it, everybody else just said, oh, that’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine and covered for them. At the point where that person had to be let go, they were utterly horrified and said, but why didn’t you tell me earlier on that I wasn’t producing what you wanted, because they’d never been given the opportunity to produce what was required.

I’m making it sound like it’s easy. It’s not easy. If a relationship breaks down in our personal lives, that’s horrendous. If a relationship breaks down at work, that’s not a lot better, but it is about checking in, having those regular conversations, understanding what is required both from you as a manager and as an employee, what your organization requires you to produce. Because ultimately, it’s an employment contract and we have to focus on what can you do, what needs to get done, are there enough hours in the day that have been allocated for you to be able to do that, and what’s the quality of your output like? What are the outcomes for that job and are they being achieved? And it’s about understanding and expectations. It’s about expectations: I need that piece of work delivered this week on Friday. You may not work Friday. That’s fine but then I need to have that by nine o’clock on Friday morning. How’s that going to fit in?

Lucinda: Yeah, I think the expectations piece is so important. It comes up time and time again, that actually in so many scenarios, I think both managers and also the employee are reluctant or are not used to having that conversation around actually what is being expected of me and what am I expecting of myself? I remember myself during lockdown, it was really interesting, I was speaking to a lot of people who hadn’t even had a conversation around, what am I expected to achieve while I’m homeschooling two, three, one child or children in varying, different circumstances, obviously. So I think that expectations piece is really important.

What would you say to an individual, a working parent, for example, who is unsure about how to have that conversation about aligning expectations, around how they can be the parent they want to be, but also be the employee that we want to be? Because I think it’s really important to say that actually for a lot of working parents, work can be a real sanctuary for them to come and be themselves and add value and enjoy, you mentioned the social side and sometimes that could be really important as well. But yeah, what would your words of advice or thoughts be around, as a working parent or carer, how can you approach those conversations?

Jane: So if it’s a conversation that’s around performance management, one of the tips I was told really recently, was starting the conversation within this role what does success look like?  So that you understand what it is that your manager wants out of you, and do you understand what you need to provide and also what the limits are. So actually, I need you here Monday to Friday nine to five sitting in that chair. Well, actually I can’t do that. So now we need to have a different conversation. So if your conversation starts off about outcomes and outputs from the role then that’s a really good place to start. That would be my recommendation: what does success look like? If I’m achieving well, what will I be producing? How will I be behaving? All of those kinds of things.

And then if it’s a question of trying to flex your working day and having your manager understand that, then it’s about putting options forward. On our legal advice line, we would always say to people start with having a human conversation. My responsibilities at home have changed, stayed the same, whatever happens to be. Can I have a conversation with you about different working hours? I’ve thought about what needs to be done and I wondered if we could try blah. And always position it as a can we try this?

Lucinda: Yeah. So, you’re not expecting that it’s all going to work straight away, but it’s a trial for me and for you as in the employer and the employee.

Jane: Absolutely. Because the more you try things, the more you’ll realize what doesn’t work, because it may be that actually that half an hour that you want to work extra or want to work later than your colleagues or want to leave earlier than your colleagues. Actually, it’s going to be a problem. You didn’t know that when you thought about it and neither did your employer and there’s a different half an hour, some other time of the week, but it’s going to be a doddle, really easy. So why would you not want to change that? Why would you not want to flex that? Think of it also from the perspective of your employer, who may be anxious that they’re going to be offering something to you that doesn’t work, and then they think they have to offer exactly the same to everybody else.

So it’s about, can we try this? Let’s see if it works with a team, let’s see if it works in terms of the outcomes that you want in the job, and then trying to work that through. For most of us who are sitting behind a desk, those conversations can be much easier because they are about the fact that I need to produce something. If a lot of your role is around being place-based, so what are called key workers, that’s a very different conversation. But again, that’s about what are the expectations of the role and therefore what do I need to produce. And then maybe it’s having conversations within the team so that the team can do some rostering themselves, because the team will know when’s your busy time, when is your not-so-busy time, and how you can flex that in order to accommodate everybody’s needs.

