Tool Box
Issue No. 41 - June/July 2008
Get the best from working parents
by Craig Stubing
Employers who take steps to help working parents improve their wellbeing will see benefits on the bottom line, it seems.
Generation X families may be the hardest working cohort of modern times, with both parents often full-time workers. With work-life balance hugely important and skills in huge demand, How can employers turn Gen X needs to their advantage?
Jodie Benveniste, Director of Parent Wellbeing,
says work-life balance is not a zero-sum equation
where working parents have limited capacity for either task. In fact, employers who create the right working environment will be rewarded with more capable and more resilient staff.
“Australian working parents report feeling rushed for time, having work interfere with family time, and guilt,” Jodie says.
“‘Work-family balance’ suggests that people have a fixed and limited amount of time and energy. If work is taking all that time and energy, then family suffers, or vice versa.
“But work family research, and the experience of working parents, suggests this is not how work and family issues typically function.”
Essential first steps are to recognise that work offers benefits to family life while parenting skills offer benefits in the workplace.
“‘Well’ parents are more productive and effective
at work and care better for their children,” Jodie
points out.
Her concept of Work Family Flow aims to create work and family synergy. Traditionally, she says, work family research has focused on how work and family clash. More recently researchers have examined the rewards and benefits of combining the two.
“We now know, for instance, that working parents bring skills and energy they have developed at home to the workplace,” she says.
“Skills developed in child rearing, such as multi
tasking, negotiating, compromising and conflict resolution actually help boost work performance and
life satisfaction....
