THE BUSINESS CASE FOR WORKING PARENTS
At Careers After Babies, the business case for working parents is abundantly clear. They need more support to stop them silently LEAVING the workforce.
But how do you build the business case for working parents?
We know from our research that women, in particular, are leaving the workforce in their droves due to lack of support, lack of flexibility and progression opportunities disappearing. Organisations are making it too difficult to balance work and family. the facts are that:
85% of women leave the full time workforce within three years of having children (many leave altogether) ...leading to huge gender pay gaps of 14.3% (ONS).
74% of families need two working parents (ONS)
87% of Dads are involved day-to-day childcare responsibilities (The Millenial Dad report).
But we still live in a world where working parents are massively under-served and it's leading to stress, burnout and huge talent loss from the employment market. It’s the primary cause of huge gender pay gaps and big gender inequity in leadership.
The need for more support and a change in culture has never been clearer.
HR professionals and family networks are being asked to translate this phenomenon into a business case for investing in employee proposition for working parents. That might be equalising parental policies, recommending family-friendly suppliers and benefits, or (you knew it was coming) seeking Careers After Babies accreditation.
What to include in your business case
To develop a compelling business case for supporting working parents, you need to know the stats. Here's our take on what needs to be included:
Number of mums that left your business within three years of returning frrom maternity leave
Number of dads that left your business after returning from shared parental or paternity leave
Number of women that left your business before they had had children because of perceived lack of support
Number of co-parents (dads, partners etc) that left your organsiation to go somewhere with better parental offerings
The cost of hiring and re-training new people
The loss of productive hours from losing people
Projecting these numbers forward to see what you're likely to lose if you carry on doing what you're doing
But how many organisations actually have that data? We’ve spoken to hundreds of organisations and the answer is - not many. Organisations either don’t hold the data or they don’t track it.
HOW WE’RE DEVELOPING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR WORKING PARENTS
That’s why we’re building the first tool for creating your business case for working parents. The business case will be a tool that enables you to build a robust and fact-based business case.
In order to build it, we need the anonymous data of as many organisations as possible. We need you to anonymously share your data to support us with building the norms. We already have the data from our accreditation partners but this needs to go bigger. We need representatives of all shapes and sizes - all industries and all business types - to support.
We’ll be combining all this data to bring you the first business case for working parents.
Watch this space to see how we’re getting on and when the business case will be ready.
