Multitasking Is No Superpower

Multitasking shouldn't be a constraint for anyone, especially not for working women, according to Milvia Sica, Head of HR Barclays Europe & EME. Cultivating one's professional career, supporting one's family (including parents) and simultaneously having one’s personal dimension is not easy. To make this possible, there must be an opportunity to raise a hand and say: I need a different balance between workload and family commitments. Here's what the Bocconi alumna, who graduated with a degree in Business Administration and is now an executive with 30 years of experience in international finance and the banking sector, has to say:

What is multitasking?

One of the most common aspects of daily life today is having to do multiple things at once — multitasking — and one of the underexplored aspects of multitasking is that we often fail to realize how busy we are. A frenetic pace prevails. Even if working environments provide support, we end up not using it. I myself realized in hindsight that I was so busy with a new corporate role and a delicate situation at home that I didn't even realize that help was already available to me. Multitasking, especially for women, can become a source of pride, in the galvanizing sense of managing to be able to do everything, when in reality, doing everything at once means fully dedicating yourself to nothing. You become unable to give your best, either to your family or to the office. There's no pride in constantly accelerating at full speed.

Yet it's not easy to raise one’s hand and ask for a new work-family balance within a company...

But not raising your hand is shortsighted, and fails to consider the full potential that every female employee can express through a different schedule. The key is that every employee, especially women who often also have to manage household chores, must always have the means and opportunities to express their discontent. It's true, not all companies implement support policies, and some are stuck in a limbo with programs and projects that are more frequently announced than implemented. It's not just a matter of asking for part-time or remote working, but of promoting a culture of "speaking up" so that everyone can work with the flexibility and peace of mind needed to offer their best and achieve the company's expected results, especially during critical moments of a corporate transformation or during the implementation of a highly demanding project.

Operationally, how do you cultivate a culture of speaking up? 

The goal is to create tools and procedures that make it easier and more practical to raise one's hand. In the more international and structured companies, these procedures have been in place for years. Being able to work in these organizations also confirms the importance of academic qualifications, as they contribute to access, at least initially, to this type of company. In any case, a variety of tools can be activated, ranging from concern-raising channels for freely expressing concerns to engagement and surveillance procedures, which are based on surveys of the working environment, allowing issues to be identified and approaches and solutions to be discussed to improve the work-life balance.

In short, there are numerous types of companies, but there isn’t a shortage of tools suited to every situation?

Exactly. To give another example, there's also the opportunity to use "skip-level" meetings between a team and the manager above your immediate direct supervisor to allow greater freedom of discussion. That said, we should start by encouraging more dialogue between employees and their direct managers, given that corporate wellbeing is now considered not simply an HR issue but rather a factor of cohesion in a well-functioning team.