Care Worker Shortage and Part-Time Work Culture in the Netherlands – An Integrated Approach to Tackle this Labor Conundrum
Credit: Marijn Fidder
On October 27, 2022, Simon Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times, wrote in the article, The Netherlands May be the First Country to Hit the Limits of Growth, that “[T]he Dutch economy’s demand for new workers seems insatiable. Eighty-four percent of employers report labour shortages, one government study found...One constraint on growth is that the Dutch enjoy the developed world’s shortest average work week, at just 30.3 hours. Six workers in 10 – predominantly women – are either part-timers or temps.”
HPP, Het Potentieel Pakken, is a Dutch public benefit foundation. Its name in English means “tapping the potential.” HPP’s core mission is to use underutilized potential to solve labor market issues within organizations, sectors, and the Dutch economy. It was founded by Wieteke Graven and is the result of her work on the report “Power of Parity” published in 2018 when she was a partner at the global strategy consulting firm McKinsey and Company. The report showed that the shortages in care and education could, in theory, be solved if all women with a part-time job worked an extra hour a week. This extra work could also be an important step towards financial self-reliance.
An Interview with Wieteke Graven
Wieteke Graven is the founder and chairman of Het Potentieel Pakken (HPP), a foundation with the mission to make optimal use of the untapped potential in the Dutch labor market. HPP currently has launched a number of initiatives in the healthcare sector, in primary education and childcare. Since its foundation in 2019, HPP has grown into an organization with 30 employees, with plans for further expansion.
Wieteke started her career at ING and Credit Suisse in Tokyo and London. In 2007 she became a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam. After a period as Chief of Staff for one of the members of Royal Dutch Shell’s Executive Board, she returned as a partner at McKinsey in 2017. Her focus has been on large- scale organizational change.
Wieteke has a passion for research and writing and is the author of a number of reports and opinion articles including McKinsey's Power of Parity report: the value of more equality between men and women in the Dutch labor market and Opportunities around part-time jobs in healthcare.
Deepa Krishnamurthy: In the Netherlands, what cultural or historical reasons are behind the high percentage of part-time work, especially for women?
Wieteke Graven: It started in the Golden Age when the Netherlands was a big trading nation. For the wealthy traders, it was a sign of their status and prosperity if their wife could stay at home. During the First World War, the Dutch nation was neutral, so while in surrounding countries most of the women had to step in for the men that were fighting in the war, in the Netherlands there was no such need. So, there was not a tradition of women working in factories. Different countries had different solutions to the labor shortages during the great rebuilding after World War Two. Some countries solved that by having women participate in the workforce. In the Netherlands, the preferred solution was to bring in migrant workers from, for example, Spain, Morocco, and Turkey to fill in the vacancies. The Netherlands does not have a tradition of women working.
Krishnamurthy: What is the current sentiment on migration? Why start with increasing part-time hours? What's the right total balance of the three levers for increasing workforce: migration, increasing part- time work, and raising the retirement age?
Graven: A recent report by a large national think tank forecasts a big labor shortage by 2050. Practically speaking, there are a finite number of solutions as you mentioned: welcoming migrant workers, increasing the retirement age, or increasing part-time hours. But interestingly, all these solutions are unpopular. Nobody wants to work later in life, beyond age 67, which is the current retirement age in the Netherlands. Working part-time is a deeply ingrained societal norm, and some people say it's a privilege. Bringing in migrant workers is the least popular solution of all of them, because at the moment, we also have a housing shortage. A lot of people are waiting for a house, which is further aggravated by a large inflow of migrant workers. It also puts a stress on the education system. In a recent poll among the Dutch people, increasing part-time hours was the least unpopular option.
Belinda Juran: Your work with HPP focuses on how working hours might increase in the healthcare area and education. And, in part because they are often serviced by women, wages in those positions tend to be lower. So how does your work fit with a concern about whether this further exacerbates the stereotypes of women being less valued, in an economic sense, in these positions versus other opportunities for women?
