Engaging Working Parents
Family friendly employers throughout the UK are winning the battle to attract, retain and engage working parents, who make up over one-third of the country's workforce.
In Accor Services' new white paper, Engaging Working Parents, we review how forward-thinking organisations - many of whom offer flexible, tangible benefits to help employees with dependent children - are engaging working parents and enabling them to balance and manage their personal and professional commitments.
There is no question that, since the introduction of the first childcare voucher scheme in 1989, huge steps have been taken to provide family-friendly policies in the workplace and engage working parents. Yet despite these advances there is much organisations can learn from each other to ensure that their working parents' strategy is effective, inclusive and has the desired business impact.
Here we present a number of issues and best practice steps you can consider to better engage your working parents.
Understanding your working parents
Understanding who your working parents are is clearly an important first step when it comes to engaging them. Many organisations don't have a database detailing all their working parents and because of this find it impossible to single them out and instead choose to target all employees about family-friendly benefits. Despite this it is relatively straightforward to find out and you could, for example, build a picture of this segment through data capture following employee surveys to better target future communications.
Alongside this, organisations also struggle to get employees to admit they're even interested in family friendly policies. Many employees believe that to do so would have a negative effect on the way they are viewed and treated within the business and to address this, organisations need to encourage a culture change to highlight their commitment to supporting, not stigmatising, working parents.
Creating an engagement strategy
The rewards on offer to employers who successfully engage their working parents are significant. Not only can recruitment and training costs be cut in line with rising employee retention levels, but the organisation can also reap associated productivity benefits because key talent is retained and can deliver to the best of their ability.
Yet to reap these rewards, efforts to engage working parents must also be aligned with an organisation's people policy as a whole. For example, an organisation can have the most comprehensive flexible working policy, but if this isn't supported by the culture or reinforced through managers' behaviour, it can never succeed. Working parents must be made to feel a part of the organisation they work for rather than alienated or made to feel a burden. The idea of work life and family life must not be seen as totally separate.
Involve and encourage employees
Organisations that successfully engage their working parents consult openly with them to ensure they're involved in finding solutions to, for example, childcare issues. A number of organisations host 'staff forums' where employees can get together to discuss issues, such as work life balance or flexible working. Not only do these types of groups help to connect people with shared interests in the organisation, but they can also be an effective sounding board for ideas and proposed changes.
Effective communication is also essential to enlist working parents and develop family friendly policies. Once you have developed or launched specific working parent initiatives, take time to consider the variety of channels available to reinforce and re-emphasise its key messages. Whether it's a newsletter, face-to-face conversations and meetings or the intranet (although every organisation's approach will be different), a variety of channels to get your message across is vital.
It's also important to take advantage of opportunities to re-engage your working parents and increase the awareness and uptake of family-friendly initiatives, including Childcare Week in June 2009, Father's Day and Mother's Day. A conscientious employer that wants to make engaging working parents more than a 'tick box' exercise and be seen as an employer of choice, needs to seize these opportunities.
Although the future world of work is impossible to predict, we do know that working parents will continue to make up an increasing proportion of the workforce and organisations will need to adapt and evolve to meet their needs. As a result, organisations need to act and make the cultural and organisational changes necessary to ensure working parents remain an effective and engaged segment of the workforce.
