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Brad is a frequent blogger and covers a wide range of issues including career management, work-life, fatherhood, changing workforce dynamics as well as pressing social issues. His pieces have appeared in a number of outlets including LinkedIn, the Huffington Post, Medium, and the NY Times.
Father’s Day 2022
This Father’s Day marks the 12th year that BCCWF has been working to better understand the experiences of today’s working fathers. We have published numerous reports, book chapters and journal articles aimed at helping the public and employers better understand the experience of today’s dads, especially with regard to work and family. Our research has focused mainly on the experiences of “white collar” fathers and we have studied a broad range of issues including the transition to fatherhood, at-home dads, millennial fathers, generational differences in fathering, and men’s attitudes about and utilization of parental leave. Read more on LinkedIn.
A Look Ahead: Workforce Challenges and Trends
Over the past two tumultuous years, our Center has dramatically altered our value delivery system in order to meet the needs of our corporate partners, many of the country’s most respected employers, during a time of unparalleled change. In March of 2020, we switched to virtual offerings in order to meet member needs, and were able to do so while continuing a very high level of member satisfaction and engagement. Read more on LinkedIn.
Returning to normal and the office? I’m not so sure
As August approached I was looking forward to a return to campus and teaching my fall class to our University’s seniors. I had the foresight (i.e. blind luck) to not commit to teaching in the 2020-2021 academic year and was happy to have dodged that bullet. The course I teach is a highly personal and interactive one and I couldn’t imagine fostering the same connections for the class while we were all masked and socially distant. But just a couple of weeks ago while prepping for class, looking forward to seeing my colleagues at the Center in-person, and discarding the masks that were scattered everywhere on the home front, life took yet another unexpected turn. Read more on LinkedIn.
Is the “Great Quit” really happening and why?
Over the summer and early fall as COVID seemed to be winding down, the terms “the Great Resignation” and “the Big Quit” entered the scene. As the economy began to move toward reopening, there was a new concern for organizations to contend with. Would employees return to work and the office? Anecdotal evidence suggested that many employees would opt not to return in person, and if required to, would choose to either (a) leave their present employer or (b) possibly leave the workforce altogether. Read more on LinkedIn.
The Lessons of 2020
It has been a rough year by almost any standard, and on almost every front. We have experienced disequilibrium fueled by a global pandemic and the turbulence it has created for work, schools and families, an unprecedented response to racialized violence and a call for equity and justice for Black Americans, an economic meltdown in many industries bringing unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and the demise of many small businesses, and sharp increases in mental health challenges and addiction. Read more on LinkedIn.
Challenging Men to Step Up: This Is Our Moment
As we enter month nine of the shutdown, there is finally some reason for optimism. Two major drug companies, Pfizer and Moderna, are reporting very high rates of effectiveness with their vaccines in clinical trials. While too early to declare success, the likelihood that these vaccines will be released by year’s end suggest that we may be on our way to defeating this terrible virus that has cost far too many Americans their lives and far more their livelihood. This good news is beyond welcome in a year that has seen far more than its share of bad news. Read more on LinkedIn.
If We Look for Common Ground, We'll Find It
2020 has been a year like no other. Never has there been a time when our entire country sheltered in place to avoid the onslaught of an unknown virus. Yet in spite of the measures taken, over 110,000 Americans and more than 400,000 people worldwide have succumbed to Covid-19 in just a few short months. And as we faced this health crisis, the actions aimed at limiting its impact resulted in the worst employment meltdown in American history with over 40 million individuals losing their jobs. As always, the hardest hit were those who could least afford it. Read more on LinkedIn.
What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About What Is Essential
For the first 20 years of my career, I worked in corporate roles in human resources, quality improvement and management education. While my roles were interesting and, I believe, impactful for the organizations I worked in, I always felt that my contributions were a bit out of the mainstream. After all, I wasn’t engaged in the core mission of those businesses - making, selling or supporting the organization’s products and services. Read more on LinkedIn.
Adapting to A Remote Workplace
Because of the outbreak of Coronavirus many employees have been asked, or more likely told, to work from home for the coming weeks (or possibly months). While work from home programs are the norm in many organizations today, for others this is a new undertaking. History has shown that organizations that have developed the competencies to manage a remote workforce are in the best position to maintain business continuity when a crisis strikes - think 9/11 or Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy. Read more on LinkedIn.
