Business Family Balance #cipdbigconvo

Thanks to Sheridan Webb for today’s blog contribution.  Sheridan runs Keystone and Development and Training Ltd.  You can find her on Twitter as @Sheridan_Webb.

I was working full time as a client service manager with a training consultancy when I had my first child. I enjoyed my job, but as my husband and I have no extended family within 100 miles to help us with childcare, we had to make some difficult choices. We didn’t want our daughter being brought up by childminders, so I elected to return to work on a part-time basis (as many do). Before anyone starts getting uptight about gender stereotypes, this was purely a practically and financially driven decision: He is a surgeon – he earned more AND was on a very tightly defined career path/contract. I was a client manager for a training company, which paid less and was easier to do part time. If I had been the surgeon, he would have been the one going part-time!

Anyway, my employer was happy for me to return on a part time basis, as long as I reverted back to being a Training Consultant. The rationale for that was that clients expect their client manager to be available 8.30-6.00 5 days a week. So I took the reduced pro-rota salary, and went back. To be clear, I wasn’t forced into this – just encouraged, and to be honest as I was learning how to be a working mum, I thought having a less responsible job was probably a good thing.

But it wasn’t easy – The office was an hour’s drive from home and the nursery, and my boss wasn’t keen on me working at home (this was 12 years ago – we didn’t have the technology we do now) Also, I couldn’t travel anywhere near as much as I could before: No extended family remember? And a husband whose job meant long days, evenings on-call and weekends. Overall, my colleagues were understanding, but I always felt that I was letting my company down, and putting pressure on my colleagues. Just because they had no kids, or had help with kids, didn’t mean that they should be away from home more often: They had lives too.

So when I was expecting cherub number 2, I knew I wasn’t going back to work.

My husband was great – he said I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to, we would manage. But have you ever been with 2 under 3’s 24/7 with no-one to relieve you even for an hour until your other half gets home from work after a 10 or 12 hour shift? This simply wasn’t an option.

So I decided to give self-employment a go. I figured I could choose my own hours and it would keep me mentally stimulated, meaning I had a life outside of being mum. The kids went to nursery 3 days a week and the plan was for me to earn at least enough to cover the nursery fees (no free places in those days). I started out doing associate work, and within 4 months, I was covering the fees. Just as an aside, it was odd though how many people thought that I worked at home WHILST LOOKING AFTER a 3-year old and a 1-year old. Bonkers!

What was even odder was that, after a couple of years, when I started to get my own clients, they were totally OK with me only being available Tuesday-Thursday. So the whole “You need to be available 5 days a week” turned out to be nonsense.

Now my kids are older, I work term time. There’s no childcare for the 13 weeks school holidays, and again, my clients are totally understanding: Of course it’s not that I’m completely unavailable: I answer emails, I do a bit of design work, I attend (arranged) conference calls, but everyone knows that I can’t travel and I’m not sitting in my office all day waiting to respond to last-minute requests. But if we arrange work in advance, or schedule a call, I can do it.

My family and my business are both important to me. Sometimes, my kids have to work around my business (finding places to go after school so I CAN get to that occasional meeting in London). Sometimes my business has to work around my kids (sorry, I can’t deliver a course in Basingstoke on Tuesday ‘cos my husband is at work 8am-8pm). It’s all about give and take. Balance. Yes, I’ve lost work because of my restrictions, but not as much as you might expect.

In 12 years’ I’ve learned that most organisations are accepting of the fact that many of us have family responsibilities outside of work and want to help. The fact that a new generation of (younger) senior managers are in the top jobs helps because (unlike their own parents) they are probably the first generation who have had to juggle these responsibilities themselves. They want to make it easier for the rest.

And although I’ve been told (when working as an associate) that telling a client about my childcare issues is unprofessional, I actually think it’s vital. Most clients really want to do what they can to help – you’ve just got to be up front about it, be as flexible as possible and be honest!

 

 

It’s only words….

Today’s contribution to the Big Conversation is from Richard Dunstan, better known on Twitter as @WonkyPolicyWonk.

“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation”, said US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2001. Here in the UK, it seems we’re not quite there yet.

