At a special ceremony in Auckland, leadership speaker and consultant Ellen Joan Ford was presented with a Blake Leader Award, inspired by the extraordinary life of fellow revolutionary Sir Peter Blake. She talks to Joanna Wane about how to “change the freaking world”.
For someone who spent the first decade of her career in the army, Ellen Joan Ford seems to have instinctively known you don’t always get the best outcome working strictly by the book.
As an engineering officer in her 20s, managing construction projects from Antarctica to Afghanistan, she took the words of Dolly Parton to heart. Ditching a rigid 9 to 5 schedule, her teams took a more flexible approach, going hard to tick off the tasks required and then deciding how to spend the time they had left.
On the US base at McMurdo Sound, for example, that involved cross-country skiing and a couple of snow-survival training sessions, where they built igloos and slept in them overnight.
“I’ve always had this thing in my mind about outputs,” says Ford, who used to iron her dad’s business shirts as a kid for 50 cents a piece and got so efficient, that he regretted not locking her into an hourly rate. “In Antarctica, it wasn’t specific hours every day. It was about getting stuff done and then doing something fun.”
Fast forward a few years, Ford was at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, working a fulltime job (on full salary) across a four-day week, after negotiating with her manager to have Fridays off with her young son. She was also doing a PhD on the side.
Her thesis topic was the leadership experiences and social wellbeing of women in the workforce, using the New Zealand Army as a case study. What she found, alongside some serious issues around gender discrimination and sexual harm, was significant struggles with the logistics of being a working parent - something she quickly realised went far beyond the military.
After sharing her insights on the corporate speakers’ circuit, Ford started looking into it more deeply and found herself inundated with the stories of some 500 parents (mostly mothers) in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US, the UK and Singapore.
All of them fit into one of three categories: parents who’d given up and left the workforce altogether; parents who worked fulltime and had their children in fulltime childcare, and parents who worked part-time - in many cases, receiving less pay than fulltime team members while still being required to complete the same outputs. The system was broken, she decided, and the #WorkSchoolHours movement was born.
Now an international speaker, facilitator and consultant focused on leadership and workplace culture, Ford sees her new book, #WorkSchoolHours: A Revolution for Parents, Workplaces and the World, as a global call to action. “This is not a self-help book. It’s not going to contain tips, tricks or hacks for managing the juggle. Instead, it’s a change-the-freaking-world book,” she writes.
“#WorkSchoolHours isn’t a social cause or a pity push that sees us sticking up for mums because they’ve got it hard. Nor is it a handout for parents. #WorkSchoolHours is a good business idea - one that’s a profitable way for businesses to retain the talented people that they have, ensure they are highly engaged and have them continue delivering excellent value.”
Ford isn’t talking about a disadvantaged minority here. Roughly 80 per cent of people do eventually become parents. Nor is she advocating for everyone to shrink their working day or to keep kids in school for a couple of extra hours. Instead, she advocates building flexibility into the workplace in a way that benefits everyone.
“This ingrained 9-to-5 model is archaic in the sense that it was developed more than a century ago when the workforce was effectively comprised of men,” she tells the Herald. “Now, very few families have a dedicated caregiver at home, but we haven’t changed the construct. We live in this world where you’re expected to parent as if you don’t have a job and work as if you don’t have kids. And that’s the fundamental problem I’m trying to solve.”
According to the Harvard Business Review, between a third and a half of successful mid-life career women in the US don’t have children. New Zealand research into what’s become known as the “motherhood penalty” found it limits a woman’s potential career earnings by 12.5 percent, and in a UK study of more than 6000 women, working mothers recorded significantly higher stress levels than women without children.
In Australia, the New South Wales Government has a research pilot under way to trial extended school hours in an attempt to alleviate that timetable clash between adults and children. For Ford, that’s missing the point. Surveys show the vast majority of people - especially young people - want flexible work and her book is filled with practical examples of how companies and organisations can benefit from going at least some way to accommodate that (see below).
Former banker Jen Taylor hadn’t met Ford when she quit her job with a major lender because the corporate world wasn’t compatible with family life. But she and her sharemilker husband Adam, who live on a lifestyle block in rural Manawatū and have two young children, knew there had to be a way to do things differently.
Three years after setting up her own advisory company, Taylored Mortgages, she has offices in Levin, Palmerston North and Tauranga and has expanded into life and health insurance. Most of her nine staff are part-timers, with hours of work that might change on a monthly basis depending on childcare commitments.
That built-in flexibility isn’t exclusively pitched at parents, though. One of her financial advisors is a keen wakesurfer who might jump in the car and head off to the lake with her partner mid-week if the weather conditions are right. Taylor’s fluid operating style has also played a key part in supporting a team member through cancer.
“I don’t work #WorkSchoolHours myself, at least not yet, but I can go on school camps and I can be there for pick-ups or assemblies,” she says. “Two of the team will have kids at kindy soon, so they’ll be able to jump into some more hours. It’s whatever you need, as long as the work’s done.”
Last year, Taylor heard Ford speak at a women in business event her company had sponsored. The research she presented in support of the #WorkSchoolHours initiative was so validating it brought Taylor to tears. Ironically, the toughest challenge hasn’t been pushback from clients, who have been overwhelmingly supportive, but changing the mindset of staff conditioned to stay chained to their desks.
“I don’t want to use the word PTSD, but sometimes it is like that for people, because they’ve had a really horrific experience in that corporate world. It took a worldwide pandemic for people to be allowed to work from home. And you never take sick days unless you’re on your deathbed.”
On Wednesday night, Ford’s impact as a transformational New Zealander was recognised with a Blake Leader Award, inspired by the extraordinary life of fellow revolutionary Sir Peter Blake. In her years as an army officer, Ford did a tour of duty with a construction team in Afghanistan and the award also acknowledged her involvement in a complex mission to bring 563 Afghan evacuees to New Zealand in 2021 after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.
At the time, she was still breastfeeding her older son, Toby, as she worked the phones and gave media interviews. He is at school now but she still takes most Fridays off to spend with his younger brother Monty, who is 3.
Like New Zealand-based entrepreneur Andrew Barnes, who pioneered the growing four-day week movement, her task is to convince organisations that taking a more innovative approach is a commercially smart proposition - good for staff retention and an antidote to the “quiet quitting” that can happen when staff become disengaged.
“When people feel valued and that they belong, when they have some autonomy and have purpose, they are happier, more engaged, more innovative, more creative, more dedicated. And they make you more money.”
Moving away from the 9-to-5 construct doesn’t require a sudden, dramatic transformation but collaborative, incremental change, writes Ellen Joan Ford in #WorkSchoolHours. Managers need time to consult and figure out how best to apply the principles, while teams need to see what works and how they can become more efficient.
“Small changes add up and make a difference. Not only that but when we lower the stakes, we’re also safe to try. We embrace the possibility of failure as a way of learning and we can better mitigate the risks of missteps.”
Here are some of the changes organisations have made when taking their first step:
#WorkSchoolHours: A Revolution for Parents, Workplaces and the World (Intelligent Ink Press, $34.99) is on sale now in selected bookstores and can be ordered through Ford’s website, ellenjoanford.com.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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