What is Family Friendly Workplaces?
Parents At Work and UNICEF Australia have united with industry and community leaders to develop National Work + Family Standards in a response to results of the National Working Families Report and the impact of COVID-19 on families and workplaces. The aim in establishing these standards is to educate employers, provide a framework and guidelines, develop and certify employees.
Family Friendly Workplaces aim to improve work life wellbeing, inclusion and equity outcomes for families by introducing a set of certifiable National Work + Family Standards for employers. As proud supporting partners, KidsCo helps organisations in terms of Family Care Standards with our School Holiday and Virtual Lockdown Care Programs to support working parents and carers.
Colin Biggers & Paisley shared their experience with Family Friendly Workplaces below:
Why is your organisation committed to be a family friendly workplace?
One of the strengths of our practice is the way we look after each other, and at the heart of this are our values of loyalty, respect, balance, and integrity. We understand that many of our people have parenting and caring responsibilities that often intertwine with their roles at work, even more so with the Covid lens applied.
Being recognised as a Family Friendly Workplace will help us continue to build a positive and inclusive culture where open communication about finding balance is encouraged. At CBP we understand that life changes when someone becomes a parent or a carer –priorities shift, balance at work becomes even more important, time becomes a more precious commodity and values can shift. We want to continue to support our people with these competing priorities.
Being formally recognised as a Family Friendly Workplace will also help us continue to attract and retain the best talent, an important strategic objective for our practice.
Point of Difference
Share a family friendly workplace initiative that your organisation excels with and the impact it is having on the workplace culture?
Wellbeing
At the centre of our Strategic Plan is our purpose to collectively build and secure the future of our clients, colleagues and community. At the core of this purpose is a commitment to maintaining an environment that is safe, respectful and supports our people to be the best version of themselves whilst contributing to the success of our practice. To achieve this, we must create balance and foster their general wellbeing.
A commitment to foster and maintain physical, mental, social and environmental health and safety will see our practice continue to support and grow high performing teams, reduce lost productivity, and substantially improve the wellbeing of our people. It is a chance to:
- Improve morale and engagement;
- Collaborate within and across teams and build social networks;
- Increase productivity;
- Reduce absenteeism;
- Strengthen job satisfaction.
Distributed and Flexible Work
Our Distributed and Flexible Working Guidelines were implemented to help guide our transition back to the office during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our approach to distributed and flexible working was aligned to our approach to the pandemic which was ensuring our people remain safe, productive and connected so that we continue to achieve our strategic goals. Each role was categorised and this meant that nearly all of our roles could be performed remotely. This was a huge shift for our practice and it gave our leaders and people a framework to work within to ensure that flexibility continued while continuing to meet the needs of our clients.
Back Up Child Care Allowance
In 2016 we implemented our Back Up Childcare Allowance Policy to show our commitment to supporting our employees and their families. This policy provides a daily financial allowance to the employee where their usual work pattern has been distributed due to work commitments or their regular childcare arrangement was unavailable to assist with the costs of day-care or a nanny.
Families@CBP
In 2020 we relaunched our Parental Leave Program and created Families@CBP. The priority for this program is to create a positive and inclusive culture where open communication about balancing family life is encouraged. We understand that everyone has unique needs and our Families@CBP program is tailored to provide support to each individual and their own personal circumstances. As part of this program, we partnered with Parents at Work to provide our people with expert Executive Coaches to assist with the transition on to parental leave, while on leave and when returning from leave.
KidsCo Program
We wanted to make life a little bit easier for our working parents in lockdown so we partnered with KidsCo to deliver a special virtual kids after school program. The program was available to everybody and ran for two weeks.
Forty one kids attended the KidsCo program and we received great feedback from our employees. It was a great opportunity for the kids to make new friends and connect with other kids of parents at Colin Biggers & Paisley.
Read the full case study on the Family Friendly Workplace website
Chat to us about how we can support your organisation in becoming family-friendly here
