Key Research

1. Practices Supporting Women

EFFICACY PRACTICES SUPPORTING WOMEN

• • Flexible Working Arrangements emerged the most often cited practices that support women.
    Flexible working arrangements are the most highly adopted practice from our survey and most utilized by women, followed by taking carer’s leave; in our study carers leave leads to more trust in the organization and resilience.
  • It is important that working flexibly is not seen as a “women’s arrangement”
    It greatly helps women balance their family and work life, it helps them even more if these arrangements are just seen as normal business practice and are utilized to the same extent of their male peers.
  • Flexible working arrangements lead to more trust, wellbeing and engagement, but it also leads to more burnout
    A potential difficulty women face is when separating their work from their home
    lives and also to do with potential work overload.
  • Coaching and mentoring are also seen as valuable investments by women.
    Coaching is seen as being particularly helpful at the moment of career transitioning or change, such as returning from maternity leave. Availability of coaching leads to lower turnover intentions.
  • Importance of mentoring in their workplace
    Mentoring is more about having that support available to them when they are facing challenges at work. It also leads to more wellbeing and lower turnover intentions

Fig.1 Percentage of women CPA
and partners in Australia

2. Big 4 vs Non-Big 4*

• Big 4 were significantly more proactive in implementing FORMAL supporting practices (Figure 2) such as carers leave and the availability of flexible working arrangements.
• Big 4 were significantly less proactive in having INFORMAL supporting practices such as their workers having high degrees of autonomy in the work that they do.
• Women in Big 4 also show lower team-based PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY which is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking and team members feel accepted and respected, but also low supervisory LEADERSHIP SUPPORT and a poor supportive culture.
  This is important because in the study we see that while FORMAL practices can have some positive psychological impact, the INFORMAL supporting practices have a much greater positive psychological impact and wellbeing outcomes.
• Non-Big 4 firms exhibit higher WELLBEING and RESILIENCE than Big 4
• Impact and interpersonal trust at work are also much higher and in terms of OUTCOMES, work engagement is also significantly higher for women employed in non-big 4 firms.
• BURNOUT levels, however, are about the same across Big 4 and non-Big 4 workplaces.
• TURNOVER intentions are significantly higher in non-Big 4 firms, despite higher health outcomes.

* Big 4 indicates the following professional service firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC.

4. What can organisation do?

• Culture change is key.
  A more authentic approach to work-life balance.
  The culture of many accounting firms was described to
  us and being completely inconsistent with the ‘worklife balance’ narrative that those same firms like to spruik. Many workplace cultures demand long hours and have a very competitive working environment.
  Many mid to late career women told us that it was these cultural reasons why they had to leave their prior workplaces, as the culture was incompatible with their personal needs.
  Many of the young women saw this as a culture that they could tolerate before motherhood but they could not see how they could possibly balance motherhood and career in this type of working environment.
• While managers publicly support work life balance, most do not model it themselves, and this seems to be essential in order to create an authentic culture that is consistent with that narrative the organisation likes to spruik.
• “Huge risk to personal brand” to disclose mental health challenges -> burn out acceptance by the accounting firms
  Investing in creating a psychologically safe environment is essential to retaining women who face mental health challenges and not having unsustainable workloads will help enormously in preventing mental health challenges and burnout in the first place.
• Workplaces can also actively create more part-time leadership positions
  Dispel the myth that women who work part-time are not ambitious or not serious about their work and cannot be successful.

5. COVID19 pandemic and practices supporting women?

• The demands of work are very high.
  In addition to this many women have lost resources
  that usually help them balance their home and work life such as lost childcare, access to family for help and even domestic help such as cleaners. In many households there is an unequal distribution for domestic arrangements that women have with their partners.
• Changes in the perception of supporting practices.
  The pandemic is likely to significantly help reduce the stigma of working from home or working flexible hours. The pandemic is also likely to lead to more men choosing to utilise flexible working arrangements. However, there is still a very long way to go in making flexible working arrangements a more accessible option for women and in embedding this practice firmly into the workplace culture.

Other ongoing projects

Work in progress: Female Accountants Well-being and the role of Organisational Voice, Emotional Labour and the interplay with Management Control Systems