Like it or not, your female workforce won’t be able to picture a future with you if you fail to motivate them. Take a moment to put yourself in their shoes and think of what they want from you:

“I’m not passionate about my job”

This is not about fake enthusiasm when the boss is within earshot, this is the fundamental premise that a woman’s heart must be in what she does in order to thrive. Our research, and numerous studies such as the On-Ramps, Off-Ramps Revisited by the Centre for Work Life Policy, shows that the primary reason women leave is because they don’t do a job just to pay the bills.  The dollar sign is not as important as having their heart in their role…

“My job is taking over my life”

Put more pressure on your female employees’ workload and know that she is forced to balance this by subtracting from her family and home commitments: more flexibility is high on the wish list of most female executives. So, push her too far and next time she takes an inventory of how she spends her time, she may feel she wants to stretch her wings elsewhere.

“I feel creatively stifled”

This employee enjoys her job and has looked for ways to improve her situation, but can’t turn the job into what she really wants. Nearly half of those surveyed in our recent research said that they wanted to be able to innovate and collaborate more. Don’t turn her into someone she’s not by keeping her nose to the grindstone.

“This is not the right place for me”

Women are more likely to align themselves with a company whose ethos mirrors her own. Embrace her world, offer her strategies for a sustainable working life and she will reciprocate with a strong commitment to your business.

“Other jobs look better”

If this is your first step into gender-savvy recruitment and retention, the good news is that you follow the lead of some clear leaders in the field. Don’t let your investment go to waste, act now to develop a strategy to retain and reinvigorate your female workforce.

Want to find out how to retain your top female talent? Buy Your Loss: How to Win Back your Female Talent- A gender savvy business plan for competitive advantage.

‘Believing someone else is going to take care of you is really risky. As a woman I recommend that you should always be able to take care of yourself. If you are a mother, make sure that you can take care of your kids because, in the end, you can count on no one else but yourself.’.

This is a quotation of one of our interviewees for Your Loss: How to Win Back your Female Talent, Emily Walker is a highly successful corporate executive turned entrepreneur. She rose to the top of the corporate ranks and is now a running her own international consultancy.

I am drawn by the power of this quote. It instantly negates the traditional, stereotyped image that we have as a girls growing up who will “find their prince charming who will look after them”. Today’s reality is very different. Women have to break down barriers in all walks of life, and in every level. Boys don’t go through the same challenges. They are encouraged from day 1 to “fight it out” and “win”, to “compete”, to become “leaders”. Women, on the other hand have been reinforced subservient roles and it falls squarely up to them to break those mindsets and, at the same time, to take control of their career.

To be smart in how to play the game of business. Here are some of the key tenets I always recommend:

Be proactive

Women tend to focus on being excellent at what they do and feel a sense of duty to deliver and offer support to all around. They tend to work away unnoticed, driving themselves into the ground and, of course, are disappointed when they cannot fulfill everyone’s, and most importantly, their own very high, expectations. Women need to be proactive about their career. Be intelligent – what will you need to do to get to where you want faster, smarter and with less effort?

Have courage: Speak out!

Women are great workers. They are the silent holders of the fort. While men are keen networkers, women believe ‘my work will speak for itself’. We have news for you: it very seldom does. You must reject what you learned at school or at home that ‘girls should not brag or speak out’. If you don’t talk about your successes, who will? If you do not voice your discontent, how will your manager or organisation know the challenges you are facing?

I sincerely applaud the women who start women’s networks and other such affinity groups in corporations because, at the very least, they have brought to the discussion the culture in which women find themselves and the challenges they face in business.

Sell yourself

Have the courage to ask for what you are worth, ‘I contribute X,Y and Z to the business. I would expect A in return.’ If your line manager or sponsor will not listen, move on. Enlightened organisations will react and will support you. If they don’t, they simply do not deserve you. You can then move on, with no love lost. If we do not raise our voices or vote with our well-heeled shoes, corporations will not wake up to the stifling cultures that are prevailing in their businesses.

Network outside of your organisation too

Women tend to be focused on their own working environment and are excellent internal networkers. The common held assumption (and I held it too during both of my redundancies!) is that your employers will look after you. However in turbulent times, or when redundancy occurs, the absence of a good external network is keenly felt – by you and only you.

