The progress of women in the workplace has no doubt come a long way, but there are still so many hurdles such as pay parity; to creating high-paying jobs for women; to equity at home with regards to unpaid domestic work; to initiatives that would ensure talented women can reach the highest levels of business.
Bearing this in mind, we asked a group of industry experts what was the one thing they’d like to see change in their workplace in 2019.
Their answers were discussed over lunch at the eighth Professional Beauty Industry Roundtable, focused on Empowering Women.
Our panel of thought leaders, including Carley Dowdle from asap skin products, Yvette Wyeth from Activeskin, Tina Copland from Jax Wax Australia, Emma-Rose Dermody from Ivy Brow Co, Mandy Gray from True Solutions and Sonya Annesley from InnerSense Beauty & Day Spa, stressed the importance of flexibility in the workplace and agreed the more you gave, the more you got back when it came to employees.
Sonya emphasised the most important thing we needed in today’s workplace was flexibility in working hours.
Tina said she liked to incentivise her staff with goals that were achievable and benefited everybody.
Carley said it was important that both male and female staff members had a happy work-life balance.
Emma said she has maximised the skill set of her staff – she has a therapist with childcare skills that allowed clients to bring in their children while they had appointments.
Yvette said she was very open to what hours work around a staff member’s family rather than the hours working just for the business.
Mandy suggested she’d like to encourage women to work collaboratively because we were not inherently good at it.
Watch the video below for the full discussion.