Caregivers across Canada have always done mandatory, unpaid overtime — a ‘double day’ of work and care, on top of every other obligation in their lives. This second shift is with their families, taking care of kids or other loved ones. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened the eyes of some Canadians to just how pervasive and exhausting this double day really is. 

But Amanda Munday is not one of them.

As the founder of The Workaround, a Toronto co-working space that offers childcare and a community atmosphere to remote workers, her business is built upon the reality that freedom for many parents is the ability to balance personal duties and professional responsibilities. As a childcare advocate, she understands the economic and social benefits of universal, accessible daycare options for all. And as the single mother of a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old during a global pandemic that’s disrupting nearly every aspect of daily life, she’s tired. 

Many parents, as well as the caregivers of elderly or disabled relatives, are hitting a brick wall of fatigue. Juggling constant care duties is simply too much for many to bear. Asking caregivers to put aside those they love to focus on their jobs is simply not realistic — so what can employers do to help them strike that balance?

In a wide-ranging interview with Future of Good, Munday spoke about the perils of flexible work, working in the startup world as a parent, and why COVID-19 reminds her of postpartum depression. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity:

We are 15 months to the day since the first public health restrictions began. How are you feeling? 

I’m exhausted. It’s been worse in the last few weeks since we knew the lockdown was going to be extended — when the Ontario government announced the state of emergency was going to be extended to June 2nd. We’ve been closed since November. Now my 2021 revenue is pretty bad and my kids are probably not going to go back to school. It’s pretty tough for parents, particularly single parents like me. 

As someone who has publicly spoken about mental illness, I’m very good at catastrophizing and expecting the worst. I don’t know that I ever anticipated that I would be sitting on a brick-and-mortar space with fixed costs and a fixed lease that is personally secured with no ability to make any money. That’s a tough place to be. 

Back in 2019, you wrote a memoir, “Day Nine”, about your experience with postpartum depression, including a period where you were institutionalized. Did any of that translate to your pandemic experience?

That’s a great question. There’s a lot of similarities between being institutionalized and the pandemic stay-at-home order because in both cases, it’s quite out of your control. I don’t really hold a lot of personal blame — I might have at one point, but I don’t really anymore — hold blame or shame around if postpartum depression was my fault. It’s a mental illness that I needed treatment for, I sought treatment, I got better. 

But when I was institutionalized and I went to the hospital and they said — ‘We’re going to keep you against your will’ — you’re not in charge of when your reality will change. The goalposts keep moving. You think you’re doing everything right but then somebody makes a decision and says, in fact, you can’t go. That’s very similar. 

The other thing that is quite similar is that your physical surroundings seem OK. In my personal life right now, I have a home, I have food, my children are thankfully well, our environment looks pretty stable. But mentally you can feel really trapped. With postpartum depression, it is the same. In the early days of the pandemic I was joking that I’m the best suited to manage this because I’ve been locked up in a psych ward and now I’m locked up in a whole house — there’s so much more room!

Let’s talk about The Workaround. When did it start? 

The Workaround opened in 2018 and it came from my own problem-solving needs and me recognizing that there was absolutely a social purpose, profitable business within scope. 

Because I’ve worked for tech startups in Toronto, I’ve worked out of many coworking spaces so I understood the business side. I understood startups, I understood daycares, and I had a good sense of the Child Care Act — what I would need to do in order to set up a daycare business. I wasn’t starting from zero.

And then I’m in the customer journey side of things. I’m the parent of two kids and I’ve gone in and out of maternity leave twice. The first time I went back after nine months and that transition — having come out of a psych ward experience, postpartum depression, a really awful leave from work — was worse than the birth. With the birth, it was like: ‘I have an illness, I need treatment, I’m getting better, let’s move forward’. 

But with returning to work, it did feel like it was my fault. ‘Why is this so hard? Why do I feel like I’m not performing the way I was before? I hate that I have to leave at 4:30 p.m. but everybody else is staying later. It feels like people are judging me, but nobody will really say it. Why am I the only parent working for a startup?’ I would say all the time, loudly, “I feel like parents know something I don’t know. We’re not supposed to be working for a tech startup and there don’t seem to be any other parents here.” It’s not an environment that’s conducive to supporting parents who need time off for kids who are sick, who need to have flexibility to work from home, who have really hard start and stop times. 