Graven: During my prior work at McKinsey, we released the Power of Parity Report, which delved into this. It is quite common across Europe to observe the stereotype of distinct male and female dominated sectors. However, in the Dutch situation, male sectors have full time workers, and female sectors are part-time, a pattern not seen in other European countries. It is a chicken and egg story. For example, consider a couple where the husband works in a male dominated sector, which are also usually the better paid sectors, like IT, manufacturing or construction, and the woman works in the service sector with lower wages. When they have to make a decision, for example, to have their first child, it's always said to the woman, “but you earn less, so why don't you stop working?” or “you should work less, because your income is lower.” It is exceedingly difficult to break out of that pattern. The decision then ends up in favor of the husband’s work and career.
And I think it is also revelatory that in our work with care workers they find it completely normal, that, for example, they have to adjust their hours to their husbands’ work because “my husband comes home at 5:00pm, so he needs to have dinner at 5:30pm.”
When a child falls ill in childcare, or in school, the first call is to the woman. It does not matter if she's the higher paid, or she's a senior executive; it's so deeply ingrained in the culture norm that the mother is usually the first point of contact for whenever something happens. That mindset is the thing that we are trying to break through.
Juran: Do you think expanding the number of hours for part-time workers will help address that?
Graven: That is the big question. Even when you have two highly educated partners, and the woman also has a highly paid job or works more, there is still this traditional role playing between the two partners. But I think increasing part-time work is a step that will make a difference because some of the arguments for wage inequality will begin to disappear. The reality is that in the female service dominated sectors – like education, healthcare, and childcare – labor shortages are getting increasingly worse and are not going to disappear. It is not cyclical. According to the forecasts, it is a structural shortage. The solution of increasing the part-time hours becomes almost essential.
Krishnamurthy: Demography is changing, in terms of falling birth rates, increased workforce participation by women, and increased longevity. Are the labor shortages in the Netherlands a prelude to something we are all going to face?
Graven: In the Netherlands, we call it the “Double Gray” — the wave of an aging population together with a wave of an aging workforce. This is becoming very visible in the health care sector, where around 20% of the workforce is retiring in the next 10 years, and at the same time, the aging population needs health care. This is not something temporary. We can work on demand or supply, and supply is something on which HPP is focusing.
Krishnamurthy: How does HPP’s mission fit in with the childcare angle, incentivizing higher birth rates, while incentivizing increased workforce participation?
Graven: Interestingly enough, availability of child care is hardly ever in the top three reasons mentioned by the women or by the respondents to our surveys as one of the main reasons people do not work more hours. It is almost counterintuitive, because everybody in the Netherlands always complains about the quality and cost of child care, but when we ask people ”what do you need to have in place to work more hours?,” child care is never really a very popular response. Most childcare arrangements are informal through family and friends. Formal child care has for a long time been very unpopular in the Netherlands, and you might have read in the report that it is also seen as bad for mothers to bring their kids to child care for 5 days a week, like some of my employees do. They feel judged, “Wow! Why are you doing that to your child?” The Dutch government at the moment is convinced that decreasing the cost of childcare will encourage women to work more hours. So, there is this big plan to make childcare almost free. But a lot of critics say that because of this whole cultural thing about childcare, do we really believe that free childcare will have the desired impact? And I must personally say, that based on the experience within our work, I also have my doubts whether this will be the incentive for women to work more hours. So, the jury is out, and it is an expensive plan, with lots of critics, but the government is going to give it a try, and they are aiming to launch this in, I think, 2025.
Juran: What then are the reasons why women might work more hours and how do you encourage that behavior? If the jury is out on the effectiveness of government financial incentives, are there other incentives you have identified?
Graven: The number one reason still is “I work more hours because I enjoy my job.” In the Netherlands, we are in a luxurious position where working more hours is a choice. For instance, in the US, working full time or two jobs may be economically necessary in order to be able to pay the bills. So, the “one and a half income” model, where the husband works full time and the wife works part-time, is still a pretty popular model for most couples in the Netherlands. But because of rising inflation, the number two reason, “I want to work more hours because it’s financially attractive for me”, is growing in popularity. And the third reason is, “I want to work more hours if I’m still able to balance work with my personal life.”