Parental Leave: A Driver for Gender Equality at Work and Home
We all know how far behind the United States is when it comes to offering family support, especially in the area of parental leave. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world that does not legally ensure that mothers receive paid leave following the birth of a child, or provide paid leave for fathers, same-sex partners or adoptive parents. The past five years have seen a groundswell of action from employers on this issue, many realizing that if politicians will not make this happen on a national level, the private sector must take the lead. Read more on LinkedIn.
A Sunday morning at Notre-Dame that changed my life
I’m sure everyone who watched on Monday as one of the world’s greatest churches, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, was engulfed in flames felt much the same way I did - heartbroken. For me, Notre Dame Cathedral has always had special meaning. It was there, one Sunday morning more than 30 years ago, that I made a decision that changed my life. Read more on LinkedIn.
Finding Daylight on Mental Illness
Last weekend daylight returned. We turned the clocks forward and thankfully, the darkness of winter begins to lift. The older I get the harder winter hits me. My tolerance for the cold definitely decreases with each passing year, but it’s the darkness that really seems to draw me down and inward. Read more on LinkedIn.
Lessons from a Decade of Studying Fathers
This Father's Day marks 10 years since my Center, The Boston College Center for Work & Family, began our New Dad research series exploring the experiences of working fathers and publishing reports on how their roles are changing --- and how they're not. The genesis of this work came in 2009, when after nearly a decade in the field, it was glaringly apparent to me that when it came to work and family research and actions, fathers were only conspicuous by their absence. Although fathers desired to be defined as far more than simply breadwinners, the field and society as a whole seemed content to paint them with that brush. Read more on LinkedIn.
The New Normal
With three kids five and under, I thought for sure that we were in the "eye of the storm" when it came to work-family challenges. I had experienced, albeit from 60 miles away, elder care issues with my family when my dad struggled with and ultimately succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease at a relatively young age. And despite what I knew about adult life stages, l still carried with me some very flawed assumptions about work and life. I kept thinking that things would “get back to normal” in no time. Read more on LinkedIn.
Make this Father's Day a new beginning
There are times when you don’t need to be an expert on gender issues to realize that the world is trying to tell you something. For years we have listened to the seemingly unending refrain about the gender pay gap. We’ve also heard about the difficult juggling act women have trying to fulfill their profession obligations while still shouldering most of the responsibilities on the home front. We know that when women become mothers, their careers plateau — or even derail. Women are certainly doing better in the workplace today, but they’re still not invited into the boys club at the top. Women CEOs in large companies remain a very rare species, with only 6% female CEOs in the Fortune 500. And last, but certainly not least, the #metoo movement has made us all painfully aware of the amount of sexual harassment women continue to face in the workplace. Read more on Medium.
When Tragedy Hits Home
As a steady stream of violence hits our country again and again, we seem always to hear the same sad refrains. Along with the shock, the outrage, and the predictable lack of action, we also hear those closest to each tragedy respond, “We never thought it could happen here.” Although the frequency of these events makes that sentiment increasingly dubious, the idea that it doesn’t happen here, to people like us, resonates. But last weekend, it did happen here. Read more on LinkedIn.
She's Leaving Home
The circumstances are happier and it’s not a Wednesday, but this Friday morning at five o’clock as the day begins, our oldest daughter will leave home to spend a year on the other side of the country. Maggie, who graduated from college in May, is moving to Seattle to do a year of service work with the homeless. It’s not an easy choice that she is making. She won’t be earning much money, she’ll be far away from family and most friends, and she’ll be working with individuals who live at the margins – not a cushy proposition. By most people’s standards, she’s certainly taking the road less traveled. But that’s nothing new for her. When it came time to study abroad her junior year, Maggie picked Kathmandu over London or Paris. Read more on HuffPost.
An Anniversary: 25 Years and Counting
Today is my anniversary. Exactly 25 years ago, I entered into a lifelong pact with my best friend, Annie. So much has changed and been experienced since that day. On one hand our journey has been unique and unimaginable. On the other hand, quite commonplace and ordinary. Read more on HuffPost.
The Boston Marathon: Clinging to a Lifelong Love
4/16/13. I spent much of yesterday in shock and disbelief. As the story and images of the tragedy of the Boston Marathon unfolded, I found myself clinging to a lifelong love and to an eight-year-old victim who lost his life because he was taken to see that wonderful event. Read more on LinkedIn.
