In our original blog Balancing Life & Family, we spoke about how work-life balance may be maintained, or even shaped to your particular circumstances.
We got some great feedback from our survey, and this is our chance to share it with you.
Most of our respondents had young children, and felt their current employers had a fair bit of room for improvement, several had even gone freelance in response to business’ unreasonable demands on their lives.
If they hadn’t already, most people said that they would like to work part-time with flexible hours (dependent on family routines), sometimes from home but maybe with some time in the office for social reasons and as a different work environment. Flexibility was key – an employer recognising that no two families are exactly the same, and therefore giving the choice to work when there was available time, was important. After all, more time with the family is what everyone wanted.
Listening to the ladies who completed our survey, we see that we must be flexible, offer mobile/remote working, holidays when you want them, desk sharing, allow people to work on what they love and not worry about the pesky admin, and avoid unnecessary long meetings.
Looking over the trends, we feel we’re going ok at Enspiral, but of course we can always do more. At the moment we’ve got the flexible, mobile working, and we try to push most of the money from projects to our staff, rather than suck it up to high paid managers. If you have the resources, you can choose how you spend them; It’s the power to decide. We hope people can use this to spend more time doing the things they love outside of work too.
Trending from respondents’ answers
Q: What’s your general situation currently?
A: Families with young children
Q: How well does your current employer meet the needs of parents raising young children?
A: Room for improvement with current employers (avg is 6.4/10)
Q: What would you change in your work life if you could?
A: Part-time working / More time with family, higher pay, something they love, flexible hours, choose location / PT in office, Equality, employer acceptance & support of parenting role.
Q: What would your ideal schedule look like?
A: Flexible, work when kids aren’t around, P/T, some time in office
Q: How do you think we can best meet the needs of parents with young children?
A: Flexibility, mobile working, unlimited sick leave (…), holidays when they want them, Desk sharing, understand & appreciate role of parenting outside of business, support partner if one is away travelling, let people work to their skills instead of admin tasks (hire cheap PA’s), no needlessly long meetings, child care onsite arrnagements.
Q: Any other comments you’d like to share with us?
A: Parents should be able to visit kids during the day, recognise all families are different, home life is more important than work, less time in the office, peopel should be there for their kids, make it possible for kids to interact with parents’ work life, security of income is important.