Lucinda: But the keyword that I’m hearing you say a lot, is conversation. It is actually having the time, which we are often one of the barriers to holding people back from having these conversations, but actually enabling managers and employees to have a space where they can have these conversations

Jane: Make it as easy for your boss as possible.

Lucinda: Yeah. That’s really good advice actually, I think. What would you say that looks like? As sort of easy tips and advice, how can you make it when it might not be easy for you either.

Jane: So, understanding what needs to be done in the job. So if you and your manager already know what needs to be done, then that’s a fantastic place to start. Then for you to have thought through what are the impacts of the changes that you are suggesting on your boss, on you, on your team, on the organization’s customers. Be your boss and think through all of those things. When you make that presentation or have that conversation, you’re presenting it from the perspective of success. I’d like to try this. I’ve thought through the negative impacts. I think we should be aware that that might have an impact on X. Can we try it for a week or so, and see how it goes? Can we try it for a month? Can we try it for three months? So it’s about thinking through what might the challenges be, and also don’t neglect the positives.

If you’re going to get what you want, you’re going to be much more motivated, you’re going to be much more engaged. I have a fantastic example of an organization called Zurich who are advertising all of their roles as flexible. And they found an unexpected consequence is that there has been a 10% improvement in the engagement scores of everybody who is currently employed who was working part-time.

Lucinda:  Wow.

Jane: They hadn’t done anything differently for them. They hadn’t changed a thing.

Lucinda: It’s just that advertising and making it clear that all roles are flexible.

Jane: Absolutely.

Lucinda: Yeah.

Jane: And so, people feel more valued because they know that the organizations going, oh, look, that’s possible. So, the impact of you having a positive experience with your boss is going to have a ripple effect throughout your team.

Lucinda: I suppose that piece is where it speaks to the culture which is what we’re talking about today is creating that culture where people feel that what they’re doing is accepted and that it’s of the norm, I suppose. It’s interesting because you were talking just then about, and I asked you the question around, what can people do to make it easy to have that conversation.

What are your thoughts on what responsibility do managers or should managers have around knowing or understanding an individual circumstance and being able to work with them or accommodate them on that? Because I think that’s one of the things that can hold people back from having these conversations is being honest about their individual circumstance, whether that be that they are doing it on their own, whether it be that maybe they’ve gone through a relationship change and that their circumstances have changed in some way. They may have become the main financial earner through circumstances. They may not have the support around them. They may have family overseas or circumstances have changed there. What’s the responsibility or how much should a manager know, or leaders know in those situations?

Jane: I think this is a very complicated one because I think it depends really on your level of comfort or discomfort as an individual with how much people know about you. Now, I have always been an over-sharer, that’s just me. So I’m very happy for the people that I work with and the people that are reporting to me, and the people that I’m reporting to, to know things about me that might impact my performance. But that’s not the case for everybody. So I think the manager’s responsibility is to focus on what are the things that we can do at work to help you do your best job. And if you, as an individual choosing to tell your manager that there have been some changes in your life and therefore you might need different support or you might need to be able to flex your working hours or your working times, or step up or step down, whatever it happens to be. If you feel confident and comfortable with your manager and your fellow team members that that information is going to be treated with the respect that it deserves, then share away.

If you don’t, then it may very well be that you’re not going to want to share what your personal circumstances are. But you can still have a conversation with your manager about look, things have changed for me at home: I’ve moved house, I’ve gotten divorced, I’ve had this huge tragedy in my life. You don’t have to say that. You just have to say things have changed for me at home and I wondered if we could look at me doing different hours. I’m doing three days a week now; I’d actually like to step up to four. Start having those conversations, explore the possibilities. Managers need to be open to having those conversations and to say to people in an absolutely honest way, we do not have the budget for you to be able to step up right now, let’s have the conversation in six months’ time. So that you absolutely know, again it’s about expectations, so you know what’s possible and what’s not possible. Because what managers don’t want is to have people stuck in roles that they’re unhappy with because that’s going to affect the whole team over time and you’re just not going to get the best out of somebody. But I think it’s very difficult. I would always encourage sharing, but that’s because I’m an over-sharer and I think it’s easiest and best, but I have friends who are incredibly private.

