Transcript
This is one of the most challenging things we come across, because the first thing a mother feels after having been at home with young children and managing the house, particularly for the first time, is they feel like they've been disconnected, and they probably lack a fair bit of self worth, because they don't value, or feel the community ... the work community values what they've been doing, so they feel disconnected.
My view is a bit different. I, if I'm looking at time management, and we've talked a bit about time management, my perfect model for a great time manager is a mother working with a child or children.
If you ask them what they do and how they manage their day and their week, they get out of bed very early, they do all these things they do play lunch and lunch and get everything ready, get their husband out of bed usually, get them going, drop the kids at daycare or school or wherever it is and then get to work. And they go home again and they usually cook dinner and get everything organised for the kids for school the next day.
So if you want a good time manager, a working mother is one of the best you can get.
So, I'm a great fan of women returning to work, only because of my philosophy.
But I think the first thing they should do is to feel that they've been doing a worthwhile thing. That's a very important thing. They haven't lost the skills they had before they had their child. Those skills are still there. And a working mother doesn't have to be totally disconnected. There's the Internet these days, there's magazines, and newspapers. They can keep up to date, and they can also once they've decided to go back to work, they can do a bit of a ramp up, if you like, on what the business community has been doing and the target organisations that they're looking to go and join, they can start to research that organisation, upgrade their knowledge and skills about what the company has been doing.
So they can get themselves on the runway early with knowledge and information.
And it's very easy to research companies these days, and it's very easy to look a bit historical about what they've been doing while they might have been out of the workforce. So, value who they are, value what skills they have, realise that there are lots of out there for talented people, and people who need to get back to the workforce.
Good quality time management in employees is the critical thing. So I'm a real fan of women returning to the workforce.
