The Cost of Working Parent Burnout and What Leaders Can Do | Dr. Rosina McAlpine

Something you touched on there.

that really resonated with me is I might not know, but someone has an answer.

Because recently I had an epiphany where I was like, you know what? During university days, when you are tasked with writing a paper or a research report, I was never intimidated by not knowing the answer to the hypothesis.

I was more intimidated by the fact that I have to figure out how to put 15 to 20 to 40 patients together, to be quite honest.

And I think somewhere along the way, when we reach the corporate world or when we reach new challenges in life, we forget that it's okay to not know.

And it's the curiosity and the desire to find out is what will help us.

So diving into the data piece, though, you mentioned, I want to make sure that I have what I need to not only equip myself, but then more so the population.

space, what would you see as like one common theme you've noticed for designing the workplace and so that it is conducive to being family friendly?

The first thing that's most important is understanding the employee.

And when I'm running leadership training programs, the first question I ask is, do you know the proportion of working parents in your organization? Do you know the proportion of women in your organization, in your workforce? Or as a manager, how many women do you manage? How many working parents do you manage? Whenever I do that, whether I've got 100 people or five people on the training, there'll always be a reasonable percentage that say, I do not know.

Step number one for a family-friendly organization is know your workforce because you cannot mitigate any risks.

You cannot support them if you don't even know that they have caring responsibilities, if you don't know that they are a woman.

The reason why I say I take that out of specifically is because we know from all the data, even though dads are stepping up a little more now, there is nowhere near equality.

So we know that women are doing much more home care, much more childcare, despite also in part or full-time employment.

So that's why I say you need to know who are your working parents and how many of those are actually women.