Business travel: the perks with no kids?

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

For the last several weeks my job has been particularly demanding.  I took on two very high profile projects in preparation for my company’s biggest customer event and, as a result, have been working long, long hours. I’ve been getting up before 6am to attend conference calls and staying on the computer until midnight. My family has, without complaint, paid the price. The laundry piled up, we ate more take-out, I was snappish with my husband and children, I didn’t read a bedtime chapter of Harry Potter to my girls for a month.

So naturally, I was a little defensive when, just a couple of days before my trip, I ran into a mom I know.  As we stood on the sidewalk making small talk she said “you’ve been traveling a lot for work.” “Yes,” I replied, “and I’m leaving again on Sunday.” “At least you get to be without kids,” she said brightly. Not really seeing this as a plus, I said “we work very hard when we’re there.” “Yes, but no kids!”

I’ll admit that business travel is a vacation from the day-to-day home chores that are so tedious and always must be done at the end of a very long day. But being away from my children is really not a welcome treat. Yes, I get to do some grown-up things like eat in nice restaurants and go to parties, but these are work functions, not dates.

This is what a week with no kids looks like…

SUNDAY: My family dropped me off at the airport in the early afternoon.  My flight was delayed so I had a snack from a terminal restaurant and did some window shopping at Hudson News. Upon landing I checked into my beautiful hotel room, but since I arrived later than planned, I barely had time to take a very quick shower and change clothes to meet my colleagues for a departmental dinner. While walking over to the restaurant I checked email and saw that my husband had sent pictures of his afternoon spent bike riding and climbing trees with our daughters.

MONDAY: I set my alarm to get up early to work out in the hotel’s fitness center.  I can never find time to exercise at home, nor do I have access to such nice facilities, so this was a treat.  While I was getting dressed, my husband texted me a short video.  One of our younger daughters had been selected to read a short essay on the lifeskill of courage over the PA system.  Through the wonder of technology, I was able to watch her speech just moments after she delivered it, but I wasn’t there to hug her and tell her “great job!”

TUESDAY: My husband texted me first thing in the morning, “child throwing up.” He didn’t have the ability to stay home with her and I obviously wasn’t there to share the responsibility, so he brought her to work with him. I got to put in a good 10 hour work day without any parental responsibilities.

WEDNESDAY: In the afternoon while working the noisy show floor, I received a phone call from my teenage daughter who was in tears because she’d done poorly on an important test.  I stood behind a pillar, seeking quiet, with my finger in my other ear while calmly trying to reassure her that her college acceptance wasn’t in jeopardy.  My arms ached to hold her but I reluctantly hung up, telling her I’d call again later that evening.  I never did, of course, because I had three evening functions including a private Bruno Mars concert.  Of course I texted photos and videos from the concert to my children.

THURSDAY: After several hours of dead time – that’s the time spent traveling: standing in security and boarding lines, waiting for a delayed flight, waiting on the tarmac for a gate to open up, waiting for luggage – I arrived home. I reveled in their happy faces and tight hugs, promising “mommy is not going to do any work tonight, we’re going to read Harry Potter!”

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Luck o’ the Irish

Posted on March 17, 2013 by

I don’t know where it comes from, but my two younger daughters have imaginations and creativity that astound me.

They’ve been chattering all week about St. Patrick’s Day. “I don’t know why people aren’t excited about St. Patrick’s Day,” one told me early in the week.  “Honey, it’s really not that big a holiday,” I responded, and she looked at me with exasperation. Clearly I just didn’t get it.

On Saturday, the girls decided to make leprechaun traps.  We were having an easy weekend free of our usual obligations, so I helped them find green paper and fabric and gold stars and glue.  I donated a couple of shoe boxes to the cause.

The girls worked diligently for over two hours, creating what can only be described as cozy leprechaun homes.

One contained a pillow-topped bed and tiny pictures on the wall. A personal note said “I put a lot of work into this house.” The other provided a leprechaun snack (a small piece of bread, cheese, and a sliver of chocolate) as well as a pencil point and paper with instructions for the leprechaun to write his name and draw a picture of himself.

A friend of mine stopped by in the midst of construction and asked the girls why they were making leprechaun traps.  “To see if we can catch one,” they replied.  There was a lot of conversation about what leprechauns were like – they’re apparently tiny, always men, and not very nice.  “Little devils,” is how one described them.

Both girls went to bed dressed in green, so they wouldn’t get pinched by naughty leprechauns during the night.

Now what? Leprechaun traps were not a part of my childhood, so I’m not sure of their purpose.  Were the leprechauns supposed to leave surprises? Or play naughty tricks?  Was I obligated to create tiny green leprechaun footprints?

(I’d already bought the requisite box of Lucky Charms, stashed in my car under a towel for the past two days, that would appear at the breakfast table.  A few years ago, we’d bought a box of Lucky Charms for a treat for the girls on St. Patrick’s Day.  When they spotted the box, they were firmly convinced leprechauns had delivered it – their parents had never bought them breakfast cereal with 10 grams of sugar per serving!  And every year since they’ve made it clear they expected a box of Lucky Charms would magically appear on St. Patrick’s Day morning.)

