Letting women make their own choices
About four years ago, when I was 41 weeks pregnant with my second child, my phone rang. I sent it to voicemail because I didn’t recognise the number. A woman I'd worked with before, Fiona McBeath, had left me a message saying she'd changed jobs and was wondering if I was available to do some work for them.
I didn’t know what to do. I really wanted to work for her but was in no state to in the immediate future. I was booked in for a caesarean section the following morning, so I didn’t even have time to call her back for a long discussion.
I went with the truth. I called her back and left a message on her answerphone along the lines of “I’m really keen, but I’m having a baby tomorrow, so it'll depend what the timeframes for the work are”. I went into labour about three hours later and thought nothing more of it.
She called me back about six weeks later. She said it was one of the funniest voicemails she'd ever received. She asked how we were all doing, and then she asked if now was a good time to talk. It was so we discussed what she needed done, along with the time frames, and she gave me time to go away and think about it. I met with her a week later. The project went really well and I enjoyed the work.
This interaction meant and still means so much to me. Fiona could have written the message off as an amusing incident but she didn’t. She left the choice with me. There was no pressure to take on the piece of work. I could have said no and I believe she would have come back to me at a later date with something else. As it happened I was really keen to get back into project work so it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
The lesson I've taken from this is to let women make their own choices. It’s really hard to do in practice but has become an underpinning value of our business. We can’t know what is going on in someone else’s head. We don’t know what they need. So if I have a piece of work for one of our part time professionals I ask. Even if I know that things going on in their personal life would be enough to tip me over, I still ask, because it's not for me to decide what is right for someone else. All I do is make it okay to say no, and trust them to make their own choices.
Amy and I help each other with this a lot. I'll be worrying about who to offer a task to and she'll gently remind me that “we don’t make choices for other women, we ask and make it okay to say no.” And you know what? I am always surprised by how often they say yes. Probably just as surprised as Fiona was.
Jasmine Hardy Mills is one of the founders of Part Time Professionals. She is a business owner, learning specialist, and champion of solutions to help women work more flexibly. She lives with her husband and their three children in Porirua.