Jacob Rees-Mogg – currently being feted as a potential future leader of the Conservative Party and, therefore, Prime Minister – has generously, some might say recklessly, contributed no fewer than six souls to the next generation, without having changed a single nappy. Well played, Jacob. And, according to government-commissioned and funded research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, pregnancy and maternity discrimination at work is even worse than it was ten years ago.

It’s fair to say that this and other forms of discrimination have not gone unnoticed by government ministers. In October 2015, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, condemned the “disgraceful” discrimination in British society, including by employers:

“We can talk all we want about opportunity, but it’s meaningless unless people are really judged equally. I’m a dad of two daughters – opportunity won’t mean anything to them if they grow up in a country where they get paid less because of their gender rather than how good they are at their work. The point is this: you can’t have true opportunity without real equality.”

In July 2016,when launching her campaign to become Tory leader, Theresa May, now Prime Minister, highlighted the need – and her own determination – to “make Britain a country that works for everyone, regardless of who they are and regardless of where they’re from.” And, just a few weeks ago, equalities minister Claire Perry told the House of Commons that, when it comes to unlawful pregnancy discrimination, she and business minister Margot James are “absolutely determined to sort things out” and will “come down like a ton of bricks on any employer who breaks the law”. A. Ton. Of. Bricks.

However, as the Bee Gees almost sang, I think Cameron, May and Perry don’t even mean a single word they say. Because their actions speak far more powerfully than their words.

Cameron’s anguish about the shameful level of discrimination in British workplaces didn’t stop him introducing hefty, justice-denying fees of up to £1,200 to bring an employment tribunal (ET) claim for discrimination. And neither he nor Theresa May seemed the least bit bothered when, as predicted, those fees led to a sustained fall of as much as 80 per cent in the number of ET claims for disability, race, sex, pregnancy or other discrimination at work. Even when the Ministry of Justice’s own review of the fees concluded that they “may have resulted in indirect discrimination”, especially against women.

Nor did it stop Cameron stripping the EHRC of its duty to promote a society with equal opportunity for all, or cutting the equality watchdog’s funding by 60 per cent, leading to staff numbers tumbling from 455 to fewer than 200.

May’s determination to make Britain a country that works for pregnant women and new mothers – I assume she would include them in ‘everyone’ – hasn’t led her to act upon the various recommendations made by the EHRC when publishing its final research findings in March 2016 – a full eighteen months ago. Nor has it prevented her dismissing calls by the EHRC, the justice and women & equalities committees of MPs, and the energetic campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed to increase the time limit for submitting an ET claim – from three to six months – in cases of pregnancy or maternity discrimination.

Moreover, May’s apparent belief that there are ‘boys jobs’ and ‘girls jobs’ – changing nappies, perhaps – is deeply depressing, as it is this type of attitude that fosters and perpetuates gendered stereotypes that particularly hinder women, especially once they become pregnant, and then mothers – the assumption being that childcare falls to them.

Talking of childcare, the new Liberal Democrat MP, Layla Moran, has highlighted at Prime Minister’s Questions that the Government’s plan to offer 30 hours per week of free childcare for three and four year olds from 1 September this year sounded great, but – again, as predicted – in practice is proving to be something of a flop:

“Quite simply, the Government aren’t giving childminders and nurseries enough money to actually deliver these places for three and four year olds, and make a living at the same time. In England 74 per cent of providers said they would not be able to cover their costs.”

Theresa May can’t even bring herself to accept a few eminently sensible proposals, from the women & equalities committee of MPs, on increasing the number of female MPs in the House of Commons. Which means the Commons will go on selecting all-male Science and Technology Committees. So much for a country that works for everyone. We can’t even have a Parliament that works for everyone.

Where does this leave us? Well, not in a great place, imho. For the next two or three years, the attention of ministers, and their legislative programme, is almost certain to be dominated by the unfolding economic and social disaster of Brexit. ET fees may have gone, thanks to the Supreme Court, but austerity continues, and the exploitative practices of many large employers appear ever more blatant and cynical. When the economic shock of an Armageddon Brexit hits, pregnant workers and working mothers will feel the pain more intensely than most – just as they and other women have borne the brunt of austerity since 2010. That’s the way inequality works.

