The Times: Bringing up baby is for Facebook bosses. Working parents get a nanny or get the push

When my daughter was in year 1, I put in a request to work flexibly. I asked to come in early three times a week and leave early, but when working from home I wanted to work more hours than I was contracted. I should add here, that I asked for flexible working in term time only. As my daughter was at an independent school, term time was considerably less than at a state school. At this point I had been working up to 15/16hr days, every day, for over a month.

Members of my team worked flexibly. A woman in her thirties, without children worked 7-3pm, so she could go to the gym. Another had a sick wife so would come in after 10am and finish later. Another, with a child, had agreed to work flexibly during school holidays.

My request was turned down. Although I had offered to work considerably more hours than I was contractually required, and I had been working long days already, I was told my request was considered part time. I was told I hadn't been working hard enough and that my line manager didn’t believe I had been working long hours at home, my predecessor had not needed to work long hours. I was exhausted and shocked. Due to my discovering a major problem with the budgets when I arrived (leading to weeks of my working more of those 15/16 hr days), I was now rebuilding/fixing them, on my own. The original reports had been created by a team of people. It even turned out that my predecessor had someone to help them for the budgeting period. Looking back I feel my line manager was punishing me for working hard, finding the errors that should have been picked up before I began the role and in turn showing the rest of the department up.

Therefore this article in The Times struck a chord.

‘When I told Facebook that I wanted to work from home part-time, the human resources department was firm: you can’t work from home, you can’t work part-time and you can’t take extra unpaid leave.”

Eliza Khuner, a data scientist and mother of three, published an article last week in Wired magazine explaining how Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, had both told her that part-time work and working from home were forbidden because it would put undue strain on other people.

Khuner describes looking into her four-month-old daughter’s trusting eyes and realising she couldn’t leave her all day. She resigned and shared her reasons on a Facebook message board.

When I read her piece, my jaw dropped: if Facebook — at the forefront of everything that is changing in work — can’t or won’t do this, who can? I was so surprised that I contacted Facebook’s press team and Sandberg herself to ask if it was true or not. The firm’s London PR agency called me back but so far there has been no comment, confirmation or denial, so I presume it’s true.

Facebook is led by two people who globally peacock their commitment to family life. Zuckerberg and his wife penned gushing open letters to their children when they were born: “Childhood is magical. You only get to be a child once, so don’t spend it worrying too much about the future. You’ve got us for that and we’ll do everything we possibly can to make sure the world is a better place for you and all children in your generation.”

Sandberg, meanwhile, has written two books on life and parenting, sharing her philosophy of “leaning in” and reflecting on life as a single mother after her husband’s tragic death. They include guidance such as “it’s important to develop policies that give people the time off and support they need so we don’t have to rely on the kindness of our bosses”. But as a woman posting on Khuner’s Facebook page said: “Flexible work arrangements are fundamentally at odds with ‘Lean In’ thus making Facebook’s choice a philosophical rather than a resource one.”

There is, I am told by a former employee, a view among Facebook staff that, unless forced by local law to provide flexibility, the company actively resists it.

It is interesting that this resistance to part-time and remote working was not publicly known before. Although the news has shocked many people, Khuner says she is far from an isolated example. She received 5,500 indications of support from other employees, parents and non-parents: some told her it was the reason they were freezing their eggs to have their children later; one with a seven-week-old baby said it made her feel less alone.

We can’t read those messages because they are on Facebook’s private internal site. Nor can we speak to Facebook employees because they all have to sign strongly worded privacy agreements preventing them from commenting publicly without risking losing their jobs. Even former employees are nervous about talking to me. ”Promise me this is totally off the record,” they say.

This chimes precisely with the interviews I have conducted with working parents. They feel that the debate on managing work and family life is being dominated by public figures who are out of touch with the lived experience of their own teams. Most employees feel massively constrained from speaking out about how hard they find combining modern work with family life because they will be diminished at work if they ask for reduced hours and may lose their jobs if they comment publicly. This is true even among employees as highly skilled, well connected and well paid as Facebook’s.

The Wired article and the response it has generated are a reminder of the huge difference in life experience between the super-elite tech leaders and ordinary workers. It’s a point made by Professor Lynda Gratton, co-author of The 100-Year Life, who is exploring these trends. “In many ways a leader’s day-to-day life is more protected from these major shifts than those of many employees,” she writes.

This is confirmed by a person I know who has visited Sandberg’s house a number of times, estimates that she has a full-time staff of 10 or more people to help with her home and family and says she always travels with a retinue of three or four support staff, plus hairdresser.

Ordinary working parents everywhere are confronting a world that has shifted from a model of one parent working and one caring at home to, more often, both parents being at work — at the moment when the working day has expanded in hours and “always on” has arrived. Facebook is part of the creation of the “always on” working culture, of course, where many people are constantly yanked back into work via their devices from the moment they wake until they turn off the light.

People all over the world are starting families and trying to figure out how to make this work. Those who realise that it doesn’t work are giving up, like Khuner, with many feeling defeated. Unlike her, most people say nothing about it publicly.

Some businesses are trying to fix this, however imperfectly. Organisations ranging from Lloyds Banking Group to the Ministry of Defence to the NHS and big management consultancies, such as PwC, have announced flexible working initiatives and are all trying to understand what works for employees and their households.

These organisations aren’t doing this simply because it’s a nice thing to do. Much as they may want a better society, they also need to attract and retain a diverse group of talent to their businesses and keep them engaged, productive and healthy.

They are no longer merely after the macho and super-driven stereotypes who have too often dominated the highest echelons of business but they also want the talented people who value their mental health, their family time and being active within their community.

Businesses such as Timewise are springing up to help people find the kind of work that works for them.

Many companies are experimenting with what they call “team-based approaches to job design” in order to find working patterns that suit everyone, including those who can’t afford carers at home. This means looking at the tasks that a team needs to complete, how people in the team want to work and designing roles accordingly. It includes timing people’s jobs to ensure that “the strain” is shared fairly. But the toughest challenge to crack is managing the total number of hours that people work. Brilliant people all over the world are putting their minds to this.

Unfortunately Facebook, a company on the cutting edge of it all, seems content to go on creating riches without seriously addressing the downsides of our changed working pattern. It remains entrenched in the systems of the old world, with hierarchical power structures, full-time working hours and traditional career paths to retirement, as well as a belief that only those in senior roles should have a public voice.

As the former tech chief executive and author Margaret Heffernan puts it drily: “It’s ironic that tech companies which present themselves as innovative and new are ancient reactionaries when it comes to gender politics.”

My guess is that Facebook is reluctant to change because it doesn’t have to. In the “hard” year of 2017 it made $40.7bn (£31.2bn) and remains a hot brand in employee terms. It can afford to pay people well and it doesn’t need to give parents, or anyone else who wants to work in a more flexible way, a break.

All brands have challenges, however, and Facebook already has many, ranging from questions about its tax contributions to profiting from fake news and the lack of digital privacy. It would be wiser to capture the energy and evident passion of its workforce and join the companies getting ahead of this issue long before it has to.

As its own posters say: “Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” Surely it cannot mean “Nothing . . . except the opportunity for our 25,000 employees to combine working and caring for their children.”

Christine Armstrong is the author of The Mother of All Jobs, published by Bloomsbury