Lucinda: Well, and I think it’s really important to say there’s also the cultural aspect because depending on where you’ve grown up, what you’ve seen your parents do, what ethnicity you are, you’re going to have some values as well around what is appropriate and what’s not. And  I think it’s just another point I think for managers and companies to think about is that actually that culture isn’t going to look the same for everybody, and making sure that everyone, managers particularly, are aware that sometimes some conversations are going to be easier or harder based on your ethnicity or cultural upbringing, which is really important.

Jane: For me, one of the most difficult things that I’ve had to learn is that fairness does not mean that everybody is treated exactly the same. Equality and equity are not the same things, and that’s taken me quite a few years in the workplace to understand. So we will always need to challenge ourselves as managers, as employees: what are the things that I need to be kind of tweaking about either my understanding of the way in which I’m interacting with my colleagues? Yeah. So, for me, that was a challenge is that equal is not equitable necessarily.

Lucinda: Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, fantastic point. I think we could probably do a whole other podcast on that, couldn’t we. It’s a great conversation to look at. The point around hybrid working. So, it’s a buzzword at the moment in the press and within companies issuing lots of new policies and particularly, I think there also seems to be, when you look at the hybrid working piece and also, I suppose the uncertainty is still around: what is this winter going to look like? What are the next couple of years going to look like? What are your thoughts on whether hybrid working is or isn’t a silver bullet for working families?

Jane: Hybrid working is not a silver bullet. That’s my short answer. At Working Families, we’ve found the use of the term hybrid working so extraordinarily frustrating because hybrid working is a way of working flexibly, but it is not every way of working flexibly. You have to start from the requirements of the job. So, if, for example, you work in security and what you’re looking after is a building as opposed to a person and actually you can’t work in a hybrid way. That’s just not possible within the demands of that job. But you certainly could work flexibly within that job. There could be all kinds of ways in which the way in which you work can be tweaked. So for us, it’s flexible working is the most important point.

What I would say about hybrid working in the sense of you are in your office for a certain period of time and you are not in your office for a certain period of time, that can lead to much greater amounts of flexible working. So from that perspective, I think it’s incredibly important. And hybrid working also does not mean working from your office and working from home. It can mean working from different places. So one of my team can’t bear working from home so they now work somewhere else. It’s not their home, it’s not our office, they’re just working somewhere different. But the point of that is that they are working and as long as they keep their calendar up to date and we know how to get hold of them in an emergency and also, we know how to get hold of their emergency contact if we can’t get hold of them for a day and we’re thinking, oh, what’s happened? Are they okay?

I think hybrid working can be helpful in the sense that it gets everybody used to working flexibly. And I also think it can be very useful because it makes employers, or hopefully will make employers think about work in a slightly different way. So why do we come to an office? What is it that we’re going to do there? Why might we work from home? What are we going to do there? Because for me, when I think through the types of collaboration, there is going to be conversations that I want to have that are just two people. If you’re doing a one-to-one, you don’t want the entire rest of the team sitting behind you listening in, that’s just uncomfortable. But at the same time, if you’re going to have a brainstorming session, for example, then actually you might want everybody having the same experience. So you might all want them in the same room, but you might all want them on a Zoom call. So the quality of the experience is the same for everybody, and for some people working on Zoom works that way, and for some people, it doesn’t. So it’s about the needs of the business.

So yes, we just think that hybrid working when it becomes incredibly rigid is not flexible working, but when it’s done well, it is part of flexible working, you know? So you need to be in the office Monday and Tuesday every week, irrespective of what the weather is, what your health is, what’s going on in your working day. They’re pointless. You’re going to be in the office Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, because you’ve got a series of meetings with a whole bunch of people, and you need to flex around those. Well that’s fine as long as, as part of your flexibility, you can get into the office for when you need to get in there and you leave the office when you need to. It might end up being slightly more complicated for employers, but only if they can’t get their head around the fact that this is about flexible working and it’s about how we all deliver best for the organization.

