Is some of your work ‘office housework’?
What do you mean by office housework I hear you ask …….. often it’s the thankless, dead-end and invisible work that probably doesn’t belong to you, such as writing up minutes from meetings, serving on committees, organising social activities, organising the leaving cards and gifts, getting the coffees in a meeting….. the list could go on and on. What else are you asked to do that doesn’t belong to your role I wonder?
Women can often end up taking on these extra tasks as part of the conditioning that makes us want to be liked and not ‘rock the boat’. In my last blog I talked about how we want to be liked.
Why women do office housework
One way that we keep the status quo, and the boat on an even keel, is by doing work that doesn’t belong to us. There’s a number of reasons for this –
- we want to ‘be liked’
- we don’t like saying no
- we feel guilty refusing (have a look at my video on this topic),
- you wonder ‘who else will do it if I don’t?’
- others, often male colleagues, have an expectation of you
- we like helping others out (we’re conditioned to be caring and empathetic)
Taking on work like this comes at a cost to you – less time and more pressure.
It takes up valuable time that you probably haven’t got. Are you already stretched to capacity? One reason could be you take on too much. Are you taking on the wrong stuff? If you are spending time on this type of work you are not able to operate at your full potential.
Doing office housework doesn’t help advance your career. If you are a leader, or an aspiring one, this is not the work you should be doing. It doesn’t get noticed or appreciated. It doesn’t help you grow and develop your skills.
How do people perceive you if you do this work? How does it impact on the leadership work that you get paid for? Most women just get on and do it, but at what cost to your sanity and credibility as a leader!
Focus on work of high value
I hope that’s got you thinking about how you spend your time at work. Here’s some ideas to help you reduce the amount of office housework you do
- Assess your workload – what is your high value work? Ask yourself ‘is this task my responsibility, was I hired to do this?’ Does it help me advance my career or hold me back?
- Recognise your worth – think about how much the organisation is paying you per hour to do some of these tasks, shouldn’t someone else be doing it instead?
- Keep a track on what you are doing each week to enable you to quantify it.
- Stop doing it, get more comfortable with saying no (for tips on this read my blog or watch the video)
- DO NOT volunteer, keep your hand down even if no one else volunteers, don’t succumb to that pressure if it’s not your job.
- Create awareness of the problem, talk to people about it, your manager for instance, who else? Suggest taking it in turns to do office housework if it doesn’t sit within someone’s role.
If you want to read more about the topic of office housework, there’s a book all about it The No Club – putting a stop to women’s dead-end work. It’s by four female professors in the US who were fed up by the endless, thankless duties they were performing at work. For them such activities included planning the office party, taking notes in a meeting and training the summer interns.
I’d love to hear about your experiences of doing office housework and your tips to reduce this burden, so please get in touch. Or if it’s something you’d like some support with I’m here to help. Book a no obligation meeting to see how we might work together.
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