The interesting thing is that now the Dutch government policies are very much focused on the financial incentives. However, working longer hours has to do with the intrinsic motivation of people, which then shifts the onus to what employers can do. You enjoy your work because you have autonomy, because you feel you are respected, because you feel like you’re making an important contribution. And these are not things that can be dealt on the systemic level; instead, the crucial role is being played by employers. So that’s why we also strongly believe and advocate not to wait for huge systemic changes, like free childcare or changes in fiscal policies, because they are super costly, they take ages, and there are plenty of implementation challenges. Instead, you can start tomorrow; with things you can do as an employer in the relationship you have with your employee. And that is the area HPP Is active in. We are helping employers to do the right thing and make the right changes and have the right conversations with their employees.
Juran: Your work with this approach seems to focus on employee teams, where people come together to figure out how to best approach the jobs for them. Is that the key piece?
Graven: There is no silver bullet to stimulate people to work more hours. What might be very surprising, is that, although every single organization in the Netherlands has a labor shortage, very few of them have even thought about asking their existing employees to work more hours.
So, the first thing we do when we start to work with organizations is make sure that people are aware of the shortage and make it a topic for discussion within the organization.
There are deeply ingrained perceptions about what is possible around increasing working hours so the second thing we do is a questionnaire and interviews. We create a very fact-based overview of what the potential is and what the barriers are in the organization. We move from beliefs to facts. We usually find untapped potential. Around 15% of people say, “I definitely want to work more hours,” and an additional 25% of employees indicate “I want to work more hours under the right circumstances.” Then we have conversations with teams. We work on their schedules to see if we can increase working hours whilst retaining a pleasant working schedule. We facilitate conversations between team leaders and their employees to talk about this. We review HR processes to see what they can improve. And we try to communicate about the topic in a very positive way throughout the whole process. So, there are multiple things we work on during a six month engagement, to get the wheels in motion for the organization to seize the opportunity, and for the employees to say, “It is possible. It can be done in a good way. I actually do financially benefit from it.” That is what we try to achieve in a period of six months’ time.
Krishnamurthy: That is a lot of work! Most of the things that you talk about require a lot of handholding, a lot of high touch. How do you scale that — especially with the urgency to deal with this current and projected labor shortage?
Graven: Yes, it is a lot of work and that is a super good question. When I started to work on this topic four years ago, an increase in part-time hours was considered a “nice to have.” Now, we have these huge labor shortages. Suddenly, this whole topic has gained traction and urgency. People would like to see this changed tomorrow. However, having gained so much experience in this field, we need to give people a reality check. Deeply ingrained norms have been there, for centuries, and are not going to change overnight. We are not going to change it in six months within an organization. This really takes time.
This is also a big challenge for our team because we have grown fast, from about five to 30 people right now. Almost on a weekly basis we get requests from organizations that want our support, and there is only a certain level of growth we can digest. If we grow too fast, we begin to lose impact. So now, we have made a clear distinction between two types of activities we provide at HPP. The first one is support which is quite intense — we actively guide organizations through the change process. This requires a lot of time and effort and energy from us, because we help them for six months. It takes a team of three people from our side to do that. But we believe that in terms of really creating impact it is very important to do this part. The biggest part of our activities is around this intensive support.
The second part of our activities at HPP is to develop and share our knowledge and experience with a really broad group of stakeholders. We share what we've learned, our methodology, our interventions, our approach. For example, we do so-called bootcamps where we teach organizations in a virtual course how to get going on the topic, how to start working on it themself. And that’s turned out to be a very popular way for organizations to make their first steps toward increasing working hours. We also hold roundtables on how to make healthy schedules. We conduct sessions on financial rewards — how can you help your employees to understand whether more working more hours is actually financial beneficial? We write opinion articles. We conduct and publish research.
