So he put in place some rules about who was around, when he was working, and where he went when that happened company matters to take care of.
Sutherland-Wong said he doesn’t let his children see him while he’s working on weekends or late at night, and as a substitute logs in after his children go to bed.
Said the CEO who has led Glassdoor for the past 4 years CNBC Do it: “WITH [my] kids, I would like to lead without having digital products all over the place or being continually distracted by emails and texts.”
Working remotely five days per week gives him a certain level of flexibility, but Sutherland-Wong added that if something happens while his children are around, he’ll move to his home office as a substitute of working around them.
Sutherland-Wong said his two young children “pick up” when their dad keeps one eye on his emails reasonably than interacting with them.
As a result, he structures his day in order that “I’m there when my kids come home from school, I can go online, spend quality time with them, put them to bed, and then get back online.”
The balance of working parents
The 44-year-old CEO is not the primary worker to notice the conflict between parenting and the immediacy of work – especially when calls, emails and notifications are delivered directly to a smartphone or watch.
This problem is defined as “technoference,” when an individual is digitally distracted from the people in front of them.
More than 20 years ago, Stewart D. Friedman, an organizational psychologist on the Wharton School on the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study of 900 business professionals and their relationships with children.
Of course, this was before social media, the iPhone, smartwatches and – in many homes – Wi-Fi.
And so in 2018 in an article for Harvard Business Reviewprofessor emeritus of practice revisited his research to see the way it could have develop into much more relevant.
Friedman found that aspects akin to parental freedom to work, control over workload, and the psychological interference of employment with family life were correlated with children’s behavior.
“Father’s cognitive intrusion into family work and relaxation time—that is, the father’s psychological availability or presence that is noticeably absent when he is using his digital device—has been linked to emotional and behavioral problems in children,” Friedman wrote.
The findings went deeper when it got here to moms. The study found that working moms who had power and freedom at work gave birth to mentally healthier children.
But what she did in her free time at home also had an impact on her offspring: “Mothers spending time for themselves—relaxing and taking care of themselves—reasonably than a lot on housekeeping was related to positive outcomes for children.
“It’s not just about whether mothers are at home or at work, but what they do when they are at home during their time off from work,” Friedman added.
