The corporate world has changed a lot in the past few years when it comes to identifying and nurturing the talent of female employees. We crossed a major hurdle when workplace harassment and related professional misconduct came to light. But several issues that are not so salacious still plague women’s careers and business performance and their possibilities. Any company that employs female workers must recognize their special needs and then enable their workers to accomplish what they want by facilitating appropriate working and learning opportunities. With that in mind here are five ways executives can start helping their female employees gain a better outlook for their careers and deliver better performance.
Five steps towards better work performance by female employees in 2024
Basing business performance on an open communication-based environment
Key Takeaways:
Workplaces with open communication have more females working happily and with strong career paths
Workplaces with poor communication and openness feel stifling for women.
Businesses must foster open communication and standards to enable women to put in their best
For the most part, women do not restricted to entry and mid-level roles even in the recent past. While the number of billionaire women has increased marginally in 2024 the majority of women face issues when it comes to making the most of their talent at work. Part of this process hinges on the nature of workplace environments and the professional conduct standards that they involve.
Unlike their male counterparts, female workers often have the tendency to keep their ideas and opinions to their cells for fear of reprisals or even ridicule.
Now, this is not a female-only problem this applies to all kinds of people who are introverted such as the quiet contributors, workhorses, and Jack of all trades. This problem also hampers women of color as well as people who do not speak their native language as a first language.
From a DEI perspective, this is a problem of great significance since enabling diverse voices to raise issues and express opinions leads to far more dynamic growth and opportunity actualization in business. No modern business can really afford to ignore the voices of female employees and even people of color and hope to sustain its long-term venture game prospects. Check out this Forbes article to understand what is the new norm in workplaces and how should your communications policy redefine itself to fit in to the global standard.
That is why creating an open and healthy environment as well as fostering interpersonal communication with employee engagement tools like virtual coffee chat apps is an unwritten essential for both executives and managers in today’s world. As they say, variety is the spice of life so is diversity the lifeblood of a booming business giving women the chance to express themselves and come up with innovative ideas is one of the best ways to foster diversity within any team or workplace environment.
Encourage role-based mentoring
Key Takeaways:
Role-driven mentorship helps women define their career paths and enhances their likelihood of continuing in such roles
Role based mentoring incentivizes better performance with stronger growth path
Finding mentors can be hard for women so developing programs that offer them automatically helps a lot
One of the biggest problems women face in their careers is that they do not find Apple sources for mentoring and career growth. Part of the reason for this is their inhibition in asking for such a partnership since it asking for a favor. And while this is certainly worth encouraging, creating a membership program framework is better.
In particular, role-based mentoring is a great way to create a professional development module for female employees with specific skill sets. for example, women with expertise in sales but an interest in administration are better suited for managerial roles as opposed to women who are sales experts and want to specialize in global product marketing or related promotional activities. Check out this Business Insider post mentioning
clarity, self-awareness, avoiding defensiveness, proactive working
as the top qualities needed to create a strong mentorship result value for more insights.
One of the biggest reasons why women do not find opportunities as easily accessible to them as their male com counterparts is because of the lack of adaptability of roles. So the easiest way to overcome this hurdle is to have well-defined career growth paths fostered by mentors. When a company has this as a benchmark for its employee development programs, it not only helps female workers but also people of all minority ethnicities and orientations.
TLDR video here! Get all the key points in case you were ready to skip out!
Offering health-supporting policies to foster business performance
Key Takeaways:
Health and wellbeing plays a huge role in defining women’s career
Many women leave work when they cannot cope with business performance demands and health needs.
Employers must consider supporting women with favorable policies to enable their working process
A major challenge that virtually all working women face involves juggling their work lives and their personal health. This includes both the time spent while pregnant and also issues relating to their health and well-being arising either out of parenting or the nature of the work that they do. The combined stresses of these factors and influences are such that it can lead to a rapid decline in their performance and even cause burnout. This is why, companies must invest in relevant infrastructure and policy standards to enable women to not sacrifice their health for work performance for the sake of ensuring career safety.
Pregnancy and Parenting Are The Two Big Ones
Obviously, the biggest and most important one here is paid time off during pregnancy. Many companies prefer to keep the PTO time for the third trimester although there is talk now of extending this up to the second trimester or the midway mark for a standard pregnancy term. Furthermore, companies that offer pregnancy PTOs must make sure that this does not hamper the prospects of the persons concerned when they do return to work. One of the biggest stresses that women face during pregnancy is being looked over for promotion because they are out of the workplace. Read this CEO Magazine article which says,
As conversations around the impact that female sexual health issues and menopause have and on working women start to open up – employers have become more flexible and wellness resorts are now catering more to women who plan their vacations around key stages in life. Menopause retreats, babymoons, later-life wellbeing and so on are seeing a surge in popularity, more so with women in high-powered, high-stress jobs.
