Organizational Behaviour - Daniel's Blog Entry #1 - Family Commitments and Remote Work

 

This first blog entry related to our Organizational Behaviour class is based on the following article, titled "The pandemic changed how we work. Now, mothers want it to stay that way", written by journalist Kiernan Green, and published by CBC News, on October 10, 2022 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/mothers-remote-work-pandemic-legacy-1.6607205).

This article, even though through its title emphasizes the perspective of mothers of younger children, applies to the entire work force.  Indeed, many industries worldwide were suddenly hit by the Covid 19 pandemic in early 2020, as the article explains, forcing a sudden and dramatic switch from presential job mode to a work-from-home kind of arrangement.

In the case of parents, this change was somehow positive for their families, as their children were being closely watched, 24/7, by their parents, while staying in the household for all their activities. And despite said obligations being already time consuming enough for those professionals, productivity on their jobs did not get compromised.

Yet, after the pandemic started to come down, many employers began demanding their employees to return to their work premises and resume the older arrangement, which the article considers somewhat pitiful, as a golden opportunity to for ever change the mindset of how employment should be conducted could be very well being passed by.

The article goes on to mention the statistical differences between how the children’s age affect mothers in a different scale that it affects fathers (“Women with two-year-old children were six per cent less likely to reenter the workforce than those with kids seven and older. For men, the age of their children was largely irrelevant to their reentry into the workforce”). This, again, seems like a clear case of gender inequality, something one would think should not still be an ongoing situation in 2023, yet apparently it still is, unfortunately, as per what Mr. Kiernan Green explains.

As far as how this article relates to myself personally, in my case, as in the majority of cases out there, I too went straight home from the office the very day lockdown was declared, without any smooth transitioning phase whatsoever, and there I was, making up an office space in a crumble space, and felt sort of out of place at the beginning, and feeling the uncertainty of would be coming next. And adjusting to that sudden situation in the house, along with my wife, proved to be quite challenging, even without children, as it was difficult for us to determine when the workday started, when it ended, when personal affairs were supposed to be happening and what not. So, it required some adapting period and lots of trial and error, but I guess everybody can relate to this situation, as we all went through it.