How Can Women Wield More Personal Agency In The Workplace

Creating empowering work environments for women

Personal agency is the belief in our capacity to act in (and have a sense of control over) a situation. In theory, if you have the mindset that you can make a difference in your surrounding conditions and outcomes, you will be more motivated and incentivized to face the situation.
 

Across countries and industries, despite some progress, women are still significantly underrepresented in leadership roles. According to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2022 report, one of the biggest obstacles on the way to senior leadership is the first promotion to manager, leaving many struggling to catch up with men.

At the same time, women are leaving companies at a faster rate than ever before, due to feeling overworked and under-recognized, experiencing resistance to progression and seeking but failing to find a more suitable workplace culture. Given these trends, it has never been more important for women to take a stand and wield more personal agency in life, both professionally as well as personally.

Has the Pandemic Awakened Agency in More of Us?

The human race is becoming more demanding. We expect more. The pandemic has given people a wake-up call and many are striving for more purposeful lives. This may be part of a new phase in which people’s purposes become an equal force to profit and material reward. This is an encouraging development for society.

In the October to December quarter of 2021, the number of job vacancies in the UK rose to a record high of 1,247,000. This represented an increase of 462,000 from its pre-COVID level in January to March 2020, with most industries displaying record numbers of vacancies. From October to December 2021, the UK also reached a record ratio of 4.1 vacancies to every 100 jobs.

According to Rani Molla writing in Vox, ‘Higher-paid workers are increasingly quitting their jobs, as the Great Resignation – also known as the Great Reshuffle – enters its second year.’  The demographic of those leaving organizations is changing from lower-paid industries like health and retail to more experienced and higher-paid industries like finance and tech. Company culture is no longer merely a ‘nice-to-have’ for the good, passionate, and capable people organizations want to attract. It is a core criterion that employees use to judge opportunities along with salary, benefits, and location. A desire for more meaning associated with the work people does and flexibility to work remotely are being prioritized.

Seeking Environments that Suit You

Currently, retaining talent is a tough challenge for many businesses. People are actively seeking and finding environments where their values, needs, and ability to work and contribute without compromise are palpable. Employment opportunities are at record levels.
People question whether the work they do is meaningful if their skills are being used if they feel valued and whether their contribution is recognized. They ask themselves the following questions:

1. Why am I doing this?
2. What purpose does it serve for me and those around me?
3. How can my environment help me do better work? Help me to thrive?
4. What are the consequences of working in a toxic environment?

The answers to these questions are causing a growing number of people to lose faith in their leadership and to leave their jobs and organizations. This is having a disproportionate impact on competition for the best talent and the power is seemingly shifting in a way that is influenced by personal choices.

People are becoming empowered to take matters into their own hands to such an extent that the goals of financial performance and meeting the needs of employees now share paramountcy. In the spotlight are critical factors such as people feeling an affinity with their organization’s purpose and vision, the ingredients for more collaboration and fewer territorial silos, an equitable workforce that demonstrates gender equality (through representation in numbers at all levels and supporting policies) and an organizational environment that proactively nurtures people’s good health and wellbeing.

There are various ways women can wield more personal agency in the workplace. They include:

Question Inconsistencies Between Personal and Working Life

Often, experiences of stress or difficulty in the workplace originate from when an individual's identity or self-concept is rocked by factors in the surrounding environment that is at odds with them. What businesses and organizations espouse and the reality that employees and leaders experience diverge in many contexts. Women should be encouraged or take initiative to question these inconsistencies and no longer compromise their values, not be afraid to rock the boat or stand out.

Create Safe Working Spaces

We live in a society where intrinsic drivers for personal ambition infuse organizational vision, where personal security and hygiene factors remain necessary conditions for life, and where unrelenting ambiguity and change are the only consistent conditions. These conditions and realities drive our people’s autonomic nervous system to default to a ‘fight or flight’, high-alert state.

Creating an environment that counteracts and disrupts our learned and automated responses are critical to counterbalancing this force. A safe space is a vital requirement for individuals, organizational life, and our day-to-day reality in teams. Teams can interact and work using more balanced, rest and reflect-oriented patterns rather than the ‘firefighting’ common to many organizations. In a pandemic and post-pandemic world, the fully virtual and hybrid versions of working life add complexities to how we interact. We must adapt to a new way of working beside the firefighting we have normalized as part of the team and organizational life.

Evaluate Your Priorities

There are choices that women can make about their own lives which will also heighten their sense of control and agency. For example, making sure you get enough sleep, regular exercise, spending time in nature and mindfulness such as meditation can help balance stress. As well as this, the availability of methods for individuals to track and measure their health – from steps to calories to heart rate patterns – gives people the impetus to keep active. To practice wielding more agency, women can assess their own priorities and need with these questions:

1. What are the values I commit to and live by?
2. What role does the surrounding environment play in supporting me?
3. Do I prioritize my family and relationships?
4. What I am no longer prepared to give up or compromise, especially relating to my self-identity?
5. Why is it important to take action to safeguard my health?
6. What are my passions, and why are they worth investing in?
7. How can I be kind and compassionate but also aware of the impact of my words and actions on others?

The process of wielding more personal agency is a combination of conscious actions taken to improve external circumstances in a way that women know will eliminate or reduce the undesirable effects of the adversities they traverse, and ongoing self-reflection practice. As well as learning to assert themselves more and prioritize their own values, the personal agency also requires an acceptance that the challenges they face are real and valid, the determination to not become discouraged and the motivation to also invest in themselves.

Author Bio

Samreen McGregor is an executive coach, founder of Turmeric Group, and the author of Leader Awakened.