Organizational Behaviour - Daniel's Blog Entry #2 - Family Commitments and Remote Work

 

This second blog entry related to our Organizational Behaviour class is based on the following article, titled "When Your Boss Doesn’t Respect Your Family Commitments", written by Ms. Rebecca Knight (currently a senior correspondent at Insider covering careers and the workplace. Previously she was a freelance journalist and a lecturer at Wesleyan University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Financial Times), and published by Harvard Business Review, on September 01, 2020 (https://hbr.org/2020/09/when-your-boss-doesnt-respect-your-family-commitments).

The article makes a parallelism between the ideal situation in which someone’s boss is understanding and flexible regarding his / her subordinate’s personal life and the opposite case, in which someone’s boss is rather unpleasant and completely oblivious to his / her subordinate’s personal life, making them really struggle to balance out their professional and commitments and their family and personal affairs.

Ms. Knight goes on to describe some stories collected from her research and from interviews she has conducted out there in the different markets and she explains how certain supervisors even dare to cross the line to become hostile toward their employees, harassing them any given time the worker has to leave his / her duties earlier due to having to care after their child sudden school-related issue or perhaps to accompany and aging parent deal with an eventual health-related matter.

            As a disclaimer, it is worth mentioning that this article is USA-based, and as such, specifically encourages readers from said country to know their rights, mentioning, for instance, that some states happen to have flexible-work related policies enacted for their government employees, and also prompts the reader to investigate whether they may qualify for the so called federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act (important also to consider this article is dated September 2020, right in the midst of the first year of the pandemic, even before vaccines came out). But the idea may easily be applicable to different jurisdictions across the globe. Workers must know their rights.

The author also suggests workers to be upfront and transparent about their situation to their bosses, trying to explain them the ins and outs of their particular concerns and how they propose to still deliver results, but emphasizing the work-from-home arrangement they require in order to tend to both their personal and professional responsibilities.

As far as how this article relates to myself personally, in my case, when the pandemic started I had an office to go to and a schedule to go by, and hence, when we were suddenly switched to work-from-home mode, at the beginning my boss had no choice but to allow said arrangement to be in place, yet as weeks and months went by, but while we were still dealing with the pandemic situation, he began pressuring me to go back to the office, just because. He did not have a solid argument, as my performance had not changed, if anything I was putting in more hours, from home, to make sure I could keep my job. But eventually we came to an agreement for me to leave. It turned out to be for the best, as this sudden outcome prompted me to start looking for online freelance alternatives to continue developing my career, but I guess that is part of a different story.