“I have a couple of areas that trouble me. One area is, young people learn from the experience of older people. Some people will almost go too heavy on flexible working, and say to young recruits “Yeah, you work from home, come in one day a week”. When actually they need to be there more often, because that’s where they learn. From people who do come in, the experienced people. They don’t have to be there every day.
Another area I’m concerned about in the flexible work agenda is what i call the gender promotion gap. Will women work more from home? And men, because they are organisationally political and very much into being ambitious, go in more often. And because they show face time will get the promotions and women will be less able to push up the glass ceiling. And the gender promotion gap will grow greater. That’s another negative on it. But i think if we’re aware of those kinds of things, young people do need to learn. When you’re assessing women for promotion you’d have to look at the bottom line of what they deliver, not just whether they show facetime or not”
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