Bridging the gap between family and work

Having a family can, at times, be stress-inducing and time-consuming. This is why finding a balance between family and work can often seem impossible.

Working to reduce this stress is Parents At Work, a membership-based company that provides benefits to employees.

Together with UNICEF Australia, Parents At Work introduced Family Friendly Workplaces. This assessment tool is described on its website: “The Family Friendly Workplaces recognition framework benchmarks and certifies employers as a ‘Family Inclusive Workplace’.”

Emma Walsh, founder of Family Friendly Workplaces and the chief executive of Parents at Work, said that the pandemic that ushered in the new world of work has allowed people to take control of their work/life balance.

“There’s nothing a pandemic to make us all stop and think about how we are managing our work and particularly our work from home. And so, it gave a unique lens into the lives of our work and our colleagues and family,” said Ms Walsh.

“The future of work has arrived; it’s not in the future, it’s here, and it’s now far more flexible and fluid than any of us could have imagined.”

According to Ms Walsh, work can have a massive impact on the wellbeing of children. If parents are leaving work stressed, they bring these negative feelings home and reflect them onto their children.

“Not enough organisations have a handle on how their people feel about their work and family tension points, that their policies aren’t really up to scratch, aren’t meeting the needs of the employees,” Ms Wash explained.

“Workplaces have … a really great impact on children’s wellbeing. And I don’t think enough workplaces recognise the impact that their workplace is having on the future generation, how their parents’ stress and tension is impacting their ability to thrive.”

Policy can be a crucial influence on this issue, said Ms Walsh. Getting policy right is an important first step towards creating a family-friendly workplace.

“What we particularly homed in on is looking at, first of all, the organisation’s policy. What is it that they’re intending is put in place for their people? Because I always call policies intentions. Policies don’t drive change actually, in many respects, a lot of research will tell you that. But what they do is they make an statement in an organisation, this is how we do things around here,” she said.

“So, you’ve got to have a statement and an intention that this is what we’re about and this is culturally what we want to be about and offering.”

Ms Walsh continued: “If you don’t have practices that support that policy, the policy gets walked over, remains in a drawer, is ineffective. So, we are measuring the practices that organisations put in place to embed those policies as they are intended.”

While policy is important, it also needs to be visible. If an employee is unaware of their entitlements, what is the point of having it there at all?

“The most important thing is what we would call the promotion. Because if those policies and practices aren’t visible enough, isn’t culturally permitted enough to use them to take advantage of them to have leaders properly understanding what the expectation is of them to drive those policies and practices, then we know it falls short,” Ms Walsh said.

“And we know this because we’ve certainly done research on particular types of HR policies like parental leave, for example, where there’ll be a parental leave policy that is gender-neutral and is available to men. But because there are some practices where it’s actually referred to only as primary carers leave, and really that’s how it’s manifested in the organisations. Many men, because they don’t see it promoted, don’t even look at that policy because I don’t think it’s for them.”

Flexibility is another important policy to have for families. Making sure workers have the ability to spend time with loved ones helps to promote healthy families and a healthy workplace.

By providing staff with the tools to support their family, employers are better able to create an inclusive workplace that supports wellbeing.

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation with Emma Walsh on 9 May is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.