To mitigate that, you must build external networks to ease your transition to pastures new. My experience? A former boss became a client and I was able to contribute to his business as a free-lance consultant following my second redundancy in 2002. On the back of this experience, I have helped hundreds of women to be strategic in building networks, within and outside their organisations. You need to build that network and promote your own, strong personal brand around your area of expertise.

As the quote above suggests, if you want recognition, flexibility and to ‘feel’ engaged with your work but also able to fulfil your family obligations, you and only you can do this. You need to change your own mindset before you can take over your own careers. When you do, you won’t look back. Emily Walker certainly didn’t.

In our experience, this becomes even more important if your customer is female. In both the B2B and B2C spheres, women are becoming the major purchasers of products – ranging from cars, to computers to computing systems. Whilst traditionally these purchases were made by men (and hence this is why car show-rooms are still the most un-attractive places for a woman to walk into), some of the metrics are interesting: 60% of new car purchases are dominated by women in Japan; in Europe women make up about 47% of PC users.

So, what are some of the ways that your organisation can delight your female customers?

Deliver an Interconnected Offering

Neuroscience has dictated that the male and female brains are different. Women have 20 million more neurons than men, largely in the Corpus Collusum, the interconnecting highway between left and right hemispheres. Consequently, on average, of course, women are experts at Integrative Thinking: according to the anthropologist Helen Fisher, “they want to explore multiple interactions, the multidirectional paths, all of the permutations of the puzzle*”. So, when considering your company’s product or service delivery, have you considered the myriad of applications that it may be used for, and how each can be relevant for the user? If something goes wrong, have you considered looking at non-traditional ways of finding the solution? If, for example, you are delivering IT systems and something unexpected goes wrong, did you consult the breadth of the team delivering the service to come up with the solution? This process is part and parcel of what your female stakeholder is likely to be looking for, in order to see that your business is using all the knowledge base available to obtain a (novel) solution.

Seek to understand…. to obtain the ultimate brand ambassadors

The best brands in the world understand that a loyal female customer, is the best customer in the world. Her innate need to communicate (the hormone Oxytocin has been proved to be responsible for her need to connect with others), means that she is very likely to share her positive experience with a friend or colleague. When loyal, women are the best ambassadors to your company or service. So, how do you obtain that loyalty?
You have to prove you understand and care for her as a person, her business, and her world wider world. You have to satisfy this innate sense of personal and community altruism. We are working on a number of projects with our clients in the IT and Financial Services sector whereby client-supplier activities focus on constructing connections on a personal and socially responsible context. How are you expressing your commitment to a stronger client-relationship? How is your organisation making a difference in the worlds where your client may have an interest or presence in?

Flexibility leads to Creativity and Innovation

As an extension on the point above, women embrace flexibility. The worst thing to say to your female customer is to insinuate that there is no other way to solve her problem/or issue with your product or service. Surely, if she is such an important customer as you make her out to be, then being creative in solving any problems is part and parcel of your offering? In fact, you will let her use her innate creativity (remember, point 1 above about Integrative Thinking), and you will let her work with you in identifying the appropriate solution. This is why women make excellent relationship managers – they, on average, tend to utilise this skill in solving problems for their customers. So, ask yourself, how flexible are you and your team being when your disgruntled customer contacts you over a problem? How are you showing her this flexibility?

Genuine Delivery of Promise

One of the most critical value-systems that guide women is that of authenticity. Delivering your service or product with a genuine, authentic desire for her or her company’s success is critical. Make sure your strategy engages her in dialogue – ask her frequently what would make a difference to her, and adapt your product or service accordingly. Remember one important point – deliver what you promise. If you do take the time and make the genuine effort to understand what she requires, then act on it. The female hippocambus, the part of the brain that never forgets a conversation, is larger and more active in women than in men. So if you say you will amend your processes so that she receives the reports with the frequency she wanted, do so. If you don’t, then the disappointment is greater. So, consider how are you communicating and delivering that authenticity? How are you servicing that undeniable claim that you are in business to serve her business?
I suspect you are thinking this makes sense good business sense, as well as being common sense. We ask ourselves why does most of the business world, however, overlook this market and these basic premises?

*  The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, Dr Helen Fisher