Flexible work key to supporting parents and carers, advocate says

Workplaces have made strides in supporting employees with care responsibilities, but there’s still more progress to be made, an inclusive work advocate has said.

Since 2007, Parents at Work CEO Emma Walsh has advised firms on how they could better support workers with care responsibilities to boost employee wellbeing, productivity, and gender equality.

Last Thursday (6 November), Walsh told the Women in Multinationals (WIM) Summit that she had seen workplaces make “enormous” progress in supporting parents over the past two decades, but the battle wasn’t over yet.

“In the last 20 years, there’s been huge progress on paid parental leave,” Walsh said during her WIM panel.

“More women have been able to return to the workforce and be promoted and all of those great things. But we have not seen the same kind of progress made around men and their active role in caregiving.”

Over the past 18 years, Walsh said she had observed substantial shifts in workplace norms, giving employees with caring responsibilities more support and flexibility.

“There was no right to work flexibly, there was no return-to-work support available for people. In fact, if you were a woman, you were kind of lucky to get your job back, and often, you were back part-time,” she said.

While government and workplace policy have made strides in these areas, Walsh said Australia’s care system still fell short of what was necessary to support carers, meaning that organisations needed to step up to bridge that gap.

According to Walsh, flexible work policies were a key lever that organisations could use to help their employees balance competing work and family pressures.

“Australia does have a huge issue ahead for its productivity and GDP, and that is care infrastructure. We cannot build it fast enough. There is not enough of it,” Walsh said.

“What we can do from an organisational point of view is make sure we develop a caregiving culture in our organisation that supports the shortfall of it. And guess what? Flexible work is the number one driver in which you can do that.

“Our research tells us that flexible work, coupled with leadership culture; that permission to use it and take it; is the single biggest driver that you have to drive performance and therefore productivity and engagement in your workforce.”

She added that flexible work mandates, such as Victoria’s proposal to legislate the right to work from home two days a week, were a natural response to overly rigid workplace policies.

“If employers aren’t going to step up and actually adopt good flexible work policies that encourage that, we are going to have the government come in and make some heavy-handed decisions,” Walsh said.

“And so I guess my call out to businesses is, if you don’t want to see these sorts of things legislated, get good flexible work policies that work for your business and for your people and invest in it.”

She added that flexible and parent-inclusive work policies were not necessarily at odds with productivity. The stress of balancing rigid work schedules and care responsibilities created mental loads that contributed to burnout and poor performance, Walsh noted.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re physically at home or not. People take those mental loads to a workplace,” Walsh said.

“There’s the enormous pressure on women who are bearing the majority of the caring load to sort out their own care in an environment where access to great quality, affordable childcare is – in some cases – zero. And then to be able to show up and be your best self working when you’ve got this mental load that you’re carrying is enormous.

“And I think it’s a productivity drag. I think if workplaces want to get more out of people, then they need to solve some of the care-related challenges that prevent people from being able to show up and be great at what they’re doing.”