S5 E5 Climbing career mountains

Helen: My guest this week is Joy Burnford, the founder and CEO of Encompass Equality, a gender equality expert and author of the bestselling book 'Don't Fix Women: The Practical Path to Gender Equality at Work'. And if you're watching this on YouTube, here's a quick pic. With over 25 years' experience as a business leader, non-exec director, podcast host, and speaker, Joy and her team provide clients with practical solutions to advancing gender equality in their organisations so they can better attract, retain women and help them progress in their careers.

As host of the Equality Conversation podcast and contributor of over 70 articles on Forbes.com, Joy has interviewed hundreds of senior business leaders, board members, CEOs, authors and experts, and has been cited in national, business and HR press. She speaks regularly at conferences and industry events and is working with the British Standards Institution to create a new standard for menopause and menstruation in the workplace. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Joy!

Joy: Thank you so much, Helen. It's wonderful to be here.

Helen: It's great to have you on the show, and I know we are both very busy working mums ...

Joy: Yes!

Helen: ... Regularly swapping notes on how we find enough time in the day to do everything that we would like to do at home and at work. And I'm going to ask a fun question to start with, which is, if I gave you an extra day this week just for you; if you got to have eight days this week, how would you ideally spend it?

Joy: Well that's such a lovely question and actually this week I'm only working four days because I'm going to a spa on Friday so actually I've got my extra day this week. So I think that's probably what I would um, I love to, as you know, I talk a lot about self-care and wellbeing and looking after yourself because it's really important to put your own oxygen mask on first when we are busy and doing things. So I really do value my time that I can spend either swimming or going and having a massage if I'm lucky enough to do that. So I've, I've booked in this day at the spa with some friends because I need that escape actually from the home because I work at home and life is at home and everything's at home. So I find it quite a stressful place to be. So actually having that escape is something I really, really value. So if I had an extra day, I'd spend another day at the spa!

Helen: It could be an overnight stay!

Joy: Yes!

Helen: Well, if you don't get back on Saturday, your family know where you are.

Joy: Yes.

Helen: Oh, that sounds wonderful. And I totally get what you mean about actually for many of us men and women, home actually represents a place of work, either paid work or unpaid work, and I often feel the same, that actually I only really switch off when I'm not at home, which sometimes feels a bit sad to say that, but actually it's just reality. I am surrounded by work of some nature when I'm in my home environment.

Joy: Yeah, I totally feel that. And I think my husband often thinks I'm a bit strange because I say I want to go and stay in a hotel even if it's like, you know, just a Premier Inn half an hour away from home. That's just bliss for me because you get away from all the clutter and you can actually really focus on just being, because often there's so many other things to do.

And I think you can be better for your kids as well when you're in that state as well, because often there's washing, there's cooking, there's everything else that we need to do to be there and present for your kids as well, I think is really important.

Helen: Yes, yes, definitely. Switching off regularly, getting your space and head space fantastic. Well, enjoy your spa day on Friday. Very envious. And talking now about your career and what you do, how did you get to become an expert in gender equality? Is it something you set out to do from the outset? Tell me a little bit about how your career has evolved.

Joy: Yeah, it's really interesting and I didn't; it's something I've ended up falling into, I guess. I suppose there's been a passion there for my career. I started off working in a management consulting industry, worked for PA Consulting Group, and my background's been in marketing.

And then I set up a business back in 2007 called Source Global Research and this was being consultants to management consulting firms. And after I did that, part of what my journey took me onto was setting out this current business, which was called My Confidence Matters, now called Encompass Equality.

But if I tell you a little bit about why My Confidence Matters came about it was because, I had my second child and I had a year of thinking about what am I going to do for my next 10 years of my career. And part of that year that I took out, I'd had some coaching and started looking internally at myself and what I really wanted.

And I looked back at my career and realized that I'd always sat in the background really in business. When I was a child, I did lots of acting and lots of singing and never saw any difference between men and women. And I grew up with a mum who helped me to do whatever I wanted to do.