Lucinda: Yeah. I suppose I’m wondering, listening to you, what are the assumptions that might hold companies back from putting that level? I’m in complete agreement. I think it’s about what you’re doing, not where you’re doing it. There are going to be some days where it’s going to be more, and I have conversations with working parents, we talk about how can you make the most of those days that you’re in the office, and really make those maybe a work focus day. But when you’re working from home, you’re probably going to have more of a home focus day. You’re also going to work, but you might be able to do a bit of washing, and see a bit more of your child, and do a bit more of that life admin which we know all working parents have to do. But what are the assumptions do you think that are going to hold companies back from maybe putting these processes in place or putting successful practices in place?

Jane: For me I think it’s about, in a way we go back to job design. It’s about understanding what needs to be done and what the outputs are that you’re looking for. And some of it, I think, is about respecting people’s time. So if you are the boss and everybody comes into the office, and you trick around doing whatever it is you want to, if you need somebody they’re right, there. You don’t have to think through what their schedule is, you don’t have to worry about what they’re doing. You can just say, oh, I want to see so-and-so and so-and-so will magically appear. Whereas with flexible working and with hybrid working, actually there is an amount of respect and power that is being transferred to people so that you can say, I need to speak to so and so. Are they around right now? Yes, they are. You can get hold of them, but they might not necessarily be physically co-located with you. So if you’re desperate to speak to someone you can speak to them on the phone, you can speak to them via Zoom, but they’re not necessarily going to be physically there. So I think that’s the mindset that really needs to change. We would go back to job design and trust and culture.

Lucinda: Yeah. Those difficult points.

Jane: You give respect to your fellow colleagues, because we’re all colleagues, because frankly, the boss can’t do their job without the team.

Lucinda: A well-functioning team. Yeah, a happy team. Yeah.

Jane: And the team themselves will find that what they’re trying to do will just not be possible if they don’t have a good quality of functioning team around them. I think there are bits that are going to be tricky, but we got through a pandemic. We can get through a bit of tricky bits of hybrid working.

Lucinda: Yeah. And I think it’s going to take time, that’s the thing, it’s going to take time. And as we said earlier, trialing different ways of working within teams and companies, et cetera, to find the best way forward. What would you like to see, flash forward five years’ time, what would be the one thing that you would want to see that is better for working families in five years’ time?

Jane: In five years, time, when I think about what I’d like to see, I’m thinking very much of the working parents and carers who call us on our helpline. Their lack of access to justice and their lack of access to flexible working, because the working parents and carers who call us, they all want to keep their jobs, they want to keep their jobs for a lot of different reasons. One of them of course is to do with their income. None of us want to be unemployed. But also, because they like their colleagues. They like what they do. So I would love for flexible working, and all of the different ways in which you can work flexibly, to be better understood and particularly in SMEs, to be much more warmly embraced. So that for me would be the big goal. I think one of the ways in which that can be achieved is with having flexible working or flexible jobs being advertised.

Lucinda: Yes. So that really good example you gave earlier. Yeah.

Jane: Yeah. The government had talked about that a few years ago when in the Queen’s speech, I think it was 2019, I think they’ve become less comfortable with that as a legal requirement. But the more people start using flexible working, the more people start advertising all roles as flexible, the better off we will all be. All of us whether we have caring responsibilities, or whether we just are ordinary people and we have a life, we need, all of us to do life admin.

Lucinda: Absolutely. Yeah. Jane, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this. It’s such a rich subject and your points that you’ve made around this idea of creating a company where people can trust each other, where they can have open and honest conversations and that realization that we are all whole people, I suppose and have all of these things going on outside of our lives other than work, that actually make us the people that are then good professionals and happy professionals. I think, yeah, it’s all just been brilliant to talk to you and hear your views, and I wish you the best of luck at Working Families. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you, everyone, for listening to us today. Thank you.

 

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