For a period, there was broad agreement in the corporate world that supporting working parents made sense commercially and competitively. A decade where talent-hungry employers jockeyed to attract the best people by offering family-friendly benefits was evidence that if the argument wasn't entirely won, it was well appreciated by organisations who wanted to recruit and retain the best.
In the past few years we have travelled a long way. Employers of choice are announcing cuts to the package of family support on offer. Organisations that once competed to be seen as family-friendly are recalibrating what that means, or how much it matters at all.
Our new Parental Fog Index, published this week in partnership with Working Families, measures something related but distinct: what they choose to make visible about their credentials as a family-friendly employer. I believe that in competitive talent markets what an organisation communicates about family support to candidates and prospective employees tells you what it values. Increasingly, that signal is inconsistent.
More than a third of the 100 employers we audited - employers who put themselves forward as employers of choice - are completely silent on family support. A candidate searching their website finds nothing. More than half leave candidates unable to make any kind of informed assessment of whether working and being a parent is compatible with the employer in question.
At the same time, nine employers achieve our highest Beacon rating spanning professional services to banking. The distance between the leaders and the laggards boils down to one simple choice: what kind of signal do we want to send to prospective employees about how family friendly it is to work here?
Our research also found that US-owned or headquartered businesses are among those dimming this important signal. It comes at the precise moment that legal rights and workforce expectations in markets like the UK are moving in the opposite direction. Conditions in one market are shaping decisions that affect employees in another. Yet the needs and expectations of those employees haven't changed with the political weather.
What seems to be forgotten in all of this is that working parents are one of the largest single groups in the labour market. In most families today both parents work out of economic necessity. For single parents, family-friendly employment is the condition on which being in work at all depends. Add those with caring responsibilities for elderly parents or other dependants and you are describing something that touches almost every employee at some point in a working life.
It seems like two linked assumptions underly the retreat. The first is that cutting family support is a rational way to stay lean and competitive. The second is that that caring responsibilities are a drag on productivity.
The data, as presented by Laura Cunningham in a recent Substack post, says otherwise.
The most productive economies in the world - Norway at $132 of GDP per hour worked, Germany at $88, both well above the OECD average of $71 - are the ones that invested in care as infrastructure rather than cutting it as cost. Germany delivers that output with fourteen months of parental leave and statutory four-week holidays.
A decade after childbirth, mothers who used paid family leave have a labour force participation rate of 82%. Those who left work during pregnancy: 56%.
That gap, multiplied across an economy, represents the productive workforce lost by treating care as a private problem. Rather than lagging behind, countries that make care a shared investment are leading. This means organisations treating family support as a line to trim are making a bet unsupported by the evidence.
There is another dimension to this. Organisations that pull back don’t simply lose these people. They tend to advance those able to sustain careers relatively uninterrupted by caregiving responsibilities, and over time build cultures in that image.The talent cost is almost entirely invisible as those people never apply. They are the workforce the organisation never knew it lost.
The real question is not whether organisations can afford to support working parents. The evidence from every economy that has treated care as infrastructure rather than indulgence is that they cannot afford not to.
Organisations looking for a commercial edge in the current disrupted world may find that investing in people in this way brings a better return on investment than levelling down support which impacts on nearly everyone in their workplace.
News
Why two big companies just cut paid family leave – The New York Times
Deloitte and Zoom signal retreat from family-friendly benefits
Pay transparency shapes employees’ job decisions – HR Magazine
Workers say it is key to deciding whether to stay or go
PayPal Reaches $30 Million Pact with Justice Department – The Wall Street Journal
Settlement of probe into minority programme
Women at the sharp end as AI takes over admin roles – Financial Times
Female dominated work is among the most vulnerable to automation
Opinion
The Death of the Alpha CEO – The Times
Why two heads can be better than one
Why Parenting Now Feels Like an Investment Strategy – Bloomberg
Parenting has become a source of pressure. The consequences aren’t great
AI and the Danger of Cognitive Surrender – The Economist
How much should managers let bots do the thinking?
Should your board appoint a bot? – Financial Times
The role of AI for chairs and directors
Women are buying more houses – The Guardian
The men they are dating are not responding well
Insight
PTO pullback: Did Deloitte, Zoom just set a new precedent? – HR Executive
Balancing costs with talent investment blamed
High-powered dads are spending less time at work, more on childcare – Bloomberg
College-educated fathers are spending more time on their home and kids
Agents, human agency and opportunity - Microsoft
How do organisations adapt human roles to AI
The AI backlash could get very ugly – The Atlantic
The potential impact on jobs is forging consensus