The Working Mom Sprint
Cohort-Based Coaching for Working Moms Struggling During Covid-19
For working moms, balancing the responsibilities of both motherhood and career has always felt like walking a tightrope while juggling porcelain. In a global pandemic, the effort required to manage those responsibilities has become herculean.
According to the NYTimes, women have become the “shock absorbers of the pandemic.” Working moms are being forced to make decisions that make sense for their families in the short term, but are “emotionally devastating and have long-lasting consequences” for their careers and their mental health.
One in four women is considering “downshifting” or leaving the workforce because of the pandemic, and recent labor statistics show that women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men
In heterosexual couples where both the mother and father worked and had children under the age of 13, mothers have cut their work hours back four to five times more than fathers
The gender gap in work hours has grown by 20 to 50 percent since the start of the pandemic
For families with children doing remote learning, nearly half of fathers felt they did most of the homeschooling, but only 3 percent of women agreed
Early in the pandemic, women accounted for 80 percent of U.S. adults who weren’t working because they had to care for their children who were not in school or daycare
These statistics paint a picture of impossible tradeoffs for working mothers, who are giving up not just income and the potential for future professional advancement, but are sacrificing–at least for the time being–identity and dreams critical to their wellbeing.
While they’re giving up so much, working moms are simultaneously taking on more: the role of teacher for children who are remote learning and Worrier in Chief for the entire family as public health guidelines and restrictions change by the week.
A headline in The Atlantic puts it perfectly: “The conditions of teleworking combined with increased child-care demands are a perfect storm for bias against working mothers.”
Covid-19 should be a wakeup call to society that without proper support structures, working moms truly can’t work well and live well. So what happens when those support structures disappear overnight?
The answer: burnout.
More importantly, how can you ensure you and the other working moms in your
life make it to the other side with career, family and sanity intact?
Want to offer the Working Mom Sprint to parents at your organization?
With the Working Mom Sprint, you’ll receive:
6-week cohort-based intensive for working moms
Workshops, individual and group coaching, and peer-to-peer mentoring
A proven coaching process to help you clarify your values, alleviate overwhelm, combat burnout and sustain lasting change at work and at home
Working Moms Sprint: How It Works
Step 1
COHORT SELECTION
You will submit a brief application about your current professional effort, challenges you want to address and goals you want to achieve through the Sprint
Step 2
COACHING
A combination of coach-led and peer-facilitated sessions will equip you with actionable tools to make lasting changes that empower you to stay effective, focused and present at work and at home
Step 3
ONGOING SUPPORT
You will experience both day-to-day changes and personal transformation, gleaning from collective wisdom from both facilitators and peers that will help you achieve your individual goals
Time Commitment
The target length for your Sprint is 6 weeks. This allows you to start building habits without over-committing you to a program in an ever-changing and chaotic season.
You will participate in a combination of regular facilitator-led or peer-led coaching sessions.
You will be assigned light homework to maintain momentum, keep you engaged and provide you with tools you can use beyond the Sprint whenever you need realignment to your established values and goals
You’ll receive:
Inspiration, encouragement, and accountability from your cohort members
Individual coaching and transformation
Renewed focus on priorities
Support to stop doing things that aren’t working right now or serving your family or workplace
Support to make it through
Topics we’ll cover:
Values
Burnout
Working at the right pace
Individual support for systemic problems
Working with your employers to find workable solutions
Ideas for supporting your family through the duration of COVID
Benefits of a Group Sprint
Observe and consider different viewpoints and approaches to problems and challenges.
Expand your network of valuable connections.
Benefit from the incredible energy and collective wisdom when individuals are vulnerable about what they’re facing, and are committed to giving and receiving help. It is motivating to be around people who are working towards their goals.
Cost-effective alternative to individual coaching or support.
Cheerleaders and accountability built into your cohort to motivate you to reach your goals.
Why Sprint?
MatchPace believes that we need to run at the right pace at the right time in order to work effectively and achieve our important mission without burning out. Ideally, working moms can set a sustainable pace over the long haul that allows them to properly balance competing needs at work and at home. But there are times an all-out sprint is necessary: to meet a certain goal (like miles per minute, or finishing a race in a certain amount of time, to use a running metaphor), or to make gains that make the rest of the run–your parenting and professional effort–more sustainable over time. Then, sprinting is worth it.
During the Working Mom Sprint, you get to dedicate some concentrated time to gather new ideas, test them out, and make changes that will empower you to not just survive the pandemic with your career and family intact, but come out the other side more agile and resilient.
A Sprint is also a concept used in Lean Six Sigma: it’s a time-boxed iteration cycle for sourcing, ranking, and testing new ideas for moving your business model forward. In this Sprint, we’ll move our personal models forward and unearth how you are looking to get through the marathon that Covid-19 has turned into.
That’s why a sprint–a 6-week intensive to gather new ideas, put them into practice, and uplevel your sanity, focus, and presence–is so necessary. It allows you to make significant gains to stay on track personally and professionally during and after the pandemic.
A short, intense investment in yourself will help you make the gains you need to stay in the longer race
Working Parent Sprints for Organizations
MatchPace offers cohort-based Working Parent Sprints for employees of organizations. If you employ working parents that could benefit from a 6-week Sprint, we will partner with you to establish a Sprint cohort uniquely tailored to your organizational needs that helps your working mom employees work more effectively.
Since the start of Covid-19, roughly only half of companies have provided their employees with revised expectations for productivity during the pandemic, and only one in three have asked managers to work with their teams to ensure the work-life needs of parents are being met. Only a shockingly low 8 percent of companies have asked managers to reduce the scope of work for their teams as employees take on new responsibilities with their children at home.
If you don’t address the unique challenges facing working moms and dads during the pandemic, your team will burn out. And burned out organizations lose talented, diverse employees, adding costs to your bottom line and holding you back from achieving your important mission.
Pre-pandemic, 23 percent of employees report feeling burned out at work very often or always, while an additional 44 percent report feeling burned out sometimes. Job burnout accounts for an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion in health-care spending each year, and as many as one million people per day miss work because of stress. Studies suggest that all of this translates into a loss of anywhere from $150 billion to $300 billion annually for U.S. employers.
Can you imagine the additional costs to your organization if your employees who are also parents continue to burn out at never-before-seen rates?
The Working Mom Sprint can address the unique challenges facing your employees during the Covid-19 pandemic, help them set a sustainable work pace so they can stay focused and effective without burning out, and give them tools to succeed well beyond the pandemic.
Who can participate?
Anyone who is a working parent, with children ranging in age from birth to out of the house (because we know your investment in your children doesn’t end when they graduate!)
Working moms or other caregivers committed to participate in the entire 6 weeks of the Sprint and willing to be accountable to the facilitators and other participants
Agreement to the Coaching Contract, a basic commitment to show up, participate and do the work asked of you
About MatchPace
MatchPace has helped organizations work better since 2016. We believe that in order to live well, we need to work well. But that means we need to rethink the way the world works at work. Only then can organizations accomplish their missions while fostering an environment that helps people thrive both in and outside of work. Never has this been more important than during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many of us at MatchPace are working parents, so we’re living the realities of the pandemic first-hand alongside you. We are experiencing the overwhelm and burnout every other working parent feels, and we see it with our friends and clients, too.
Fortunately, a major disruption to the way we work–like we’re experiencing now–is the ideal time to evaluate what workplace structures and norms are serving you and where you need to realign with your values - both individually and as an organization. The Working Parent Sprint can help you (or your employees) do just that.