Krishnamurthy: From a US perspective, the Netherlands appears to blend work-life balance and a complete social safety net system. If time is the most luxurious commodity in our time-starved world, do the Dutch already have the best of both worlds? The grass is always greener on the other side. Could you comment on that sentiment?
Graven: When you look at the future of work in a more systemic way, I can very much imagine that, in 50 years time, with all the developments in technology, the average working week in most countries goes down to four days. That is already the case in the Netherlands now. There is quite a large group of people, men and women, that work four days a week, which I think is a pretty good balance between your professional life and your personal life. In the Netherlands, working 32 hours a week, you can still have a decent career even if it is not executive leadership. I think this optimal situation is only for highly educated men and women, because they have a high salary, and they can afford to work four days a week. However, the average number of working hours for healthcare workers or childcare workers, or in education, is less than 25 hours a week. So, if all of them would move to a 32 hour working week, then the whole labor shortage could theoretically be solved. But it’s a huge step from working 16 hours a week to double the number of hours. If we could achieve a 32 hour working week in the Netherlands across sectors, it would be perfect. But in reality, we are far from that especially in sectors dominated by women.
Krishnamurthy: Do you have any parting thoughts for our readers?
Graven: I realize more and more that my team consists of highly educated and privileged people who all have university degrees. And it is such a unique opportunity to combine the talent of my team with — but also for them to learn from — people in health care and in child care, and to bridge the gap between two groups of people, one with a lot of experience, with lots of knowledge, and the other one with the talents to actually bring about the change. We have this really powerful combination of two groups of people that, on most occasions, do not really meet each other anymore, because they come from different parts of society. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman says we need more people with moral ambition, and moral ambition is about using your talents for important social impact causes. It is a privilege for me to lead HPP.
Juran: The concept of moral ambition, which you highlight so effectively, speaks to the mission of the ALI program, and the Social Impact Review.
Graven: We need more people with moral ambition to solve a number of issues. Growing so fast as an organization and being able to deal with all this interest that comes our way from multiple sectors is exciting, but it's also very intimidating. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the interest there is for our work. It helps that we have a very professional team with moral ambition, but also with professional skills who can deal with that. You have to be quite pragmatic and business-like about how to deal with it. I say that you must be a pragmatic idealist. Get that experience, earn your money, and develop your skills, and then make the move. You don't have to start it from age 18, because the network I built up while I was at McKinsey, and the credibility I gained because I was at McKinsey, helped a lot, especially when nobody had ever heard about HPP. It has helped that I had been a partner at McKinsey, because people say, “Well, she must be able to do something.” That helped HPP get going. I could not have done it without my professional experience.
Krishnamurthy: We need pragmatic idealism to realize our moral ambition. That is wise advice. Thank you for your great work and for sharing your insights.
About the Authors:
Belinda Juran was a 2020 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellow whose social impact is focused on her adopted hometown of Lowell, MA. Prior to ALI, Belinda served as partner at WilmerHale, a global law firm where she co-chaired both the technology transactions and licensing practice group and the life sciences practice group. Earlier she was a software engineer, engineering manager and consultant at various software and hardware companies. Belinda is a board member of both the International Institute of New England, which supports refugees and immigrants in the eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas, and the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation, which raises funds to support Lowell’s public library. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the University of Massachusetts Lowell School of Education, the Lowell Early Childhood Council, UTEC (which helps proven-risk young adults achieve social and economic success), and the Free Soil Arts Collective (which amplifies the voices of artists of color).
Deepa Krishnamurthy is a 2021 Fellow of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). While at ALI, Deepa focused on understanding private markets, market mechanisms and the unique challenges faced by the private and small business ecosystem in the US. She is currently working on launching a mission driven venture to support small business continuity and succession with a goal to strengthen both local economic resilience and socio-economic cohesion. Prior to ALI, she had a long career in investment real estate. Deepa volunteers her time to support advocacy and programs to eliminate homelessness and initiatives to enhance and promote broad and inclusive market and workforce participation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.