Sadly, we can expect little more than warm but hollow words from Theresa May in response. Because it seems words are all she has.

The law works in mysterious ways… #CIPDBigConvo

“Well, what’s the point of that? It’s completely toothless!” exclaimed my colleague, as I was outlining the new “flexible working” regime due to come into force in a few weeks’ time.

It was 2003, and I was a one-year qualified solicitor with a passion for detail and a way with words (well, legal ones at least). It was my job to turn the new law into a plain English policy that our clients could use.

When lawyers refer to something as “toothless”, it’s a legal provision which, if breached, has little or no consequence for the person who has acted unlawfully. My colleague was right.  The new legislation wasn’t – as it had been portrayed by sensationalist media outlets – a right for parents and carers of children or dependent adults to demand whatever working arrangements they pleased from their employers.

No, it was (and still is) a right to make a formal request for a permanent variation in working arrangements, and have that request considered reasonably. In the beginning, it was purely for parents and carers, but this restriction was removed in 2014.

So, there we had it. An entitlement to ask, and an obligation to think hard about the request.  Big deal.  There were wide ranging permitted reasons for an employer to legitimately turn down a request.  The only legal recourse was if the employer failed to act reasonably and/or follow the correct procedure and the compensation for this was limited to a maximum of 8 weeks’ pay.

I harrumphed about the “flexible working” label the new legislation had been given. “It’s a right to ask for a permanent change, and you can only make one request every 12 months…” I muttered as I drafted the policy “…What’s flexible about that???”.

 

Once the law was actually in force, the queries started coming in:

Client: He wants to do …[reasonable work pattern]

Me: Is it workable and could you accommodate it?

Client: Yes, it would actually help us out a bit with cover in that departrment

Me: Well, use the trial period to make sure it definitely works, make sure you document everything carefully and then you’re done.

Client: Wait though… We don’t want to set a precedent

Me: What kind of “precedent”?

Client: You know, of flexible working. We don’t want everyone coming and going as they please….We just don’t want to open the floodgates.

Me:  *slowly and repeatedly banging head on desk* Legally, the policy clearly states that you will deal with requests on a case by case basis.  *bang* If you turn him down, it needs to be for one of the prescribed reasons. *bang* He has very little in the way of recourse *bang*. Practically, you’ve told me this would actually help your business *bang*.  If you turn him down, there’s a chance he will leave to find the flexibility he needs elsewhere *bang*.  Of course, it is your decision, but I would suggest that the practical benefits of accepting this request would outweigh the risks.

I had many conversations like that in those early days. So did my colleagues.  Employment lawyers the length and breadth of the country would have had similar conversations with their clients.  Legally, the new regime was virtually toothless, but it placed the concept of work flexibility on the agenda for employers who would never have previously considered it.

And that is how an apparently “toothless” piece of legislation plays its part in the big picture. Employment legislation of itself will rarely deal completely with a situation it is designed to govern.

But legislation starts conversations, and it triggers action. In the case of flexible working, it got people thinking more about what might work, how things could be done differently – and better.

There’s still a long way to go, even 14 years on from the introduction of the legislation, which is why initiatives like the Big Conversation can give a turbo boost to the cause. The sum of the collective influence is so much greater than all of the individual parts, so please join in with all your ideas and who knows what we might achieve!

 

Karen Teago (@teago_emplaw) is a non-practising solicitor and Head of Consultancy at Cloud9 People (@cloud9people). Image by Simon Heath (@simonheath1).

 

 

Leave it at the door? #CIPDBigConvo

This blog post has been contributed by Mark Hendy.  Mark is part of the South Wales HR Forum, and leads popular Twitter chat #HRhour. You can find Mark on Twitter as @MarkSWHRF.

I’d like to start with a quote

“You keep your home life personal, and you leave it at the door when you come in to work”.

I believe this quote (or a variation on the theme) has been said probably millions of times all over the world. Cue the famous ‘Young Ones’ sketch of “i’ve told you a million times, never to exaggerate..”

But really, if only life was that simple.

If someone knows the real way to achieve equilibrium in balancing work, life, families, hobbies etc, then please let me know.

