Flexible Work: It’s Time for New Priorities

Mixing work and parenting. This is a tricky one. There is no right or wrong answer as to how parents can do this, and it varies greatly depending on individual circumstances: financial needs, personal aspirations, career goals, and the way you want to raise your children.

But it is an issue that gets me very fired up. To give you some background – I had a career running a Human Resources department for a medium-sized company. I also studied part-time for a fair chunk of that time, so my life was pretty damn busy for a while. I worked hard to get where I was and I was determined not to go ‘backwards’ when I had children. Famous last words.

After my daughter was born I decided I wanted to work part-time. I was told this was fine, but once I actually returned to work, I was informed I had to come back full-time and run the department again. No negotiation. I chose to leave the company, which was a huge decision after having been there for over eight years. But, being in the fortunate situation of not needing to work full-time financially, I decided to stay home with my daughter for a bit longer and keep an eye out for part-time work.

My problem lay not in finding part-time work, but finding interesting part-time work. Work that could both drag me away from my little girl and also pay enough to warrant forking out for child care. (I will add that I did knock back a good job, once I found out it was with a tobacco company – I couldn’t morally do that; it’s one thing I’m really, really against).

It’s not just me, of course. Plenty of people are in similar situations, but often without the relative luxury of being able to knock back their permanent full-time job when their employer makes such demands.

There has been a lot of talk about the adverse effects that being a stressed, over-worked mother can have on both your own health and the lives of your children. (For the record, I also think fathers should be included in this. All the responsibility and guilt is placed on mothers, but we really need to start valuing fathers more by expecting that they, too, can be more involved in the day-to-day raising of their children).

To me, this type of discussion also has an added flavour of guilt for any working mother. As if anyone needed that. But this is what gets me – the onus is on mothers to not work so many hours, to put their kids into childcare less, to spend more time with their family. But where is the demand on companies to provide them with such options? Yes, legislation has been introduced to give parents the ‘right to request’ flexibility, but I’ve worked in H.R. long enough to know that there is always a way to ‘accept’ such requests but to make people’s lives so difficult that it becomes impossible for them to sustain.

In my opinion, we need to put the issue back onto employers. Give them incentives to provide flexible working arrangements. Find out why people need to be there such long hours. Why can’t some work be done from home? Why is a job share out of the question? Why does an efficient worker have to stay late?

In short: the structure of our workforce needs to change. Employers should be held more accountable and become more flexible with their employees. And in return, they will have loyal, focused workers.

Megan Blandford is a mum who works from home as a Human Resources Consultant. She holds postgraduate qualifications in H.R. and has had a range of generalist experience. Visit www.writingloud.blogspot.com

Tagged as: employers, Flexibility, parenting, part time, Work from Home, work life, workforce