As CEO of employer review site Glassdoor, Christian Sutherland-Wong knows a thing or two about company culture.
That’s why he’s introduced some rules about who’s around when he works and where he goes when there are company matters to attend to.
Sutherland-Wong said he refuses to let his kids see him working weekends or late nights, and will instead log on once his children are in bed.
The CEO who has led Glassdoor for the past four years told CNBC Make It: “With [my] children, I want to lead by not having digital products all around, or being distracted by my email and text messages all the time.”
Working five days a week remotely allows him a level of flexibility, but Sutherland-Wong added if something does come up when his kids are around, he’ll remove himself to a home office instead of working in front of them.
Sutherland-Wong said his two young children “pick up” on when their dad has one eye on his emails instead of engaging with them.
As a result he structures his day “to be there when my kids come home from school, to be able to get offline, spend quality time with them, put them to bed and then get back online.”
The balance of working parents
The 44-year-old CEO isn’t the first staffer to identify the conflict between parenting and the immediacy of work—particularly when calls, emails and notifications are delivered direct to your smartphone or watch.
This problem is defined as “technoference,” when an individual is digitally distracted from the people in front of them.
More than 20 years ago Stewart D. Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, conducted a search of 900 business professionals and their relationships with their children.
Of course, this was before social media, the iPhone, smartwatches, and—for many homes—WiFi.
So, in 2018, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, the emeritus practice professor revisited his research to examine how it may have become even more relevant.
Friedman found that factors such as parents’ discretion over work, control over workload, and the psychological interference of employment in family life all correlated with children’s behavior.
“A father’s cognitive interference of work on family and relaxation time—that is, a father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device—was linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems,” Friedman wrote.
The findings went deeper when it came to mothers. The study found that working moms who had authority and discretion around work had mentally healthier children.
However, what she did in her free time at home also impacted 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 a matter of mothers being at home versus at work, it’s what they do when they’re at home with their non-work time,” Friedman added.