Page 1533 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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workers struggle to maintain their physical and psychological health, specifically because of difficulty in balancing family and work pressures. In the same survey, nearly half of working parents and carers reported that they would like to have more control over when and where they work in order to better navigate the demands of employment and family.
In short, working parents typically want to be good, productive, reliable employees. They also want to be there for their kids to love, support, comfort, train, inspire and listen to them. Flexible work arrangements can do much to secure both outcomes.
Brett Jager, a senior global relationship manager at an Australian bank, has written about how important it is to him as a father that he is able to be his best both at home and in his office. That means that sometimes his office is his home. As he has explained:
On days when I don’t have meetings with colleagues or clients, I’ll try and work from home. This allows me to spend more time with my two kids in the morning, and in the afternoon when I’m able to pick them up and talk about their days.
If it is good enough for a senior bank manager, it should be good enough for the rest of us, including those who work in the territory’s public service.
We already know that kids benefit from having close, frequent interactions with their parents. They tend to be healthier, both physically and emotionally, and they do better in school. They are less likely to get into trouble. They feel safe, secure, loved and valued. Parents and carers who are enabled to secure a healthy work-life balance enjoy similar benefits. Research from the Productivity Commission clearly found that parents with formalised flexible working arrangements experienced much better mental health outcomes.
The best part is that none of this has come at any cost to the employer. Flexible work arrangements are linked, through reliable research, to reduced absenteeism, increased productivity, reduced staff turnover and its associated training cost, and increased morale and job satisfaction. Mercy Health, a not-for-profit aged-care and healthcare provider, reports that it has been able to save $23 million per year from having flexible work arrangements in place.
But the real benefits are to be realised in the strength of our families. As we all know, strong families are the basic building blocks of any successful society. What happens in the home—or, just as importantly, what does not happen—has impacts that leave the home and spread out across neighbourhoods and the whole community.
Unfortunately, even when flexible work arrangements are available, working parents have often felt reluctant to take advantage of them. Forty-six per cent of respondents in last year’s national working families survey reported feeling that requesting family-friendly work arrangements would be frowned on by their employers, with many respondents noting that this was a bigger problem for dads than for mums.
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