That’s why he made some rules about who he was around when he worked and where he went when he was there Company matters to attend to.
Sutherland-Wong said he refuses to let his children see him working on weekends or late at night, and instead will log on as soon as his children go to bed.
said the CEO who has led Glassdoor for the past four years CNBC Make it: “With my kids, I want to lead by not having digital products everywhere, or being distracted by my email and texts all the time.”
Working remotely five days a week allows him a level of flexibility, but Sutherland-Wong added that if something happens while his kids are around, he will move to a home office instead of working in front of them.
Sutherland-Wong said his two young children “pay attention” when their father has one eye on his emails instead of engaging with them.
As a result, he structures his day “to be there when my kids get home from school, so I can get offline, have a good time with them, put them to bed, and then get back online.”
Balance of working parents
The 44-year-old CEO isn’t the first employee to identify the conflict between parenting and the immediacy of work — especially when calls, emails and notifications are delivered directly to your smartphone or watch.
This problem is known as “techno-conferencing,” when an individual’s attention is digitally distracted from the people in front of them.
For more than 20 years, Stuart D. Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, researched 900 entrepreneurs and their relationships with their children.
Of course, this was before the advent of social media, iPhones, smart watches, and WiFi in many homes.
So, in 2018, in an article by Harvard Business Reviewthe practicing professor emeritus, revisited his research to examine how it could become even more relevant.
Friedman found that factors such as parental appreciation of work, control of workload, and psychological interference of work in family life are all associated with children’s behavior.
“The father’s cognitive interference with family functioning and relaxation time — that is, the father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device — was associated with emotional and behavioral problems in children,” Friedman wrote.
The results were even more profound when it came to mothers. The study found that working mothers who have power and discretion at work have more mentally healthy children.
However, what she did in her free time at home also influenced her offspring: “Mothers spending time on themselves – on relaxation and self-care – and not so much on housework, was associated with positive outcomes for children.
“It’s not just about mothers being at home versus being at work, it’s about what they do when they’re at home when they’re not working,” Friedman added.
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