Saskatoon manager praised for response to employee’s reduced work and pay requests

Many women in the workforce have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not only are they working full time, but they’re also taking the lion’s share of responsibilities for their children and their education, or for other family members who need care.

Those were some of the things Saskatoon Applications engineering manager Aaron Genest realized when one of his employees asked to have her hours reduced.

He says the mom came to him, asking for her hours to be reduced and her pay reduced to 80 per cent of her full salary. Her husband was taking on some additional responsibilities and she needed to help her kids with school, while also working.

“We had a productive conversation about alternatives. It turns out that I work for Siemen’s, an international company based out of Germany, and there’s an interesting policy where we look to work on productivity and outcomes, not the number of hours people put in,” Genest said.

That includes giving people more flexibility to work at home and to block off parts of the day for other responsibilities when needed — and not worry about making up that time later.

Genest says it’s important for him and his company, because the pandemic has resulted in many women making decisions to abandon their jobs or take reduced pay so they can take shoulder some of the additional challenges of the pandemic.

Genest didn’t want his employee to become another statistic.

“Women in the workforce are still not treated equally,” Genest said. “Not paid equally, they suffer extra challenges through promotion. There are still very much glass ceilings in effect and we know very well the extra labour women face in the households when they have children.”

The policy also extends to others who may be suffering from mental-health issues, those who need to get out of their homes for a day to be outside, single parents, and others.

“Expecting someone to always perform at 100 per cent not just kind of on a daily basis but over the course of a year or over the course of a career isn’t really fair … We know that we’re going to have ebbs and flows in our career over time, and understanding that we can work as a team to support each other while going through those challenges — whatever they might be — makes it less anxiety inducing,” he explains.

The response Genest has received online has been almost universally supportive, he says. But it has also been emotional to see how many others have also needed help, particularly over the last year.

His Twitter thread has been liked more than 6,000 times, and has been retweeted nearly 2,000 times in just a couple of days. Company headquarters contacted him to offer him support with his recent social media spotlight.

“This morning I woke up to the headquarters of Siemens saying that they were thrilled to hear this story and that it embodied the ethos of their company and that they were really pleased to help with the deluge of social media messages,” Genest said.

Still, Genest understands that not all employers or companies have the flexibility to do what he did.

“If one employee is unavailable for a significant amount of time, that could have a massive effect on the business,” he said. “There are no easy ways out of that.”

One of the ways he sees as lessening the burden on parents would be to have a national child-care strategy, and making paternity leave just as important as maternity leave.

Genest hopes lessons learned after the pandemic would include flexibility for employees to work from home or to work flexible hours where possible, along with a general appreciation that life can get complicated for anyone at any given point.