As soon as I hit the workplace, I kind of lost my confidence and I thought, well, why would anybody listen to me? And, and I kind of just lived with that. And it wasn't a particular problem actually until I then looked back and thought, well, this is interesting, and talking to other people about confidence and a lot of women said, 'oh, I, I totally get you, I really lack confidence and I feel worried about speaking up when there's a room full of men'.

And I worked for the trade body for consulting firms, and what I had to do was present at meetings with 50 council members who were all head of consulting firms, pretty much all men. And I remembered feeling a bit like a punch bag sometimes, and I was just like, 'oh, this is really hard'. And I just didn't feel I had the weight and people said to me things like, you have to sleep your way to the top, things like that. And I was like, this is just not right!

So it was a bit like a drip, drip, drip thing, I didn't really think I was going to end up in this, but when I had that year of reflection, I was thinking about new business ideas and, and everything had a bit of a flavour of women in business because I guess that was me. And the more people I spoke to, I thought there were so many people like me, and actually I could see there was some role there that I could bring.

One of the ideas I had was, was doing a company called Truffle, which is like the mushroom not the chocolate, and bringing part-time women who could bring a little bit of great essence to the workplace on a part-time basis and work part-time, but give a a lot of value.

But I decided that wasn't me for my career. There were other people doing that as well. I found my niche in doing what I'm doing now, and I became a curator of confidence and in the early days helped women with confidence. And I know now that it's not just women that lack confidence, it's everybody that can lack confidence. But often I found men lack the confidence to say they lack confidence. And women often speak up a bit more about that and I could see there was a role there to help women speak up.

And then, as you said at the beginning, and I've written for Forbes and spoken to some amazing senior women, men, CEOs, and the more I spoke to them, the more I realized it wasn't about confidence because you can be really confident, but if the workplaces are not set up to support women, and I keep seeing so many women leaving the workplace in midlife, aged forties, fifties when you get this kind of perfect storm of challenges and women were leaving. And I thought, this is really... when I see problems and things like that, I just want to help fix it. So I've morphed into this role in terms of helping organisations think through what you can do to better support the women that work for you.

So in answer your question, it wasn't a big dream of mine, but there've been little elements of it through my career, culminating in what I do now. And I think it's so wonderful to be able to do something where you feel passionate about a subject and make that your living, which is super.

Helen: Yeah, thank you. And really interesting to hear about that gradual realisation both about, your own career reflections, but actually the world of work that you are operating in and what you've been noticing about that over the years. And also that evolution in seeing this as initially, the problem is about women not having enough confidence, to actually the problem is the environment and the norms that we have and the structures that are in place that actually aren't well designed to help women succeed in their careers.

Joy: And it's definitely both. The confidence is still really, really important and I think, as I've probably told you before, you know, before eight years ago, you probably wouldn't see anything about me on the internet because I have worked so hard to build a personal brand, to build that confidence in speaking up.

And I'd never have done a podcast eight years ago, never. I wouldn't speak up. I wouldn't speak at a party, nevermind speaking in front of an audience, which now what I do and I love to share that story because you can learn confidence. It's a skill you can learn, which I didn't realize.

So you need that absolutely. But then as you say, it's the structural things that need to change in tandem.

Helen: Yeah. And your words around sitting in the background I think will resonate for a lot of people, men and women listening to that thinking, actually, do I feel in the background in my team, in my organisation? Am I speaking up as much as I'd like to, and feel able to? Am I contributing the value and the potential that's within me?

So let's set the scene a little bit around gender equality and I guess specifically in the uk, predominantly UK listeners, but actually international listeners for the podcast as well, but I know it's a fairly similar picture in other western nations, perhaps the Nordics aside. But despite a recent flurry of female prime ministers in Germany and the UK if we go back, several prime ministers in the UK to about two years ago, New Zealand, et cetera actually they've stepped down for various reasons so we've got less women, very visible women in senior power. We've had lots of progress with women getting onto boards, recent news about that reaching 40% or so...