So I just really felt like the system around navigating being an ambitious worker is totally messed up and totally fixable. If we just have office space, if we have better daycare, then I can focus at work. If I can reduce my commute time, I can stay at work longer. There’s this awful stigma that parents are distracted or they’re not committed or they’re somehow a liability to the company when, in fact, parents are the most efficient and the most loyal and the most committed to doing the work because we don’t have any time to waste. 

So I built it because I was frustrated that it didn’t exist. 

In countries like Germany, the idea of incorporating childcare facilities into offices isn’t that unusual. Why do you think it is such a new concept here in North America?

The fast answer is the patriarchy (laughs). We are expected to hide our internal identities from work. And that’s not a gender or a sex-based stigma — I believe it’s all encompassing. Pre-COVID, it was pretty common to see people sick at work. People would try to downplay it — because there’s this idea that work comes above everything else. When you integrate children into the workplace, it becomes a lot harder to hide your personal identity because they’re literally in your face. 

That’s what’s happening in COVID — because you can see my kitchen, because you can see the art on the walls and you can hear my kids screaming in the background, you can no longer hide that personal identity. It’s really rocked a lot of the ways in which we engage with our employers because in North America, we like to pretend that we don’t have lives outside of work, because we want to make work the thing that we’re all striving for. I think it’s really misguided because it ends up creating this huge separation between personal life and professional life.  

Who tends to sign up for The Workaround? Aside from having kids and needing childcare, what do they have in common?

That’s what’s so fun about The Workaround — not everyone who comes is a parent. For a long time, I said The Workaround is problematic because I don’t have a customer persona. Everybody’s different. But I did figure out recently during the pandemic that the common denominator for Workaround members is that the current working environment doesn’t suit them. 

People want to work where they live. They want to integrate their home life into their workplace. I had people come into The Workaround who didn’t have children, but loved that we were positioned directly across the street from a farmer’s market. They could go to a farmer’s market, have an office space, and be within a five minute walk from home. I had a number of people I can think of who are paying for a desk at The Workaround knowing they would never use the child care, but liking the idea that it was in their neighbourhood. 

The types of workers we have are totally varied. Remote workers who work for large companies, graphic designers, lawyers, accountants, teachers, quite a few university professors. It’s all over the map in terms of who’s coming — which I also think is because a lot of coworking spaces serve a startup framework that other remote workers don’t feel welcome in. So we basically got everybody else. 

What does a caregiver-friendly organization provide to its workers? 

It acknowledges that workers are more than workers. When you’re building a caregiving friendly work environment, you start by acknowledging that people have responsibilities outside of work, whether that’s elder care, pet care, child care — by recognizing that I need to take my dog to the vet because they’re sick and that doesn’t reflect on me as a worker. It’s just a thing I have to do — and not leave the workers responsible for navigating how they do that.  That’s the environment we have right now for time off — I’m going to have to decide if I’m going to lie and say I have a sick day, or I’m going to say it’s my kid, or it’s my pet, or it’s my mom, or whatever it is. And I find that friction is both incredibly fixable and also so silly. 

I think it would really serve employers to make that a lot more transparent around not just flexible working hours, but that your whole selves are welcome here. You can bring your whole self to work, tell us when you’re having a crisis, and allow us to problem-solve for you. How can we help you? How can we pull resources for you? 

On the one hand, it is good that there are employers who say they want their staff to bring their whole selves to work. But on the other hand, employers and workers don’t have an equal relationship when it comes to power. 

Yeah. This is where employee ownership becomes critical. This is where co-ops and social purpose management comes into play. I think we can recognize the role of an employer as the authority figure — but the employer is nobody without their talent. 

There’s a big conversation right now around tech talent in Toronto: that it’s hard to find talent and pay the wages that the U.S. is offering. Well, people share information about good employers versus not good employers. We need to start celebrating the employers who are doing this right, so that we can see that it’s both a recruitment and retention strategy. It’s a smart business and marketing strategy. 

We can also look at ways that we can distribute wealth differently, including employee share option plans and employee ownership that puts some of that decision making back in the hands of employees who can then say — we want health spending accounts, we want childcare subsidies, we want mandatory four week off vacations. We want these things because that’s what’s going to help us further this business. 

And for the employers who aren’t willing to move forward with the future of work, well, the top talent is not going to work for you. 

There’s also a conversation in tech around unionization as a way to build more equitable workplaces for caregivers in general. 

