How do you balance the demands of caring and nurturing a family with career commitments and work responsibilities?
Worldwide many countries now experience many different family arrangements including couples with children, single parents, couples without children, blended families and a range of shared parenting arrangements.
Families as much as work has changed greatly in the last 40 years. The days of a traditional stay-at-home parent devoted to family matters is largely a thing of the past. Working parents are the norm in the majority of households. This transition has brought with it added pressures.
Managing the competing demands associated with work and family responsibilities is not easy. More and more companies and organizations are acknowledging the importance of family and making efforts toward creating a supportive work environment that is flexible and accommodating. Strategies to address the needs of both the employer and employee are being developed. For many organizations, this has simply been a matter of more effective use of provisions in their awards or agreements to create the required flexible work arrangements.
As an employee working in a family friendly work place you could expect:
- Flexible modes of employment - full-time, part-time (including graduated part-time) and casual.
- Flexible working hours - staggered start and finish times, averaging of ordinary hours (e.g. 152 hours spread over a 4 week period), working extra hours some days and leaving or starting early on other days, working additional hours and then taking an afternoon off (known as time in lieu or banked time) working longer hours each day and having a regular day off each fortnight or month.
- Flexible leave arrangements - ceremonial/cultural leave, career break schemes, leave without pay, substitution of public holidays for another day, purchased leave - for example taking a lesser annual salary in exchange for additional leave.
To juggle dual responsibilities, some workplaces have introduced practical assistance that help employees, examples are:
- Access to a telephone to enable working parents to call home to check that a child has arrived home from school safely or to check that a toddler settled into child care once Mum or Dad had left.
- Home-based work.
- Teleworking/telecommuting e.g working from home and being linked to the workplace by e-mail and telephone.
- Job sharing.
- Scheduling of meetings during core work hours i.e. no meetings late in the day or very early in the morning when parents may need to be picking children up or dropping them off at school or child care.
- Establishing a family room where a sick child can be cared for while Mum or Dad works for a few hours or where a baby can be brought to by their carer, breast fed by Mum and taken home again.
- Subsidisation of child, vacation and dependent care costs.
- Providing information about the location of child care or out of school hours care facilities.
- Provision of employee assistance programs.
- Reimbursement of tertiary education costs.
There are also legal protections contained in industrial relations and anti-discrimination legislation, including access to parental leave, carers’ leave, bereavement leave, long service leave, annual leave and sick leave. The laws in most countries make it illegal to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their family responsibilities.
