How our Boardrooms Became Classrooms: Virtual School, Real Headache

I don’t think anyone could have predicted how long this pandemic would last.  If you would have told me in March 2020 that they would shut down schools multiple times for multiple weeks I would not have believed you.

As a firm owner who employs many people with school aged children, and as a mother of four kids myself, I felt the effects of the school shutdowns acutely.  It remains true that even as our society has advanced so much in so many ways for women, childcare responsibilities still fall to mothers for the most part.^[1] That is not to say that individual fathers, husbands and partners were not affected or that they did not step up to help, but the shutdown of schools and the limiting of access to daycare has had a greater impact on the women of our province as a whole.

For the women of my firm the combined pressures of childcare, virtual school and work became draining both mentally and physically. As an employer that has always tried to put work-life balance at the forefront of our philosophy, I knew that I needed to make some changes to the way that we did things, or everyone at the firm would suffer.