WW 04: A plaster for a broken leg

Penelope Jones on reimagining, repairing, and rebooting our relationship to work

Hi there - you’re reading the fourth installment of Wellwatching. You can explore previous interviews here. 

For today’s conversation I was lucky enough to chat to Penelope Jones, a career coach and the founder of My So-Called Career, which helps women build sustainable, positive relationships with work and challenges organisations to do better by them. Prior to setting up MSCC, Penelope held leadership positions at the Guardian and Conde Nast during significant periods of transformation and upheaval, both within the media and in her own life. Not only does she know what she’s talking about, but she’s also lived through a lot of what her clients experience. 

It’s no surprise, then, that our chat focussed squarely on the mega-topic of work and its impact on our broader wellbeing. Our conversation covered everything from professional breaking points, the need for work communities and grassroots activism, through to what’s wrong with our definition of flexible working today and what diversity & inclusion actually means at work.

Tell me a bit about yourself: What do you do?

I’m a career coach who works with early- and mid-career women who are feeling either overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their current career trajectory, or simply stuck. I set up my company, My So-Called Career, to help women be more conscious of the role that work plays in their lives and take ownership of their careers. 

For some women, this requires revolution – possibly in the form of a career pivot, a radical reset, retraining or going back to school. For others, it’s more of an evolution of what they currently do and how they do it. Either way, I help women relate to their work in a healthier way and make work, work better for them.

Why do you do what you do? How did you get started? 

The catalyst was quite literally falling over from working so hard in my last full time media job. Alarmingly, it was the second time in my career that I’d hit breaking point. Over the years I had realized that despite working so hard, I felt really passive, as if everything in my career – new opportunities, promotions, increasing responsibilities – were simply ‘happening’ to me. They didn’t bring me joy or a sense of accomplishment. And I wasn’t the only one: I heard echoes of this from colleagues and friends. I was certain that there had to be a better way of doing things.

As soon as I came back from Christmas holidays in 2018, I handed in my notice. Not knowing what I wanted to do next, I spent the next few months speaking to a huge number of women about their careers, their life, their work, their relationships. Regardless of individual circumstances, the main theme that kept coming up was DISCONTENT. These chats inspired me to put my money where my mouth was, and help women envision and architect careers that allowed for more balance, fulfilment and happiness. 

This is still a relatively new chapter for me, but every single day I have interactions with women who make bold choices, decide not to put up with what they’ve settled with before, and are taking steps to own their trajectory. It’s deeply inspiring.

How do you think people’s understanding of wellness has changed over the past few years in the context of work but also more broadly? What do people need, want and expect?

To answer this question, we need to remember that we are staring down a future of much longer working lives, with much less stability and security. There are currently five generations in the workplace – that really says it all for me. Alongside this, we've seen a three-fold increase in workplace stress, depression and anxiety over the last 18 months.

Without the guaranteed monetary gains and acquisition of tangible assets that typified the working culture of our parents’ generation, there’s now a growing sense of doing less and doing it better to counteract the overwhelming stress we all face. 

This plays out in a few ways: in broad terms, people are less tolerant of poor workplace culture. Just look at the recent protest of junior employees at Goldman Sachs. The expectation that the price of high pay is long hours is starting to fall apart; fewer and fewer people are willing to work like that anymore. 

More specifically, there’s recognition that structural support, not just money, is what people seek. In the book The Lonely Century, the author Norina Hertz talks about how modern life has rendered us far less connected to communities. In the context of the workplace, that means that people have felt that it’s on individual employees to be more productive, improve situations, or quit if it’s not what they want. Companies have increasingly failed in their duty of care to their employees and have absolved themselves of responsibility to address these issues – but they can no longer get away with it. There’s a cultural expectation now that the workplace needs to make employees feel more connected to and cared for by others as well.

Who or what is driving and influencing these changes?

I think the government’s tone-deaf response to the pandemic is in part what is fueling individual activists. The fact that in March the government was already talking about people having ‘enough days off’ and pushing a return to the office felt like a slap in the face to everyone, regardless of personal and economic situation. I don’t think the media has necessarily done a brilliant job in this area either. 

In response, change has come from individual campaigners: people who have stuck their neck out and said ‘enough’ - like Joeli Brearley, who runs Pregnant Then Screwed, and Marcus Rashford on food poverty.  Similarly, there are many people who have done a huge amount of work to facilitate a conversation about mental health at all levels of society. They’ve filled in where government policies and the media’s portrayal of these issues have failed us. 

What do you think is wrong with the way workplaces currently approach wellness and wellbeing?

Wellness still feels like an add-on rather than a fundamental element of workplace culture. I run a weekly women’s career call where I recently posed the question about workplace wellness benefits, and the answer was almost always identical across the board: people are offered yoga, or meditation, or therapy, but they can’t take advantage of these services because they have too much work to do. The workload issue isn’t addressed. So whilst you have one arm of a company saying that employee wellbeing is being invested in, there is little being done about the more systemic challenges of, for example, everyone trying to do three people's work. If wellness is only the responsibility of HR or occupational health, it’s always going to feel like sticking a plaster on to fix a broken leg. 