Also, Women’s Health often revolves around being able to communicate their problems to their managers or HR professionals. However, this is often not good enough and requires that they invest in their own therapy and health upkeep. In this case, companies can consider reimbursing either fully or partially the cost of any Wellness retreats or health-centric events that female employees might consider attending. This is a good way to endorse the company in the broader market and also exhibit that it cares for its female workers.
Parenting support to nurture talent and business performance
Key Takeaways:
Parenting is the single major contributor to women leaving work or suffering career derailment
Many women find themselves discriminated against when they must deal with parenting needs
Employers can help support parenting women especially through the early years of their parenthood
Parenting has become one of the biggest issues and strongest influencers of employee performance in today’s world. This was traditionally a problem women faced males also are facing issues relating to parenting and paid parenting leave is now a consideration for both genders and people of alternative identities. With that said the majority of parenting and parenting-related policies still apply to women and it is important to consider how they impact the performance of employees.
With the growth of remote and hybrid work networks, it is now possible to have a flexible and dynamic working schedule that enables women to spend more time with their families while still contributing to their work roles such that they can continue with their career growth as they had intended originally.
Parenting Support is a Crucial Business Performance Booster for Women
Parenting support, in many cases, also involves enabling working women to seek parenting counseling and advice related to child development so that they can put aside those concerns and focus on their performance instead. As per this article by Entrepreneur,
85% of women leave full-time work within three years of having their first child, and 19% leave work completely due to the lack of flexibility employers afford.
In some cases, when it comes to children with special needs such as those with autism or other issues such as no logical development problems ETC there needs to be special consideration given to the parent. Extending support to such parents in what is to be a trying time for them as they parent a special needs child is one of the best ways for a company to foster DEI-centric values and ethics in their workplace.
Executive partnership opportunities for focused-driven business performance
Key Takeaways:
High-performing women at work often need executive grooming and partnership
Mentoring at the executive level enables them to deliver their best work and grow into leading roles
Employers should make mentoring for successions for women a part of their DEI process
The traditional executive space has always been occupied by males almost exclusively. In more recent times there has been a call to reserve space for women on the executive board but this DEI effort has not really paid off. The reason here is that reserving a position based on gender does not work and it needs to be on a merit by merit basis. That is why the call of VR is to enable high-performing career women, even those who are raising families alone, to get executive membership opportunities.
This means that they get to work with an executive. If so, then they may take over that position once that person either moves up or is migrated to another position. This is now a part of standard succession planning and practices. It needs to be done by HR executives by default. The reason why this is particularly important is that it enables high-performing women. Through this, they showcase their skills directly without getting derailed by the problems we mentioned above.
Executive Partnerships Forge Female Leaders of Tomorrow
Further with direct exposure, they can more actively actualize their individual performance values and therefore, career prospects which then helps them make strategic decisions rather than being stuck at work in a position where they are unfulfilled or cannot put out their highest performance values.
Broadly speaking this applies to males as well but since there is a marked difference in the numbers of male executives versus female executives most DEI experts recommend that executive mentoring opportunities be given on the basis of performance first engender second with a priority for bringing up more talented female professionals.
How should your company support female workers from 2024?
Nurturing talent is a crucial part of business development and workforce management and fostering the performance of female employees is merely a part of that. The issues that we’ve mentioned above are often based on communication for which there needs to be appropriate employee engagement and DEI practices such that women can make the most of their jobs and career possibilities.
If implemented correctly, these policies and standards don’t just help women but all kinds of employees and present a positive image for the company in the broad professional market as well as industry space. But before you embark on any or all of these endeavors it is important to identify what the specific needs of your company are. For that you need a high-performance employee engagement and team collaboration support software like LEAD.bot
LEAD.bot is a team engagement platform available on Slack and Teams. It is an all-in-one team development software with features like virtual coffee chats, buddy programs, birthday celebrations & work anniversary celebrations, new hire onboarding programs, and Pulse Surveys.
LEAD.bot also offers cutting-edge Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) for big enterprises and institutions. Executive to mid-level managers use ONA to gain highly actionable insights and build strong workplace connections. Using this app enables developing innovative employee engagement ideas to connect employees and foster better organizational health, employee retention, and overall performance with this simple app!
LEAD.bot is a product of LEAD.app and we also LEAD.bot’s sister app Sunrize which showcases workplace attendance by graphs right on Slack! Book a demo now!