Joy: Mm-hmm.

Helen: ... but less in executive roles. Can you expand that picture a little bit? What's the current state of play and is it changing very fast?

Joy: Yeah. I think the World Economic Forum the latest research from them showed it's 150 years away till we reach gender parity and economic participation. And I think the year before it was 268. So I think we've moved some way; I think there is some good news. I think we've still got a long way to go and we'd like to get it to either our lifetime or our children's lifetime before we see that parity. And as you say, the FTSE Women Leaders Review said, you know, 40% on boards, that target's been reached three years ahead of where they wanted to get to that, which is fantastic.

But it is more non-exec roles. There's still only 8% of the FTSE 100 CEOs are women. I think there's also getting to those very senior roles is very, very difficult and there are not that many of the roles to fill so that's also another big problem. And I think where we need to work is this pipeline of women coming through and retaining women because I think what happens is you get a lot of sectors, you have 50 50 women joining at the bottom rungs of the workplace and then in my book I talk about the career mountain and you get to the forties, fifties, maybe after children, potentially when you hit things like menopause, you might then end up having to care for an elderly relative.

You have what I call this perfect storm of challenges, which when you join in a career in your twenties, if you're lucky, you don't have any responsibilities, you can just live life, you can work hard, you can have a great time.

And then organisations were designed by men for men, and I think what happens is that there are things like even just toilet facilities, I'm getting really basic! There are things like that that are just not... they're far too far away from where the offices are, or the uniform that's been provided is designed around a male body. And I was talking to John Pettigrew, who's the National Grid CEO, and he was talking about, they were doing a massive bit of work about changing the uniforms for women so they could climb up poles. Because they were saying, well, we haven't got any women doing this job. And well if you get the uniform right, then that will be the first step in the process.

And another organisation that I've been talking to have offices all over the world and Egypt, I think it was, they were talking about gender equality and at different places around the world that people are in different stages here; I think some places are more advanced than others. But in Egypt they were talking about having to create a toilet block for women. Sorry, I won't talk about toilets very much longer! But I just think it's really basic, some of these things and providing systems that will work.

And things like when women come back after maternity, I remember being in London, my husband - actually I've got a great ally at home, my husband took a year off when we had our first child and he brought our daughter up to London and I was working and I'd end up doing things like expressing milk in the local train station in the toilets. And it's like, sorry, I'm talking about toilets again! You know, It's not great. If you can provide a room or somewhere that people can actually breastfeed, potentially have people come in and nannies or, or other people who are looking after kids potentially if women want to work to provide those spaces that actually can help you do your day job.

I was actually talking to somebody yesterday who was a partner in a law firm and she was promoted to partner on maternity leave and she was saying she has a great support structure at home. So her husband is not a lawyer so he can help in the home; she's got really supportive workplace, Irwin Mitchell is the organisation. They have 50 50, I think they've got more women partners now than men and they're such a female friendly organisation and it means that they can actually operate flexibly in terms of your area of work, in terms of flexible working and allowing people to flex how and where they work is so important for women. It can mean she can go and do reading with her child at school at 11 till 12, but actually she'll be on early in the morning or she'll be working late at night. And that flexibility to flex your work around your life is so important.

Helen: Yeah. And although we might be trying to solve the problem of female retention and progression, it's not a women's issue, it's a business issue right? And actually by redesigning our world of work, and the benefits and the policies and things, actually men will benefit too, right? So they can be more active parents, they can enjoy the same work flexibility that they haven't had access to in the past.

Joy: I talked a lot last week with International Women's Day about allyship both in, in work and at home and how it's about not calling men out; it's about calling men in and really engaging men in the conversation. If we want to make change happen within gender equality, women can't do it. Nobody ever has effected change in a minority. It just doesn't work. So you need to get men. And actually my book is written for business leaders. It's about how you change the workplaces. It's not about women leaning in more. I mean, I know that was a topic that came up a few years ago about being more confident and more present.

