A parent’s wellbeing and work performance is directly impacted by their ability to manage work alongside caregiving. While the return to school experience is fresh in parents’ minds, it makes sense for HR to review how well their organisation supports working parents. Organisations that get this right stand to benefit from significant improvements in staff performance, wellbeing, and retention.
The Unique Needs of Working Parents
As more organisations adopt a “flex for all” approach to work it’s fair to question whether the needs of working parents require separate consideration. They face a distinct set of demands that set them apart from employees without dependent care responsibilities. In numbers, a “full-time” role is typically 40 hours per week or 24% of 168 hours. By contrast, parenting responsibilities, for a person with a baby or school aged child, can consume up to 121 hours per week, or 72% of their time.
In practice, working parents are constantly juggling competing priorities and tightly bound by external schedules like school drop-offs/pick-ups and extracurricular activities. The resulting stress, sleep deprivation, exposure to childhood illnesses, and pressure to oversee homework and exam preparation can take a heavy toll on their wellbeing which directly impacts their ability to perform at work.
The business and human toll
When both men and women aren’t supported to manage work and care responsibilities the business is negatively impacted too.
Historically, workplace support for working parents has been predicated on the assumption that mothers are the primary caregivers. Traditionally, it’s been more culturally acceptable for women to request and receive flexibility at work. While flexible working has done a great job of keeping women in the workplace it often comes at the price of career advancement and pay progression. Motherhood is the point at which many women’s careers judder to a halt, never to recover. As a result, McKinsey concludes, the “motherhood penalty” accounts for up to 80% of the gender pay gap.
The story is different, but no less problematic, for working fathers. Traditionally, dads tend to get relegated to a “helper” role rather than an equal parent. Lack of paid, extended paternity leave and a work culture that still views requesting time off to care for children as a lack of commitment to work, have prevented many men from being the involved, confident fathers they aspire to be. This conflict between societal expectations and their internal desires is taking a serious toll on men’s mental health.
The Business Case for Supporting Working Parents
While the moral imperative to support working parents is clear, the business case is equally compelling. Employers that fail to provide the flexibility, understanding, and practical support needed by working parents risk losing valuable talent, both female and male. This talent drain not only impacts the leadership pipeline and boardroom representation, but it also perpetuates the very gender dynamics that create the problem in the first place.
While it’s important to ensure you have gender-neutral policies in place that support both parents to share care responsibilities, work culture is often the biggest barrier preventing parents, dads in particular, from juggling work and life in a healthy way. Compared with Europe, UK work culture tends to value commitment to work, a long hour’s culture and the ability to overcome unrealistic deadlines over a healthy work-life balance. It is this aspect of work culture that urgently needs to be addressed not just for working parents but to support new and incoming legislation on flexible work and the right to disconnect.
5 Steps HR Can Take to Empower Working Parents
Here are five key steps HR can take today to strengthen a work culture that enables all staff to manage work and home responsibilities.
- Address the Cultural Barriers
Shifting the culture is perhaps the biggest and most impactful challenge. Deeply entrenched beliefs and behaviours around overwork, facetime, and the ideal worker archetype must be tackled head-on. HR must work with senior leadership to model and reinforce the message that excessive hours and lack of work-life balance are not signs of dedication, but rather ineffective work practices that undermine both individual and organisational performance.
- Conduct a Holistic Review
Involve staff to understand where organisational policies, job design, performance management systems, or managerial mindsets, undermine employees’ ability to maintain healthy work-life boundaries. Get feedback from working parents to understand their unique challenges and pain points.
- Leverage Data and Analytics
Without data, Leaders can’t understand how long hours and unrealistic deadlines dent staff wellbeing, performance and productivity. Equip leaders with the insight they need to identify patterns of unsustainable overtime and develop solutions that benefit both the business and its employees.
- Empower Managers to Lead the Way
Frontline managers play a pivotal role in setting the tone and ensuring working parents feel truly supported. Equip them with the skills to facilitate open discussions about workload and work-life balance and give them the confidence to actively encourage their reports to switch off at the end of the workday. Managers must also model the behaviour they want to see.
- Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Even the best-laid plans will fail without a robust communication strategy. HR should devise a multi-channel, year-round campaign to promote the organisation’s commitment to supporting working parents. This should include not just policy updates, but also success stories and testimonials that bring the message to life and inspire others to follow suit.
The key lesson here is that unless an organisation is prepared to address a culture that venerates and rewards long hours and presenteeism, initiatives to support working parents will be undermined. To drive sustainable results, for all staff, a commitment to work-life balance must be integrated throughout the organisation – embedded in its culture, leadership, and people management practices.
If you’d like to know more about how Protime can support your organisation to create and maintain work-life boundaries, contact simon.garrity@protimewfm.co.uk .
Simon Garrity
Simon Garrit is Senior Workforce management expert at Protime. Simon specialises in helping organisations use technology to improve productivity, commercial performance and employee wellbeing through technology. He is responsible for the UK business of Protime, a market leader in time registration, access control, visitor registration and personnel planning.
