Go home for dinner. Bosses, are you listening?

Pacific Brands CEO Sue Morphet has some excellent advice for her fellow executives: if you want to hold on to talented women in your organisation, make sure your staff are home in time for dinner.

The Herald Sun reports:

Ms Morphet says long, family-unfriendly hours are killing off women’s chances of progressing into senior management positions. “The most important thing we have to do is look after women through their 30s,” she said. “I’ve got daughters that age myself, and I’m watching them come in and out of their careers with babies.

“The most important thing to keep women on their way to senior executive roles … is to ensure that men and women take accountability for the domestic environment.”

Ms Morphet said she leads by example. “The upside of being a working mother is that it forces you to go home for dinner,” she says. “You do literally pack up, put stuff in your bag, go home and have dinner and then when the kids are doing their homework, you do yours, too.”

That hardly sounds revolutionary but in fact, it is.

Perhaps you’ve done the walk of shame. Not the one where you go home in last night’s clothes –  it’s the one women do in the afternoon when we rush off to collect our kids from daycare or after-school care. Where we have to pick up our handbags and walk past our colleagues and out the door. It’s an extremely uncomfortable thing to do but every working mother will be familiar with it.

A few years ago, when I worked in an office full of men, hardly any of them had kids. The hours were long. Everyone arrived by 8 and rarely left before 9. I had a baby and another child at home. I was breastfeeding. I had to leave at 5:30. I came up with a novel solution to the walk of shame. Every day at lunchtime, I’d sneak down to my car and hide my jacket, my handbag and my car keys under the front seat.

At 5:30, I’d get up from my desk, pick up some empty manilla folders, and I’d hurry to the lift, pretending to talk on my phone so nobody could ask where I was going. It looked like I was merely on my way to a meeting in another part of the building but in fact I would scurry to my car and ducking down, zoom out of the carpark and begin the commute home. Often on the way, I’d speak on bluetooth to my friend Paula Joye who also had a 6 month old baby and an older child waiting for her and as we sat in traffic, we’d joke wryly about spending “20 quality minutes’ with our kids before they went to bed.

It was a miserable time for me and after a few months – for a variety of reasons – I made the decision to get out of executive life and start my own business. There were major financial sacrifices to be made, to be sure, but it was worth it because with a young family, what I wanted even more than money was flexibility. I wanted to be able to work around the needs of my family. And in the industry I’d been working in, that just wasn’t possible.

Is it realistic for every industry to be flexible? Probably not. But surely it’s time we stopped measuring someone’s commitment to their job – or their ability to do it – by the length of time they’re physically behind their desk. That’s such an out-dated and ridiculous concept – and yet one that is entrenched in so many workplaces.

And don’t even get me started on people who call meetings for 8:30am or 5pm. That’s either selfish or passive-aggressive.

Most women – and many men – clock on for another shift after the kids go to bed. But Sue Morphet’s point about being home in time for dinner is such a valid one. Whether you have kids or not, are in a relationship or not, having a life outside work and keeping some semblance of balance is crucial if you’re going to be of any value to your employer. Because it’s not just parents who are looking for that balance, Generation Y have no interest in sticking with a job that doesn’t allow them to have a life.

So if you’re not interested in accomodating the desire of your staff to have lives outside work? Well, you can probably kiss goodbye the most talented among your staff who will seek out a boss who understands the value of flexibility.

Perhaps you disagree with the idea of flexibility at work. Perhaps you think women should stop trying to have careers and kids and just do one thing at a time. Or perhaps you think we should all stop whinging and just get on with it….

Have long working hours or an inflexible boss prompted you to change jobs or re-think your career?

Speak up….