They say you have to work at something for 20 years to call yourself an expert. I’m nearly at 30 years experience in the beauty business, and I’m 40 years on the shop floor, so I’m very comfortable calling myself an expert. There are things I’m not great at, but that’s why you hire people better than you, and you delegate – and the ability to delegate comes with confidence. I genuinely do not think that someone younger than me could do what I do. And that’s not – as the youth would say – “shade”, that’s just fact.
With my experience, there are things I feel strongly about – and things the younger generation, entering the workplace, really need to hear.
One of them is working from home. Recently, on her book tour, Emma Grede, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who founded the underwear brand Skims and the denim brand Good American with the Kardashian family, said that working from home is “a career killer”. I think she was talking to a very specific group of people. There are two kinds of employee: someone who wants a job and someone who wants a career. Grede was very much talking to the second group. I do think however, that corporate USA has absolutely no place telling the rest of the world about best working practices. They are hardly world leaders in taking care of people.
Across my businesses we have working agreements with people that there are two days they can work from home, and there are certain days when we’re all in the office. We are flexible in general – and we have people who are disabled, or can’t do many days in the office, and we have a special arrangement with them – but we aren’t one of those companies who say, as long as you get the job done you can work from wherever you want.
We’re a creative team, and you cannot recreate on Zoom the spontaneity you get from working around a table together in person. I don’t care what people say, it’s impossible.
So if people want to work one day a week in the office, we’re not the right company for them, and that’s fine. But we’ll be very honest with them at the beginning and tell them that.
The pandemic certainly left its mark on the younger generation. There is definitely more of an expectation around flexible working and a hesitancy for in-office roles. As with any demographic, there are always exceptions to the rule, and your role as a leader is to find those people that want to work in your business, and nourish and support them.
Another thing that is non-negotiable for me is giving good, proper maternity leave – we do six months full pay. My mum was American, I grew up there, and I love the States, I really do, but they have no real maternity or paternity leave. Some mums have to go back after three or four weeks. The way the USA treats working mothers is barbaric. Their people are there to drive the cog and make billionaires money. There are developing countries where women have more rights. Does giving good maternity and paternity leave cost me money? Yes. But does it inspire loyalty? Yes.
Something else I know to be true after all these years is that women with children make great employees. If I have a job that needs doing, I’ll give it to a busy woman to do. A high percentage of our staff are women with children, and if they are home early to do bedtime, they’ll be back online. We don’t ask them to do that, but they’re committed. They feel there’s something to prove.
If a woman says their child is ill so they can’t work, we don’t need details or reasons beyond that, because it should be family first. Although, there is also part of me now, as I’m older and separated, that thinks… well, why isn’t the dad at home instead of you? When some of my team get calls from school about their kids being sick, I know that their husbands are in lesser paying jobs than them, with not as much responsibility, but yet they’re still the ones who leave the office to go and get the kids. If the mums choose to go home to their child, because they feel really unwell, that’s completely different. I’m just talking about the average temperature, or being under the weather. Let’s normalise dads doing their fair share of parental responsibilities, and it not just being “the norm” that you call mum.
That’s not my business, or a comment on my team, but about society in general. I have four children, and with the first two I did most of the childcare, and with the third and fourth, my ex-husband and I switched roles – he looked after them, and I was out working hard. For that whole period, we had chicken pox, flu, tonsillitis and the rest. I only got one phone call from my husband saying I needed to come home, and that was when our youngest went to A&E with pneumonia as a baby. He was right to ring me then. Otherwise, I was able to switch off from home, and focus on work. Men are more than capable of doing it, they just default to the built in weaponised incompetence and the mum thinks, “Oh, I’ll just do it myself”.
No. Let dad step up.
I’ve gotten older, and now in my position, as a business leader, as a single woman, as a mum, as a grandmother, my concern is when I see women stretching themselves to do too much. Whether it’s my team or my friends, when we’re out socialising and talking, I’m the first one to say, “Don’t give yourself a hard time. You’re feeding those kids.”
When it comes to equality in the workplace, and at home, you have to push back on your own every day, in small ways. For example, when we bought our house, all of the paperwork turned up addressed to “Mr and Mrs”.
I made them change it to “Mrs and Mr”, because I was the main breadwinner, but putting him first showed me they assume he’s the head of the household, earning the money. It may be old school and the way that things have always been done, but to me, it’s disrespectful. Those assumptions need to be challenged and changed. Women are not the second thought. So when it comes to being a boss at work, and running businesses, I have no mum guilt. I’m not saying it wasn’t exhausting sometimes, but I was giving them a home, and food, and I also made a point to never miss a school play. Did my kids see my face in the crowd at their school events? Yes. Did I then head back to work afterwards? Yes. I just knew my kids would see the benefit when they were older. They’re now fully-grown adults, and I probably shouldn’t speak for them, but I don’t feel like they’ve missed out on me being a mum.
When I look at younger women in the workplace, I want to encourage them to not feel guilty, and to push for fairness. Companies, too, need to treat them well. After all, when you do that, you get your pick of the crop. Sometimes, you only realise something like that when you’ve been around as long as I have.