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To get more women into senior level positions, firms must engage with what Sylvia Hewlett, of the Centre for Work-Life Policy in New York, calls women’s “non-linear career paths”.

The vision is simple: a workplace where women are not penalised for opting for a non-conventional career path.

This is something that many women choose to do during their careers. According to Hewlett’s research - over a third of professional women leave work at some point, to look after children or family members, and a further third to go part-time for a while. Hewlett argues that when re-entering work, women are penalised - in terms of both salary and career progression - by a system that naturally favours a record of ‘unbroken service’.

They key to making the workplace work for women, according to Hewlett, “is to make flexibility totally universal, and to make it very real.” That means making flexibility available to everyone, not just women: The decision to work flexibly “hits men even harder than women. Men get really clobbered if they take some of this [flexibility] stuff. But it’s very important to figure out how to get men centrally involved because then you can really change the culture of the workplace, and it becomes kind of normal”.

So, if you listen to Hewlett, the key to creating an inclusive and fair workplace is flexibility for everyone, regardless of gender. But what’s in it for businesses? According to a Chartered Institute of Personal Development report - quite a lot.

In their survey, which questioned over 500 organisations in the UK, 47 per cent believe flexible working has had a positive effect on staff retention, 70 per cent perceive employee motivation as having benefited, and over half have seen positive effects on recruitment.

Though these finding are not directly linked to the assertion that flexible working can help women pursue what Hewlett brands the ‘non-liner career path’, they do provide evidence that flexible working - on its own - has measurable positive effects for businesses. If these business-related benefits also serve to create more women (and men) friendly workplaces, then really, everybody wins.

Read guide - Benefits of flexible working

Read guide - Women in business - support for businesses in the South West

A recently published research paper jointly funded by the London based Centre for Economic Excellence offers an intriguing insight into the relationship between management practice and business productivity.

The research, which aims to quantify company performance in relation to management practices, focusses on managers in manufacturing companies. Despite this industry bias, some of the findings have a broader relevance to many businesses, including non-multinational UK based firms.

The paper explains that “The spread of management performance between firms, even those of similar size operating in the same industry sectors in the same regions, is very broad, suggesting that management excellence is a matter of internal policy and not just the business environment”. The research also found strong links between improving management practices and large increases in productivity: “A single point improvement in management practice score is associated with the same increase in output as a 25 percent increase in the labour force or a 65 percent increase in invested capital”.

The assertion that management excellence is a product of internal policy gives weight to the widely established belief that proactive management training and development has a positive effect on productivity. Moreover, this productivity increase is so great it can eclipse other potentially more costly methods of increasing output.

In comparison to US, European and Asian counterparts, the UK performed badly in aspects of individual performance management, such as the establishment of effective, well structured targets. While UK firms work hard to recruit good people, they are far less effective at establishing processes that motivate workers to improve their individual performance and productivity.

A final point worthy of mention is a contrasting picture between multinational and non-multinational businesses. Multinational companies - in an effort to replicate the same performance standards across different regions, cultures and markets - have been forced into adopting a systematic approach to management. A positive offshoot of these efforts is improved management productivity, resulting in benefits such as better returns on capital and robust growth.

The research concludes that “the same benefits are easily accessible to other organisations, wherever they operate. Yet surprisingly few firms have made any attempt to gain an insight into the quality of their management behaviours. Those that do so give themselves the opportunity to access rapid, cost-effective and sustainable competitive advantage”.

More Info - Develop your management team