Many happy returns

Monocle — September 2022

Image credit to Monocle

At this year’s World Economic Forum, The Adecco Group gathered guests to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of flexible working for women at its Jeffersonian dinner, the second in a series of informal discussions produced in collaboration with Monocle.

In addition to offering flexibility, Jochen Menges reflected on the need for companies to become emotionally intelligent organizations in the new working world. He shared powerful insights from research conducted with nearly 15,000 people in the U.S, showing that there is a divide between how men and women feel at work. At higher levels of the organisational hierarchy, women report feeling less appreciated and confident than men. They also tend to feel more overwhelmed, tense and frustrated.

It is important that this inequality in feelings no longer goes unnoticed because emotions drive performance: in a study jointly conducted by the UZH Center for Leadership in the Future of Work and The Adecco Group, nearly 70 per cent of the 120 chief people officers surveyed underlined that emotions are important for productivity and performance.