We need to recognize that HR works for the company, not the individual. I think there’s a lot of pretending that needs to stop. We need to think about wealth distribution, especially with marginalized workers: with Black workers and Black women in particular. And that involves, yes, unionizing, but also just thinking about purpose over profit. We just have to stop idolizing unicorn businesses that return the highest profits to only shareholders. 

Is there something that The Workaround’s clients need from their employers, but still aren’t getting right now? 

What’s happening right now from my community is that there’s a blanket statement of flexibility from employers, and that is a false illusion of support. Flexibility is not supporting caregivers. Flexibility is a ruse for ‘work 12 to 15 hours a day.’ You’re working during the day and ‘flexible’ means ‘no problem — you can sign back on at 8 p.m. and make calls from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.’ That’s not flexible. 

What we need is a much more formal reduction of work hours during a crisis. One of my Workaround members messaged me and said her husband’s company told them as long as children are home, there are no meetings across the company. Zero. No meetings. Because if one person has a meeting, then someone else can’t participate. If a kid is melting down, it doesn’t matter — I cannot listen to my boss while my kid is screaming at me. 

‘Flexibility’ is really dangerous right now. It’s fine when we have normal working hours. We’re in a crisis. We’re in an emergency situation. Parents are maxed out. Caregivers are maxed out. 

Do you think folks who care for family members with disabilities or handle elder care receive the same amount of support from employers as parents? 

It’s hard to say. I don’t think so, because we don’t allow people to bring their whole selves to work. To an extent, it’s somewhat safe to talk about a baby. If you’re taking a year of parental leave, it’s pretty hard to hide that — but if you have a sick parent or a family member at home, you might be able to disguise that burden a bit more. And I don’t necessarily think people always feel safe — and rightfully so — in talking about some of the challenges they have in caregiving. 

That’s where I’m talking about a lot more transparency around accepting that people have needs outside of work and allowing people to have some optionality around benefits and time off and access to support in order to meet their needs. There are varied needs. I advocate for child care because that’s my niche purpose, but that’s not to say we don’t have a generation of workers who need to care for parents, and we haven’t totally figured out how to do that. 

Aside from it being the right thing to do — what other benefits do employers see when they help caregivers balance their work and other obligations?

Revenue! I have seen personally, as both an employee and an employer, that when you better support your teams, they perform better. They take less time off, they’re more focused, they make better decisions about the business. To give you an example — I have staff who could have very easily gotten other jobs, but they’ve stayed with me even though I’ve been closed. They’re on the wage subsidy. I’m topping them up and trying to keep them employed as long as I possibly can. And they’re with me because I take care of them. Because I care about them as human beings. 

And guess what? I don’t have high turnover, so I don’t have to spend as much money on hiring. There is a direct connection between supporting my employees’ whole identity and the money I make. You will make more money, no question. Optimizing for efficiency at work is a broken model. Look at Amazon as an example. You treat your workers like shit. You have huge outbreaks of COVID, you have to shut down, and you lose money. 

What do you think the future holds for caregivers at work? 

I don’t think we can unsee parents’ role at work. I think we had a collective amnesia of the way people worked before. We are very, very scorned by this time, and people will make decisions knowing [whether their] employer was supportive during the pandemic or not. I do think parents will see more of an open conversation around parental leave policies and flex work policies. Even if they’re approaching employers who are demanding people return to the office and providing no leave, you will at least know that about the employer — whereas before, it was a lot more difficult to assess whether an employer was supportive of parents or not. 

You’ll know now. That’s better for parents. It’s better to know. I remember working for companies and not knowing whether the executive team had kids or not — do you even understand my life at all? Now we can see how leaders respect us in terms of whether or not they’re going to make it easier for us to return to work. 

Where does The Workaround fit into the post-pandemic world?

We’re only getting bigger. We’ve seen retail be really shocked and rocked by the pandemic. We’re seeing lots of low vacancies in terms of commercial spaces, which The Workaround is best suited in terms of revisioning what neighbourhoods look like and taking up some of those vacant retail spaces. 

It’s absolutely my goal that The Workaround be in every neighbourhood in Canada. I’m serious. I’m working very hard right now to open up more locations and to just make sure that we are a choice for families who don’t have employers who are willing to provide that benefit — that then parents can choose their neighbourhood Workaround. 

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