To keep women in the workforce, the best way to lend them a hand might just be to lend them an ear.
Women are struggling with the high demands of work and home life during COVID. Forty-seven percent of women reported dealing with anxiety and depression, compared to 38% of men, according to KFF Health Tracking Polls.
To help women combat stress and burnout, career coaching platform Bravely connects employees with industry professionals to discuss and strategize issues they’re facing at work. Since the beginning of the pandemic, women are four times more likely to book one-on-one sessions to discuss work-related stress than pre-pandemic numbers.
“There are certain employees that may be facing more challenging circumstances right now,” says Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of Bravely. “We don't provide enough support for things like
The total number of women who have left the labor force since the start of the pandemic
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One-on-one coaching sessions give women a space to not only vent their frustrations, but also workshop solutions, according to Sheehan.
“Every session that an employee books is driven by their own needs,” she says. “Those needs get identified in the session with the coach and they start talking about their own set of circumstances and then they develop a plan of what to work on.”
Across the board, employees are having difficulty around focusing, organizing themselves and finding the resilience that they need to get through the day, Sheehan says. Coaching can help them sort through these challenges.
“We see the impact that coaching has had on the employees that we’ve supported in the last year,” she says. “It drives a huge amount of productivity, engagement and, ultimately, retention for companies.”
In a recent interview, Sheehan shared how professional coaching improves retention and provides a much-needed resource for female employees.
How has the coaching landscape been disrupted by COVID?
I think coaching has always had a measure of emotional support attached to it. So right now there's a huge focus on mental health and the need to support well-being. A lot of the stress in our lives comes from the workplace, so we can help people figure out how to face those challenges early on so that they don't turn into bigger problems. [Coaching] can help people learn how to take their emotions out of conversations so that they can really present what they need to be successful. If they feel like they're making progress in getting to the next level of their careers, all of that lowers stress and contributes to that sense of well-being that companies are so focused on.
What are the issues women are bringing to the table?
Women typically have the largest share of responsibility for child care and taking care of the home. That hasn't really changed much over time. So we're seeing parents in general really struggling over the course of the pandemic, but women are taking a huge hit and are concerned about how this will impact their careers.
I gave birth to my daughter in late November and I was four days back then we decided to send everyone home. I was back home with an insane amount of work and no child care. I haven't been able to lessen my load and it really had me questioning my worth and whether I was capable of being productive. It took me a few months to work through that, but I started to realize everything I am accomplishing, despite all of this.
That’s the perspective we’re trying to help women see themselves through. We're trying to equip women to go and have conversations about whatever they may be facing with their managers or leaders inside their organization.
What are the biggest missteps being made by companies that are costing them their female employee base?
Organizations need to think about the individual needs of their employees and how to meet them with a wide array of resources. My challenges are not the same as the challenges of the people that work for me necessarily, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn’t be receiving some sort of support that meets them where they're at. One of the things I've tried really hard to do is not mask the challenges or the stress that I'm under because I have other mothers on my team. If I'm showing up and acting like I've got it all together every day, how does that serve them?
