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roundtable


round. So, a few days a week I arrive at my desk by 7.30am in London, but I’ll make sure that I leave ahead of the traffic, to be back to help the children with bathtime and bedtime routines …. because those are the hours which impact least upon my family.”


Aly Taylor, HR director at Taylor Made, pointed out that there were no female role models at the time when she started to climb the corporate ladder, so she thought that she had to do everything herself. However, her husband was very supportive and was able to work flexibly to help with the childcare, until eventually they could afford childcare that allowed her to work more and to give some space for some ‘grown up time’.


McQueen: “I had to quickly get very ‘ruthless’ with my time – a meeting would go into the diary for 30 minutes, rather than the previous ‘standard’ of 60 minutes.”


Laura Davis, managing director of Reality HR, agreed wholeheartedly with McQueen on the subject of time management and the organisation of the working day: “We’re always looking to attract returning mums; there are some amazingly talented women out there. We allow them to manage their own days, so they often start work at 6am answering emails, before going off and doing the school run, and then coming in to work. The ethos remains – ‘My family comes first’ – but the job gets done just as well.”


Eleanor Bradley, COO at Nominet, noted: “We need to encourage everyone, women and men, to work flexibly and achieve a work:life balance. Until men also feel able to take leave and work around their family commitments without being judged, it will always be harder for women to do this.”


Men and women – workplace differences


Tamsin Napier-Munn questioned the roundtable as to whether they thought women could push themselves forwards effectively, or if they tended to over- compensate?


In response, Mark Akehurst, head of business unit at Clarify, cited the example of his organisation’s female CEO Claire Edmunds, a past winner of the Women In Business Woman of the Year SME award. “Is Claire a traditional CEO? Well, nothing comes before her family, but it’s all about balance in her case. She has a very supportive team around her, whom she relies upon and who in turn, rely upon her … but it’s


not about gender, it’s about the skill set. Claire leads from the front, she runs the organisation, she sets the agenda, and she establishes the tone, so it all works very effectively in our organisation … and as we scale, balance will remain a priority – and this is not just the preserve of the leadership team, at all levels parental responsibility is respected whether this is mum taking time off to care for a sick child or for one of the dad’s who coaches the football team to leave early on Thursday afternoons.”


Kate Collings, regional head of support for Barclays, picked up the theme of culture in large companies agreeing that it needed to be driven from the top-down, but noting that this was a slower process in larger organisations, as well as remarking on the difference in male-versus-female working attitudes: “Financial services has historically been a very male- dominated industry. There are a lot of females employed at operational level, but this percentage starts to reduce very quickly as you look further up the corporate ladder. Yes, maybe organisations could support females better, especially as statistics show that men tend to be more competitive and confident and put themselves forward for a role, whereas the reverse is true for most females.”


Shimmin agreed with this observation of male versus female ambition in the workplace: “It’s interesting – when a man is complimented and told he has done a good job, he tends to go ‘Yeah’, whereas a woman will respond ‘Ah, but I didn’t do this ...’, or ‘I didn’t do that’. So, it’s often a question of different management styles; for example, praising women by saying, ‘you were as good as (or better than) your peers’.”


Rowe followed up on this observation, asking the roundtable: “How do we ensure those conversations are taking place?” She noted that men would apply for jobs, whereas women tended to need to be asked to do so. In her own case, the spur was thinking “I could do a better job than him”.


Davis remarked that this was the reason for having talent programmes, so that organisations would not have to wait for women to apply – they would already have been pre-identified for a certain role; “We can then say, in two years’ time, that’s your goal. It’s a change in mindset.”


Lorraine Collis, CEO of Elm Group, agreed with the concept, but pointed out that it was not possible to push females all the way up the corporate ladder – the desire and push had to


Continued overleaf ... THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – MARCH 2017 businessmag.co.uk 33


Aly Taylor


Brenda Long


Philip Smith


Lorraine Collis


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