But I think we need to also look at the role of men and masculinity and what it means to be a man. Elliot Rae is somebody worth looking up, and Daniele Fiandaca is Token Man Consulting, they're doing some great work in this space and really engaging men in the conversation and what it means to be a father, what it means to be a man in today's world.

Helen: Yeah. And you mentioned allyship there, and I know that's something you expand on in the book. Can you say a little bit more about what you described in the book about the three cultural frameworks around flexibility and allyship and coaching and support? Because you are arguing that these are the things that all organisations can put in place, right? That will really help both women to succeed as well as men?

Joy: That was the most surprising thing I think I found from writing my book because I thought I was writing a book about helping women and then having done all the research and put the book together, I was like, actually this isn't going to just help women, this will help everybody!

So the three cultural frameworks that I recommend: flexibility as you say; allyship in the workplace; and then coaching and support, and creating a coaching culture in an organisation. It's having those coaching conversations, so listening, asking the right questions, and every single person in an organisation can do that. It's not about having a one-to-one coach, even though that would be lovely. It's just having those open conversations. And then by having all those things, it means when you hit an obstacle on that path, whether that's menopause, whether it's caring responsibilities, if you have that flexibility, taking caring as an example, you have flexibility so you can flex your work around what time you potentially go into work or the time you come home from work or needing to take some time off to go watch a school play or something. So flexibility is absolutely key.

Allyship when it comes to maternity, really understanding and being curious about what it is like for a woman to go off on maternity leave. I often hear, and in my book there's a whole page of these 'what ifs' when women come back after maternity, they're like, oh, what if I can't get away when my child's ill? Or what if I can't get promoted because I've got a baby? And being curious and being a great manager is helping women.

And perhaps a tip that I heard from Jessica Chivers actually was to record a video before you go on maternity leave about all your great successes and then when you come back to watch it again. And it's little things like that, you know, line managers could say, how about doing that because that would really help you with your confidence? And just being really open and empathetic as a leader to understanding those challenges and understanding if you haven't got kids, asking the question, being vulnerable and asking, saying, 'I don't know what it's like to have kids cause I don't have kids, but, you know, what's it like being a woman working here?' and actually just that allyship and being really open to having those conversations, acting with insight.

So flexibility we've talked about, coaching and support, and allyship, and I think doing all of those things. And allyship, it's not about necessarily men being allies to women, it's about women being allies to men in the home and actually strategically talking about what role do you want to play in in the home? I know James Clarry, who I interviewed from Coutts, he was saying he was trying really hard to go to the school and pick up kids and stuff, and he felt really excluded because there were the women standing over there at school gates and he was on his own and he felt excluded. And he said, I'm really trying, but I'm just not feeling very welcomed here. So it's actually about looking at allyship from the other perspective. If you want men to be more hands-on, don't treat them as an add-on. Be part of that conversation and work out what you can do differently.

Helen: Yeah, that's so true. And, and we all bring natural biases, don't we? Whether as a woman dropping a child off at school, we see a man dropping a child off and you think, well, they won't be interested in some social chat or oh, it must be the morning that the mum can't drop them off or whatever; you leap to some assumptions. And a brilliant book that I read that really opened my eyes was MaryAnn Sieghart's the Authority Gap and I know it's included in your bibliography, and she says actually both men and women are naturally biased to view women as less authoritative than men.

So this isn't about assuming a male manager won't understand your post maternity return needs and preferences. Actually, it could just as well be a female line manager who hasn't been in that situation or someone younger than you that hasn't got to that point in their life, et cetera.

And when you talk about flexibility, obviously post COVID there's a general recognition that flexibility around where we work has become much more accepted with more hybrid working and remote working. And I would argue that the flexibility around when we work hasn't moved to the same extent partly because the business world runs 24/7 and it's usually at high speed and urgent deadlines, et cetera. Yet, actually there's a lot more we could do, a lot more creatively and innovatively around flexing working time, both working hours, but also flexibility of leave and presumably also around how we think about career progression so it's not necessarily as linear as perhaps men might be used to. Can you say a bit more about some of those possibilities?

