Is your flexible working policy culturally inclusive?

The employment of Indigenous workers is both essential to Closing the Gap and connected to positive business outcomes, but business leaders have to be more than intentional.

Workplace flexibility is shaped by gendered, racial, and colonial relations of power, new research has found.

According to Professor Nareen Young, director of the Centre for Indigenous People and Work (CIPW) at UTS, becoming an Indigenous employer of choice is achieved when organisations don’t just claim to be flexible, but are actually flexible in accordance with culture.

“For a long time, flexible work in Australian workplaces has been treated as a one-size-fits-all policy, and for Indigenous employees, that size has rarely fit,” she said.

Workplace policies do not often consider the realities of Indigenous kinship care and community obligations, and Indigenous women are often faced with increased scrutiny and distrust when it comes to flexible working.

“For many Indigenous people, family extends beyond the immediate nuclear unit of parents and siblings to include extended family, clan, and the broader community,” Young said.

“Caring can include supporting parents, aunties and uncles, younger siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, partners’ children, elders, and/ or those with disabilities or chronic health issues as well as other community members.”

Further, Indigenous workers may use flexible work to attend sorry business or take part in community and Country cultural obligations.

However, Unsettling flexibility: Indigenous women’s experiences of flexible work at work revealed that Indigenous women have less control over their flexible working despite using the arrangements more than non-Indigenous women.

The research concluded that Indigenous women are frequently required to justify, explain, and even defend flexibility in ways not asked of other employees, shifting flexibility from an entitlement to a conditional privilege.

In this way, Young said that workplace flexibility that “matches the reality of Indigenous communities and families can make a real difference”.

Further, Young cited the Australian Chamber of Commerce’s assertion that culturally sensitive measures allow businesses to “embrace the opportunity to diversify the workforce, secure future skills, and boost the nation’s economic prosperity”.

“Employers who get culturally sensitive flexibility right are building workplaces that are attractive to high-performing Indigenous employees while also meeting the commitments they have made in their Reconciliation Action Plans with everyday practice,” Young said.

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