Then I remembered the bag of gold-wrapped chocolate coins I’d bought in December.  I’d planned to drop the coins into their stockings, but then forgot about them as I did several of the Christmas gifts I purchased too early.  It took me a few minutes of digging through dresser drawers before I found the stash – I’d definitely hidden them well!

We heard the girls run downstairs this morning and discover the gold coins and Lucky Charms.  They burst into our bedroom to tell us the leprechaun’s name was Patrick (clearly the mother is not as imaginative as the children) and show us the a funny picture he’d drawn of himself.  One child was disappointed that Patrick hadn’t eaten the snack she’d left for him, the other surprised that he took her note but didn’t leave one in return. They wondered why he had not taken the gold bells they’d left for him.

My husband and I laid in bed, smiling and holding hands, while we listened to them eat several bowls of cereal and discuss the leprechaun visit. This is how new family traditions are born.

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Why I embrace a blended work environment

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

Not much makes me angrier than hearing that remote workers are not as productive or effective as those who go to the office every day.

I’ve been a part-time remote worker since 2000 when my then employer, in the midst of the dot com bubble, realized they could not continue buying expensive Silicon Valley office space to house their growing employee population and their ability to attract talent was hampered by commuting time in the congested Bay Area.

My company rolled out a carefully planned “flex worker” program and enticed early adopters with a company-paid cell phone, free wheeled briefcase, and reserveable “drop-in” offices located in prime location – along the windows. Curious about this new way of working, I was one of the first to sign up. Acceptance into the program was contingent upon completion of a short course in how to work – and most important how to collaborate – from home.

In the ensuing 12 years, and at two companies, I’ve worked remotely anywhere from 20-100% of the time. I’ve always been recognized as a top performer and, as I wrote a couple of years ago, I make a concerted effort to stay visible. Currently, I work 3,000 miles from company headquarters and from most of the people I interact with – both on my peer team and cross-functionally. Some days I work at my kitchen table and other days I drive for over an hour in heavy traffic to sit in a cubicle at the local office, but either way my location is transparent to my manager and colleagues. Several times a year I visit the corporate offices and sit among my team.

Working remotely, just as working in the office, has advantages and disadvantages. Putting the issues of work/life balance and flexibility aside, it’s my experience that a blend of remote and office work is ideal for “knowledge workers” like me and the folks at Yahoo!. For large technology companies like ours, it’s simply inevitable as our workforce is globally distributed. A sub-team that I’m a part of right now consists of me in California, a colleague in North Carolina, and another in New Zealand. There is no way we will be having hallway conversations!

When I’m working remotely, I have more control over my time. My colleagues and I use conference calls, online meeting tools, instant messaging, and email to collaborate. But I also have long periods of uninterrupted time to make progress on my projects. I’m not slowed down by the drop-in visitor who won’t leave or the cube neighbor who listens to his conference calls on speakerphone. No, I don’t have productive impromptu hallway conversations, but I also don’t get waylaid on a trip to refill my coffee mug.

Working in the office is productive in a different sort of way. It can be very energizing to sit among my colleagues, and when we eat lunch together it’s convenient to seek their advice on situations where I might not bother them otherwise. I acknowledge that having a face-to-face connection goes a long way toward building a relationship, and my presence confirms that I’m as committed to our team’s success as they are. But at the same time the day quickly slips away with lots of personal interaction and little time for quiet work.

Apparently a significant number of Yahoo! employees who work remotely are unproductive, maybe even hiding. By requiring every employee to work in an office, Yahoo! intends to enforce accountability. Perhaps even lazy remote workers will quit rather than report at the office. Honestly, I consider this a management fail on all accounts.

Putting aside the fact that Marissa Mayer is a woman and a mom, or that I’m a woman and a mom, it appears that not only did she make a confounding business decision but she didn’t market it well to already demoralized employees.

Is this, as some speculate, a way to reduce headcount without doing a layoff? I think we all know that employees who leave of their own accord are usually the A players, the ones who are being actively recruited and will quickly find new employment. The very unproductive, those who are hiding, will suck it up and continue to do mediocre work, all while poisoning the environment with their unhappiness. I’ve worked in this environment before. They need to be actively managed out.

Just three things are required to allow remote workers to be successful:

  1. The right technology/tools
  2. Commitment to the company’s success
  3. Accountability

I would expect that as a technology company, Yahoo!’s employees have leading edge collaboration tools. I think the crux of Yahoo!’s problems start at the top. Has the leadership created a compelling vision and strategy and communicated this effectively so that the employees believe they can contribute to success? Are middle managers managing effectively and holding their teams, in corporate offices and remote, accountable?

I truly want to see Yahoo! succeed. I want to see a young, high profile female CEO turn around an ailing company, and I dearly hope Yahoo!’s 11,000 employees will stay employed. Marissa Mayer made a big, bold move last week in the face of great criticism and I applaud that. I just think it was the wrong move.