I’m an organised person. I never used to be. I mean, I really never used to be until I had to be. I use tools such as Todoist that help me keep on track. I use my smart phone to keep on top of work and emails, and I use my tablet to work quickly and easily wherever I am. I believe in work/life integration and I believe discipline is important to keep something of a balance. Technology has changed my life, like it changes everyone’s life. I’m way better than I used to be.

Life is not easy for most people. Stuff is always happening that alters our ability to control and keep things as normal and regular as possible. And what life doesn’t need is artificial issues and unnecessary obstacles to make things more difficult than they ought to be.

I’m really glad that the CIPD has started this conversation, because it’s important. And it is a big conversation. Technology has improved dramatically and is enabling all sorts of improvements to how people can carry out large parts of their work. Employment legislation is maturing and acts like the Equality Act 2010 is affording protection for people from being discriminated against for several reasons. But the third circle in what would be my venn diagram, is about attitude.

Attitudes towards accepting that there are ways to accommodate the ongoing challenges of balancing work and home life, still has some way to go.

The traditional mindset of the traditional workplace is changing, and we are in a transitional period where education is important. Someone once asked me “How can I listen to this persons request to work flexibly and show appreciation for the reasons why they want to work flexibly” and my reply was “to actually appreciate the reasons why they want to work flexibly, not just want to appear is if you do”.

For business to truly embrace working families and help unleash the benefits that this can bring, they need to adjust to being a real and authentic family-friendly employer, not just one who claims to be. Business needs to find a reason to make it easy for people with families to work effectively and flexibly, and not be the type of employer that views a one-off short-term absence for an unplanned family issue to be debilitating and unacceptable.

Business needs to find a reason to embrace workers who have these demands, and not start at ‘no’ and then degrade the employee at having to justify tirelessly all the reasons why they need to modify their working arrangements in some small way, decimating the psychological contract that is important between the employer and the employee.

And why do businesses need to do this. I could articulate a reason why it would be good for business, and there are many to choose from, but to put it bluntly, they need to do this because it’s simply the right thing to do. Because it’s the morally correct thing to do. Because its a humane thing to do.

When will we know if things have really changed?

• When people can stop feeling guilty about submitting flexible working requests.
• When people who work from home occasionally don’t feel as if they are asking for a ‘day-off’.
• When a parent who needs some leave at short notice to take their child to an appointment, doesn’t feel like they are being disruptive.
• When someone does not even need to think about the effects on their career of taking maternity leave.
• When a father can comfortably explain to their manager, the level of support they need to provide their partner/children at home while the family are adjusting to some form of significant change, without feeling judged.

We’ve a way to go – and conversations like this, are an excellent way to start. Enjoy the conversations and discussions over this period, take the learning back to your employers, and fly the flag for this initiative. Better work and working lives.

Parenthood #CIPDBigConvo

This post is by Gary Cookson, blogger and conference speaker on all things HR. You can find him on Twitter as @Gary_Cookson. This is what he has to say…..

 

The CIPD’s Manchester Branch are running a campaign about families, parents and the workplace with the aim of influencing public policy on the subject. This is being coordinated by Rachel Burnham and I was pleased when she asked me to help by writing a blog giving my thoughts to help get things started.

For more information about the wider campaign you can follow CIPD Manchester on Twitter. The Working Families website is a great source of advice, guidance and toolkits to help organisations become more family friendly. This article, albeit from 2014, highlights some things organisations can do in terms of their reward package to help parents – things like providing childcare vouchers, voluntary employee benefit / discount schemes and extended healthcare provision. I agree with all of these and have heavily used these as a working parent myself and would encourage all organisations to make sure they are in place.

And I’ve been a working parent for the majority of my career. It is something I’m immensely proud of but comes with its fair share of restrictions and frustrations.

Prior to my first child being born in 2001 I was a peripatetic trainer, and could move around the country delivering training at any of five or six locations for the organisation I worked for. I enjoyed it but realised just before he was born that if I carried on in that role I wouldn’t see him grow up as much as I wanted to. So I moved to a job closer to home.

And that’s one big lesson for any working parent. Being a working parent is much MUCH easier when you work close to home, and have a short commute. And it’s also easier when your job is in one location for the majority of the time.