Joy: Oh yeah. And that's totally where I'm talking loads at the moment, I love it. And I think that's one of the reasons I changed my initial book from being a career ladder to a mountain, because actually it is, and, and you may have heard of Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis and 'Squiggly Careers' and people do things in different ways now.

But yes, I talk a lot about things like job sharing, because this was a real highlight for me that I came across when I was researching the book. And I hadn't even thought about this as a tool for gender quality until I wrote my book and I heard Will McDonald, who used to work in a senior role at Aviva, I think at the time I spoke to him, he was the only known all male senior job share in the UK and I thought, wow, wouldn't that be amazing if more men did job sharing? That would allow the women, potentially their other halves, to be able to do more work. But equally for women to jobshare together, it means they could work three days a week potentially, and have two days that they don't have to work. And the more I've looked at this, and I've spoken to so many job share pairs now, the productivity for the organisation is massive. The benefit to the individuals is massive.

People I've spoken to said 'I wouldn't go back part-time because it's really hard to do a part-time job because you end up back in the office on Monday catching up on everything you've missed, and it's really hard to do that'. So the people I know who've done part-time and job sharing roles, have said it's just been life changing for them because they get to have those two clear days when they know that their work is being covered by their job share pair. Things like that are really, really important and often companies say to me, oh, well it wouldn't work in our jobs, but I've heard it working for medical consultants, which is life and death situations. So it really can work .And people might think it was another headcount, but actually you get, I think there's some research that's done this 1.2 times the cost, but it's 1.5 times the value. And this is something I want to do more work around in terms of looking at that productivity. Because you can't leave things at the end of the week without finishing it off. You can't think, oh, I'll just do it on Monday. So the productivity is immense. And I think this is something we should really look at for the future. Different ways of working. Let's throw the rule book out the window and think about things differently.

Helen: Yeah. Because even when it comes to things like term time working, which would massively help with young children in school, et cetera, it's something that's really not widespread or widely adopted. And I think a lot of organisations do think, oh, well that's just too complicated to get our head around.

And as you say, there's always a reason why it wouldn't work here. And this is very anecdotal on my part, but the few people that I know that have been in relatively senior job shares, again, women, because they have a job share arrangement that works well and they've been very careful around how they manage it, they have stayed in those roles in that organisation for a long time. So even just looking at my small sample, I'm like, okay! When it works really well, that's a fabulous means of retaining people because they value that setup so much.

Joy: And absolutely, as you know we've talked about confidence and I think sometimes in senior roles women can feel that they lack a bit of confidence in terms of pushing themselves and perhaps taking that next leap to a promotion. And those job share pairs that I've spoken to said they have so much more confidence being as part of a team because they can jump together and they have their own mentor with them all the time. They've got somebody there saying, yeah, we can do it, we can do it! And actually negotiating pay rises, going together as a pair. And yeah. I mean, I could talk about job sharing forever, I think it's fabulous.

Helen: Yeah. Brilliant and great to hear you've got lots of examples and proof that it works and also the business benefit of that as well. And talking about retention I'm interested to know what you look for, what are the factors that make you want to stay in the work you are doing? I know you obviously run your own business, but you have worked in corporates as well before; and what do you know about, from your research that you do, what are the things that do persuade people to stay once they're already in an organisation?

Joy: Yeah. My situation is slightly different because I'm my own boss and I think the key thing for me is flexibility and doing something I love doing. And we are actually doing some research looking at the retention equation and looking at what factors potentially mean that a woman will leave or stay within an organisation. And we look at various factors like the presence of menopause or childcare or line managers or the culture of the organisation or salary and benefits, those sorts of things.

And we've literally just done a beta test with a small sample so far so this is literally hot off the press, and we're going out there now to do more. But the biggest thing that's coming out is not as much, the menopause and childcare and those sorts of things, it's more about the line manager and really enjoying the job. So actually having a line manager that is really understanding and what we find is if the line manager's not great, that is the more likely that somebody's going to leave than not. So very early days, but yeah, watch out and, and look out for that.