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Overcoming the beauty and aging paradox

Posted on January 26, 2013 by

I’ve been composing my Dear John letter to More magazine in my head for the last few weeks.  I’ve subscribed to the magazine, originally targeted to women over 40, for over a decade.  But somehow I missed the memo, a few years ago, that the magazine was refocusing and “moving away from the idea that it is solely geared towards women 40 and older.”

Now that I have both feet solidly in middle age, it became apparent, as I thumbed through my stockpile of back issues during the recent long weekend, that in this magazine I thought was designed for me fully 70% of the women’s faces on the advertising pages are much younger than 40.  (Yes, I counted.)  So the beautiful smooth faces trying to sell me lifting and firming cream and hair color and other goods with names like “Youth Code” and “Slender Secret” did not reflect the, er, realities of their intended audience.

I’d also grown oh so tired of the relentless articles discussing the pros and cons of cutting edge technology for “looking better with age” – Botox injections, fillers, laser treatment, radio-frequency wave treatment, etc. I didn’t find the reminders of my inevitable physical decline and all the things I was not doing to stop it to be empowering.

But then this week, while browsing the December/January issue during my daughter’s volleyball practice, I was unexpectedly surprised to read some very excellent advice in what I thought was another predictable article on beauty and aging.  Psychologist and author Judith Sills eschews the idea of  “age appropriate”, and I can really get behind her perspective:

On the idea of mourning lost youth, her philosophy is to “look back but don’t stare.”

Sex, she claims, is “life juice” and she advises to “have as much sex as possible in any way possible.”

She considers cosmetics to be “an attitude enhancer”.

Her advice to women who are freaked out by their wrinkles is “stop thinking about yourself so much.”

“The more invested you are in life, the less worried you are about what other people think.”

So More magazine has, for the time being, redeemed itself with me.  I won’t move my Dear John letter from my head to keyboard for now, but I hope in 2013 to see a lot more such intelligent advice and less information on choosing the best plastic surgeon.

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A Stay Together Ride

Posted on January 9, 2013 by

Reblogged from Never Done It That Way Before:

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Hello there, dear ones.

I have missed you.  It's been a heck of a month (or more).  It's been Advent, and Christmas, and now it is flu season.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that the Big Bad Cold that has taken down the entire Cumings family just might be Influenza A.

So I am not quite ready to get back on the blogging wagon, but I am ready to reassure you that I am coming back.

Read more… 36 more words

This is so beautiful, what a kid!
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Reflections on the Epiphany

Posted on January 6, 2013 by

The icicle lights have disappeared from the rooflines of homes in our neighborhood; the streets are a little dimmer every day.  Yesterday I counted the denuded Christmas trees laying in the gutters, next to the garbage bins, in front of my neighbors’ homes. Although I’ve been back to work for a week, tomorrow my children return to school.

The holiday I anticipated for many months and love so much is behind us now.

This was a holiday of tradition. There are so many things our family looks forward to this time of year. Before the end of Thanksgiving weekend we cut down our tree, sucking on candy canes in the car on the way home. The girls enjoyed a tiny piece of chocolate, from their Trader Joe’s advent calendars, with breakfast each morning.  We checked the mailbox every day, hoping for a bounty of Christmas cards. We ate meatballs with dark gravy on Christmas Eve and stayed in our pajamas all day on Christmas.

This was a holiday of beauty. I don’t think our Christmas tree has ever looked as beautiful as it did this year. My husband outdid himself decorating the outside of our house with a straight line of big colored lights – the kind I remember from my childhood.  It made me smile every night that I arrived home after dark. We were battered by multiple winter storms in December, bringing us black skies and emerald lawns, and delighting the children with double rainbows in the morning on their way to school.

This was a holiday of giving. Our daughters enthusiastically purchased gifts for each other and for us, and their excitement about each carefully chosen gift was contagious. This year Christmas morning they were more eager to present the gifts they’d selected and wrapped than to open their own!

This was a holiday of receiving. Inspired by this post from the blog Gina left the mall, and being someone who is always ready for another cup of coffee, I made a donation to Cup of Joe for a Joe. A couple of days later, I started receiving email notes.  Troops in Kuwait and Afghanistan and Qatar were thanking me for the cup of coffee I’d bought them.  Every time a new note arrived in my inbox it was like receiving an early Christmas present, and I eagerly read each one to my daughters, my husband, my friends.

This was a holiday of reflection. After the horrific event of December 14, the world just seemed different. I, like so many others, felt that I had lost something. And I felt such acute gratitude – for my children and their joy of Christmas, their curiosity about Santa. For my ability to hear their laughter and to tuck them into bed at night.

Tomorrow morning I will pack lunchboxes with turkey sandwiches and apples.  My children will be happy to see their teachers and friends again, and they will bring homework packets home. We will start practicing the piano again and working on their science fair projects. But tonight is the Epiphany, and I’m appreciative of my gifts.

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Kittens and puppies

Posted on December 7, 2012 by

I may dream of a Christmas scene worthy of Martha Stewart, with kraft paper packages tied up with baker’s twine, but when you let your children choose the gift wrap, this is what you get.

 

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