But most of my jobs since then have been, on average, 45-50 minutes commute away from home and I’m currently doing the longest commute I’ve ever done at 70-75 minutes so these things do impact your ability to be an effective parent.

I have children at three different ages – currently 15, 12 and 2. Until the last 12 months these children were in 3 different educational/childcare establishments and that made doing the school run a process that took 35 minutes from start to finish. And don’t even get me started on these places having different starting and finishing times. Now the kids are in just 2 places and that’s easier, but only slightly.

I do like to do the school run, but I find the traditional school day a real limitation. The traditional working day is, more or less, 9-5. The traditional school day is, more or less, 8.45-3.15. The two things are incompatible most of the time. Nowadays there are breakfast and after school clubs that can extend the school day a bit but its still not enough.

So one of two things needs to happen: either the school day gets longer, or the working day gets more flexible. Or, perhaps, both.

Childcare can be expensive too. In the pre-school years and particularly for under 3s, childcare is very expensive unless you are lucky enough to have local and accessible and willing grandparents to help out. Childcare vouchers are a must but only help a bit as there’s a cap on them. My youngest child goes to nursery 3 days a week and we pay almost £600 a month for that. It’s a lot in a year and eats up a lot of your salaries. After our mortgage, its our biggest expenditure and if it rises any higher it’ll be costing more than our mortgage.

The government wants people to work and is providing more funding for 3 year old spaces in nurseries. But what about the 1 and 2 year olds? Must parents wait 3 years before they can both work?

And there come lots of times when parental responsibilities clash with work. Its not just school runs. Its sports days (and rescheduled sports days when #1 is rained off last minute and you’ve booked the day off but now can’t make #2 and feel bad). Its nativity plays. End of year productions. Parents “evenings” that run from 3.30pm to 5.30pm. Special assemblies that are mid morning. First days in a new school. School buses not turning up. Schools being closed for industrial action or bad weather even though your workplace is open. Kids becoming ill just before school or, worse, halfway through the day and you have to “come and get them right now” even though you’re over an hour away. Teachers ringing you “at the end of the day” eg 3.30pm to tell you a problem about your child, whilst you’re in your annual appraisal.

And then there are the invites you get to after work drinks, sometimes with little notice but sometimes with lots of notice, and you know you can’t make either because you’ll miss bedtime. Overnight stays for conferences or working away become very big things to negotiate – how will you get the school run covered? How will you keep in touch?

And schools, bless them, close for 13 weeks or so every year. 13 weeks. That’s 65 days or so that your kids aren’t in school but you need to make sure they’re cared for – and if we take the average annual leave entitlement as about 33 days (including bank holidays) you’re left with a deficit somehow that a single parent can’t manage and only two parents can. I remember my own parents having to take separate holidays, particularly in the summer, in order to look after myself and my younger brother. I suspect my wife and I are approaching that stage when our youngest child goes to full time school.

Why can’t schools have longer terms? Or why can’t organisations offer more annual leave? Or, perhaps, both.

I’d love to be a full time parent. I love my kids. I also love the work I do and like working full time. There’s part of me that thinks I can’t have my cake and eat it.

That’s not right, surely.

Surely we can do something, us HR types, to help?

I worked at an organisation early in my career that had something akin to a support group – called the Working Parents Group. It brought working parents together once a month at lunchtimes to listen to guest speakers, discuss issues they had in the workplace, and generally get to know and support each other in a different environment. It worked really well.

But I’ve only seen that at one place, although I know all organisations would benefit from such a thing.

There are lots of parents in the workplace. Possibly the majority of our staff are parents or have some type of caring responsibility (we shouldn’t ignore eldercare issues either, a growing issue).

But how often do we talk about these problems and issues with our staff and ask how we can help?

How often do we ignore the elephant in the room and try to manage our staff as if work is the most important thing in everyone’s lives and families don’t exist?

How often do we say on our websites that we are a family friendly employer but then put rules and procedures in place that go against this?

Being a working parent is tough. I can’t be the only one who struggles with balancing everything?

I wouldn’t change it for the world though. My kids are everything.

