Businesses that help employees balance work and family report productivity gains, low absence and high retention. Kate Horstead considers the benefits of making life easier for employees with family members to care for.

Many businesses are reluctant to allow staff to adopt irregular working patterns – particularly where managers feel tight-knit teams working closely together is essential. But if employees feel there is tension between work and family, they are likely to end up leaving or underperforming.

“It tends to be easier for bigger companies to allow people to be out of the workplace or to replace them temporarily than it is for smaller firms,” explains Denise Tyler, editor of Mother@work, a website for working mothers. “You have to sit down and have a sensible conversation about what your needs are and what your employee’s needs are and meet them in the middle.

“The employee will feel understood and valued. They will be more loyal and more productive – you may get paid back in bucketloads,” she adds.

Minimum requirements

All employers are obliged to meet minimum standards when it comes to listening to flexible working requests; granting maternity, paternity and adoptive leave; and giving staff ‘reasonable’ time off to deal with emergencies involving dependants such as children and family members.

But you are not always obliged to pay staff while they are away. A business that makes an effort to be family-friendly might go beyond the statutory minimum – for example, by offering a portion of salary to employees taking parental leave; or allowing staff to take more than the statutory minimum maternity leave.

Your firm might also consider a range of flexible working practices that enable staff to balance their work and family commitments without heavy pressure. These could include part-time working, job sharing, home-working or compressing weekly working hours into four days.

“By introducing flexible policies, I can get a pool of talent that my competitors don’t have,” stresses Mike Emmott, employee relations adviser for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

“A mother with children of school age might make a huge contribution between nine and three, but then needs to get off early to collect her kids from school. The fact that she’s got to go early doesn’t mean she doesn’t make an excellent contribution.”

You might even be willing to offer childcare vouchers as part of a staff benefits or salary sacrifice scheme; and some businesses that employ people living locally have even set aside space for younger children of employees to play after school.

Reaping the rewards

The extent to which you make your firm ‘family-friendly’ is entirely up to you. But both Emmott and Tyler believe that it could help to solve recruitment, retention and productivity problems for many firms.

“Look at what you’re trying to do, who you’ve already got on board to do it and who you’re struggling to recruit,” advises Emmott. “Then think about family-friendly working and whether it puts you in a better position to deliver what you want.”

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