is really helpful. “For balance for women, it's like, OK, ‘I've got to take my child to the dentist, I'll be back in a half hour, but I'm going to work a half hour extra today,’” Wallace says. The advantages extend from being able to attend kids’ school or sporting events, to simply not being stuck in commute traffic. “I talked to somebody the other day and she said, ‘My car was getting killed on the freeways all the time—I'm not doing that now and I'm more present when I'm home with my family,’” Wallace says. Wallace says that the option to work from home took a little bit of that stress off. This is because the majority of the women are also the homemakers and bearing a lot of the responsibility for that family life. “It just gave them a little more space,” she says. This benefit has allowed Arrow to attract top talent from companies that don’t offer their employees that flexibility. “And so mom suddenly has three kids that she's driving everywhere and dropping off in the morning and maybe her mother lives with her because she's taking care of her, and she's like, ‘I'm not coming back.’” Wallace says she sees these moms happily working eight hours and often sees them still working at night. She gently encourages them to stop working because that’s not helping to have a good work-life balance. “Speaking as one who has four children and five grandchildren, don't do this,” she tells them. “Turn it off. It's only insurance.” She points out it also allows Arrow to retain quality staff and attract new talent. “A lot of companies are losing out on that benefit of feeding back into a healthier workforce in our industry,” Wallace says.
“[Instead, they’re] saying, ‘No, I really need people back.’ Well, some of those women don't want to come back. So we're picking them up. “We've gotten some really good talent that we would not have normally gotten because people are like, ‘Yeah, I'm not going to go back to that every day,’” Wallace says.
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Another Bay Area company that strives to create a healthy work culture and work-life balance for their employees is Kiosk, a marketing agency in Novato. Kiosk offers services like crafting brand identity and designing engaging and optimizable digital experiences that empower business growth. They maintain a team of top-notch specialists in marketing, web, design, strategy and analytics. Kiosk has been offering a hybrid work model long before the pandemic with its ‘‘work from home Fridays” and employees appreciated the opportunity. It’s just one of the many things the company does to create a supportive, inclusive work culture. They’ve found it benefits the employees, the company and its clients. We spoke with Susi Lynam, vice president of People Operations at Kiosk. “Our owners were sensitive to the fact that a lot of our folks just would like an opportunity to work from home periodically,” Lynam says. “And Fridays in the Bay Area can be challenging from a commute standpoint.” That meant when the pandemic forced a shut down, Kiosk was ready. “That kind of was the springboard for us when the pandemic hit,” Lynam says. “We were really well set up for our employees to just seamlessly go fully remote for a while.”
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November 2024
NorthBaybiz 29
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