And as a parent, an employee and an HR professional, I think we could and should do more to help each other balance work and life, to make sure we can satisfy all the stakeholders in our lives.

So, how do we do that exactly…?

 

 

Why we need a Big Conversation

We said in our introductory blog that there was still very much a need to have a conversation about work, families and parents. To some extent, it is a conversation we wish we didn’t have to have. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that we do – and that the problems faced by working families and parents are many.

Starting with women, pregnancy and maternity.  Back in 2005 the Equal Opportunities Commission estimated that 30,000 women a year were forced out of their jobs for being pregnant or whilst on maternity leave.  In 2015, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did more research.  They found:

• 1 in 9 mothers reported that they were dismissed, made redundant or treated so poorly that they felt that they had to leave their jobs.
• 1 in 5 experienced harassment or negative comments.
• 10% felt discouraged from attending antenatal appointments.

If we take the 1 in 9 figure and apply it to the whole population – this could mean that we are talking about 54,000 women.  Every year.

While you are letting that sink in for a moment, let’s look at the issues faced by carers in the workplace. We are facing an caring explosion here in the UK.  6000 people become a carer every single day.  1 in 5 of us at some point will be involved in providing care to someone close to us.  3 million people are trying to balancing caring and work – a figure that is only going to continue to increase.  Currently, 1 in 6 carers have to reduce their hours or give up work altogether in order to provide that care.

The TUC recently produced a report entitled ‘Better jobs for mums and dads’. They focused on the particular challenges of younger parents. Their perspective and evidence:

• There are large numbers of parents, especially those who are low paid, who have not seen the benefits of family related employment rights.
• The rise in insecure work like zero hours contracts or agency work means that many workers miss out on these rights altogether.
• 51% of parents have an employer that has never spoken to them about policies that exist to help them balance work with childcare.
• Over a third of young parents felt stigmatized at work because of needing flexibility to manage childcare.
• 48% of men feel guilty when they bring up childcare issues at work.
• 58% of parents know little or nothing about what legal rights they have at work in relation to family and children.
• Key challenges that parents face are children becoming ill, school holidays and childcare provision – the latter being a particular problem when parents are required to work flexibly.

They go on to say: ‘Workplace culture is stuck in the past. Gender stereotypes are still rife in the workplace, with many employers viewing the mother as having the primary caring responsibilities’. 

There have been attempts to challenge these stereotypes through legislation – specifically the provision of Shared Parental Leave, designed to allow parents to share leave – but take up has been extremely low.

These are just some of the reasons that we believe a big conversation needs to take place.

Legislation exists, but it isn’t working. Policies exist too, but employees lack the ability or awareness to be able to access them.

So what else can HR practitioners do?  Join in the conversation and have your say.  #CIPDbigconvo

Introducing The Big Conversation

During late September and October, we are inviting HR professionals, researchers and interested organisations to contribute to a public policy ‘hackathon’ on a range of issues relating to ‘Families, Parents and the Workplace’ #CIPDbigconvo.  A ‘hackathon’ is a joint problem-solving’ activity – so we are going to be sharing experiences, hearing stories, telling of our successes, identifying challenges, finding solutions and working together to come up with problem-solving ideas.  We want to identify practical ideas that HR people can implement in their organisations and also any public policy issues that need to be addressed.

There are lots of different aspects to ‘Families, Parents and the Workplace’ – so far we have identified maternity discrimination, childcare, carers, making shared parental leave work, adoption leave and flexible working – but this is not a comprehensive list!  Families come in all shapes and sizes and there are many challenges to combining family life with work.  We want to explore all this and more – but need your help.

There is evidence to suggest that a conversation about work and families is very much needed.  Maternity discrimination leads to thousands of women losing their job every year.  Millions of people are providing care and attempting to balance work – many of whom have to reduce their hours and incomes, or even leave the workplace altogether.  Shared parental leave take-up is extremely low.  People believe they are disadvantaged for requesting flexible working.

If you are interested in improving the situation for the better – get involved with the Big Conversation.  Come to an event, join the Twitter chat, share you own story here on the blog.  Be part of the change.

Register for our launch event here! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-big-conversation-about-families-parents-and-the-workplace-tickets-36952087689