You know the type. She’s the one in whom everyone confides at work. Usually, she’s the first to notice if someone is in bad form and she always remembers people’s birthdays. She’s easy to work with and always there to help, but she’s been stuck at the same rung on the career ladder for years.
This woman doesn’t work in human resources. She’s not a manager with people responsibilities and she’s not an executive coach. Yet, without her support, the team would fall apart.
Sabrina Fitzsimons, an assistant professor at Dublin City University, as well as other international workplace researchers use the term “wife work” to describe this type of undervalued, invisible emotional and relationship workplace labour. Researchers have identified examples including taking on someone else’s responsibilities, mentoring, committee work, career-development support and other similar relational or “being nice” duties.
Many of these activities are helpful to colleagues and team cohesion, but they’re “non-promotable tasks” and tend not to be part of the individual’s key performance indicators (KPIs) in their role.
RM Block
I’ve seen cases where these individuals may take on emotionally loaded or domestic-type tasks that their managers may be avoiding, don’t notice or have delegated to them. It can range from counselling younger staff members on relationship breakdown or health issues to cleaning up – alone – after a staff lunch that they’ve organised to welcome new team members.
It is work that matters to the organisation, but goes largely unnoticed and unrewarded and often will not help with career progression.
Clinical psychologist and executive coach Anne Welsh says you need to look at the issue both from the individual level and the systems level.
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“If we say, ‘We have to wait for the system to change’, then we’re going to be waiting for a real long time. If we only say ‘Here’s what women need to do differently’ then it’s putting all of the onus on women. The reality is there has to be both for real change to happen,” Welsh says.
Women, who are largely the ones who take on these tasks at work, might not even realise they’re doing it. Girls are socialised from a young age to be people-pleasers and perfectionists and this follows them into the workplace.
Perfectionism is thought of as a standalone issue, but it’s intertwined with people-pleasing and wanting to be relationship preservers. Women are expected to prioritise other people’s needs, to read the emotions in the room and, kind of, to tap dance around all of them, Welsh says.
“This is part of how we’re supposed to perform womanhood and femaleness. So with perfectionism, we know that women are held to higher expectations and are judged more harshly when they fall short of those expectations.”
Women need to acknowledge and challenge their own perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies and others’ expectations of them.
“It gets you to a certain point at work and then it stops working. When you make that leap into leadership, you can’t be a people-pleaser. That’s not going to work for you. You cannot be a perfectionist: A, you’ll burn out, but, B, you won’t be seen as a leader, right,” she said.
When it comes to team dynamics and cohesion, emotional support and awareness are essential, but it’s not generally recognised in individual team members’ performance evaluations or on promotional checklists.
Making it visible
Workplaces can inadvertently reproduce the gendered assumptions of domestic life – that someone, often a woman, will notice what needs doing, support those around them and quietly hold things together without that labour being properly recognised, Fitzsimons says.
The issue here is women are doing valuable work that organisations rely on, but they may not be properly rewarded or promoted for that work, she says.
“If the work is essential enough for an organisation to rely on, then it is essential enough to be included in contracts, workload models, promotion systems and remuneration.”
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If you’re caught in the “helpful work wife but not promoted” trap, you might look, with your manager, at what has been added to this role without being named, Fitzsimons says. “What would only be noticed if she stopped doing it? Is this work visible in her appraisal? Does it count when decisions are made about promotion, salary or progression?”
“Until organisations name, value and reward the full reality of the work they depend on, many women will remain caught in a very modern professional contradiction: they are doing the real job, but being paid and promoted according to the official one.”
Welsh believes workplaces need to label this work and add it to individual and systemic KPIs because it’s vital to keeping the workplace afloat.
So what can you do to make sure that your efforts are rewarded? Here are the top tips:
Pause before fixing
Women sometimes feel it is their responsibility to fix things even when it’s not part of their specific role or job. In caring roles, for example, they can see or anticipate the problem and jump in to solve it.
“Let’s say you’re watching your kid trying to tie their shoes and think, ‘I’ll just step in and do it because we have to get out of the house now’. But there’s actually value in letting your kids struggle with it because they’ll learn,” Welsh says.
We can do a little bit more of that at work – and not just for our direct reports – but for ourselves too.
Make sure all your work is documented. Write down how much time you spend on support tasks each day. Get clarity on it from your boss, too. You might say: “I’ve noticed we’re spending half of our one-on-ones thinking about how the team is functioning. Is this considered part of the work that I’m doing because it is taking time,” Welsh says.
Promotable tasks
“There’s a systemic piece, too: women will get more push back for saying no to things than men will. And we will get asked to do things that men will just simply not get asked to do.”
It’s good to feel part of a team and to be a contributor to its success, but not if it’s actually damaging your career or holding you back.
To be seen as someone who is promotable, think about what tasks you’re saying yes to, Welsh says. Before automatically saying yes, ask for time to think. Say “Can I get back to you on this?”, so that you can put some thought into it.
Then think about strategic questions to ask before accepting the task: “Will this increase my visibility? My scope? Will it give me access to decision-makers?”
Of course, there’s a balance to be struck, too. It’s not that you have to find only tasks that do that, but definitely do more of those tasks and less of the tasks that are going to be invisible. These are fair questions to ask within a workplace regardless. You might say, “I have a lot on my plate right now, so I need to prioritise the things that are helping me reach my next level.”
Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy. margaret@cleareye.ie