And another work we've done with other companies as well has showed that the importance of line managers and training managers up because often people become managers without any training or they have the basic training but actually don't get trained up in how to have courageous conversations; how to understand some of these challenges that people can face, not just women. Just being really empathetic and understanding, being vulnerable and open to saying you don't have the answers all the time. So I think there's a massive thing around line management that we need to think about.

Helen: Yes. And that reminds me of a book I read recently, Work Rules! by Lazlo Boch, who's the Head of People Operations at Google. And they are really systematic about line manager quality and he goes into quite a lot of detail in the book about it. And they measure line manager effectiveness in lots of different ways, in 360 ways. They get employee feedback about that as well, and they focus on the highest performing managers in terms of that positive relationship with the individual. And they focus on the lowest 5% and they find really creative ways to get the highest performing 5% to support the lowest performing, so they bring them up to a higher level. So anyone listening if they interested in that, that might be a good read. And maybe something to consider as part of your, alongside your research as well.

Joy: Absolutely!

Helen: And just coming towards the end, how optimistic do you feel that we are going to continue to see good progress?

And of all the different conversations you have with clients and the research you do, what would you pick as one really innovative or effective thing for an organisation to trial or, or to focus on? I know that's asking you to pick a needle out of a haystack, but where would you recommend people focus their efforts?

Joy: So I speak a lot to organisations who are forward-thinking and want to change things. So in those instances, I think I'm very optimistic that they're thinking about the right things to be doing. They're thinking about things like allyship, how to engage more men in the conversation, make sure the majority are starting to change things because otherwise it's not going to happen. So I'm optimistic from that point of view.

I think allyship would be the biggest thing really about how to engage men in this debate because we know that the world is still very much a man's world whether we like it or not, and I think we just need to, rather than telling men off, it's not man bashing here, it's about actually really understanding how it feels for them actually.

What does the gender equality debate mean to them? They are the other half of gender balance, it's not about women's equality, it's about gender equality and I think it's understanding each person. I think the golden thread that runs through my book is personalization, and thinking about every individual. So let's scrap men, women. Let's think about every individual. And a lot of companies are saying, we're doing so many different groups, so many networks, we've got ethnicity networks, we've got pride networks, we've got gender networks, and there's a lot of talk now about trying to bring those together.

And I think I, in a way, it's actually right. You should be thinking about each individual human being and actually what we each need to thrive and not put people in boxes. We're not all homogenous groups. Men often get lumped in a men bucket, in macho bucket, and that's not true. I think we think about things like carers rather than men and women, and we start to change the perspective on this.

So actually then in organisations, we start to change the message around what do we mean by carers or parents and not about men and women. And if we can start changing the workplaces that hopefully we'll then have a ripple out to then be able to educate our children and change things that way around. We just need to break it down and work out what we can do in our own teams, in our own organisations, in our own homes and then hopefully those messages will spread far and wide.

Helen: Yes. Brilliant. Thank you. And for people listening who want to find out more about the work you do or follow some of the research that you are doing or interested in the book and your podcast, what's the best way for them to get connected and stay in touch?

Joy: LinkedIn I use a lot, so do connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me on our website, which is encompassequality.com. That's probably the easiest way for you to find out more, and it'd be great to talk to you about the research as well.

Helen: Fantastic. Thank you. Well, I'll put links to all in the show notes as well so easy to find you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Joy, it's been such a pleasure talking about gender equality, digging into the barriers but also to some of the progress that we're seeing. And thank you for sharing such practical advice around the things organisations can really focus on that help shift the dial on that.

It's been wonderful having you. Thanks for being a brilliant guest!

Joy: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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The Business of Being Brilliant podcast

S5 E5: 'Climbing career mountains'with Joy Burnford

Monday 5 June 2023

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S5 E5: 'Climbing career mountains'
with Joy Burnford