Change needs to start at the board level. Upper management aren’t having meaningful conversations about realistic outputs with stakeholders, who ultimately are putting pressure on these companies to perform. This is exacerbated by a lack of diversity: with boards and leadership teams who all look and think the same, there is no one challenging the model or the demands placed on the organization, and the culture that creates. So when we think about diversity and inclusion, it’s really about how different people will help to inform policies that make life better for everyone, not just senior white men. Millennial and Gen Z employees are very aware that current policies make a small group of very well-off people more well-off – often at their expense – and that the system needs an overhaul. 

With the exit out of lockdown, this can and should be a really exciting time to experiment with solutions, and engage employees on how to collectively and meaningfully improve work. The motivations for doing so have to be sincere – the goal should be creating the best conditions for people to do their best. If it’s simply about increasing productivity, for example, it won’t work.

Is anyone getting it right?

I do think that there are a few organizations who have set a great example at how to do workplace wellbeing well at scale. Over the last few months I’ve been particularly interested in Channel4’s efforts, such as giving the entire business a day off, making lunch breaks the norm and not the exception and marking out meeting free time in the organisational calendar.  Of course, a day off doesn’t magically solve any issues, but I think it shows that leadership cares enough to make that happen for everyone in the business, and sends a powerful message to advertisers and their stakeholders that employee wellbeing is a priority. It also demonstrates that we can make things possible if they are deemed to be sufficiently important.

We know that COVID has disproportionately impacted women’s relationship to work. How do we address this?

To make things equal, one side has to come down for the other side to come up. You can't expect a workplace to become better for any group if nothing changes for those who benefit most. And so, you need people to buy into that at all levels. To understand why that equality is important, and why it’s something that we should desire, not just tolerate. Without it, you end up with an echo chamber where the group in question are trying to solve problems that they never created in the first place.

I’m currently discussing some interesting work with an organization about how they build forward and better, having realized that many of its policies had inherently led to trade-offs and compromises made almost exclusively by female employees. We’re asking ourselves questions such as, how can we make workplace policies more representative? And how do we define ‘representative’ in the context of work and this organization’s culture? It’s about creating shared vocabulary and shared goals, with the aim to prove that by making things better at work for women we make things better for everyone. I can’t solve systemic workplace issues on my own, but I can start by helping more women get what they need from work.

Where do you think workplace wellbeing will be in 5 years?

Firstly, change will inevitably happen, and soon, because of the skyrocketing generational demand for it.  In a recent US research study, 56% of Millennial respondents reported having left a job for mental health reasons, rising to 75% for Gen Z, against 34% respondents overall.  With this many people willing to vote with their feet, the companies trying to attract them will be forced to adapt. Beyond financial incentives, they’re going to have to redefine what a great work package looks like.

I think workweek experiments, and ultimately shorter workweeks, are a key trend to watch. All of the data from trials in the UK and New Zealand have shown positive results. There are plenty of sceptics, but if there’s anything the last year has shown us, it’s that ‘impossible’ changes are very possible at a push. As James Suzman says in his book Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, we as a society don't respond to change very easily, but when it is forced on us we are incredibly adaptive. If we have made working from home a norm through necessity, imagine how we could reimagine the workweek itself if we put our minds to it.

With that I hope we’ll see less judgment around ‘traditional’ working schedules and styles, and more options to ensure that work is contributing to, not detracting from, our quality of life. ‘Flexible working’ shouldn’t refer to taking three hours off in the middle of the day to look after your child, only to make that time up by working until 1 in the morning. That’s not balance in my mind. I also hope that as a society, we drop the stigma of ‘not working hard’ or ‘not being ambitious’ that’s currently attached to set-ups such as job shares and part-time work. I think we’re getting closer to this reality, but there’s still a long way still to go.

What's been your biggest wellbeing breakthrough over the last year?

Undergoing treatment for cervical cancer! Which, beyond sustaining life through a serious illness, taught me a lot about my relationship to work. 

Since starting my business, I’ve considered my work-life balance quite good. But when I received my diagnosis and had to take five months off work at the risk of losing my business, I had to really reset my thoughts on what I thought ‘good’ looked like. I didn't know when or if I’d be well enough to work full-time again, so I had to set up my job in a way that could be sustainable regardless of my health. Ironically, I had been telling the women I coach to not overburden themselves, whilst progressively wearing myself out (even though it was out of pure enthusiasm). I think I’ve now realized how to fully, truly live my values when it comes to how I think about work. 

 What does wellbeing mean to you?

I recently attended a lecture on existentialism for my Master’s degree, and an idea the instructor introduced sums this up for me perfectly. It’s obvious, but we're all going to die. So let's live with passion and responsibility while we're here. Embracing the time and opportunities that we have with passion, but doing so with a sense of responsibility to the planet, the people around us, and ourselves. For me, living with both passion and responsibility is the best way to achieve wellbeing. 

What’s the next challenge that you’d love to take on?

It scares me to say this out loud, but I’m going to put it out there as it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for about 18 months. I'd love to interview 100 women about the role that work plays in their lives and their so-called ‘careers’, and turn it into something physical – whether that’s a book, a newsletter, a website. It’s always on my mind, so I’m going to make it happen. 

You can find out more about Penelope and My So-Called Career at https://mysocalledcareer.com/ or on Instagram.