How employers can really support working parents

There's a particular flavour of dread that descends on working parents somewhere around the start of July. Not dread about the work itself, but about the six-week logistical marathon barrelling towards them: who's watching the children on which day, which holiday club still has spaces, and how on earth to keep a job running through the middle of it all.

The numbers bear the dread out. New research from International Workplace Group (IWG) finds that almost seven in 10 parents (69%) are stressed about arranging summer childcare, with the average family needing to find an extra £686 to cover it and nearly one in five saying they'll burn through all of their annual leave just to plug the gap. Set that alongside the Parentkind National Parent Survey, which found more than two million parents have taken a child out of school in term time because they couldn't otherwise afford a break, and that a record 459,288 fines were issued to parents last year. The pressure, clearly, is real and rising.

But the statistics, striking as they are, only tell half the story. The other half is the part parents rarely say out loud.

The juggle is real and often hidden

Kellie Nedelcoux

Parental Transition Coach and Founder of Career and Parenthood

Kellie Nedelcoux, a parental transition coach and founder of Career and Parenthood, spends her days talking to working parents, and says the summer holidays is rarely met with the joy you'd expect. "The summer holidays are often something we should be looking forward to, but if I'm honest, when I speak to working parents, that's rarely the emotion that comes up," she says. "Instead, I hear words like guilt, pressure, anxiety, overwhelm and sometimes even resentment for having to work, or for the system that's not set up to enable working parents."

The load is not just logistical but mental. Alongside doing their jobs, she points out, parents are suddenly managing six weeks of childcare "meticulously working out who is looking after the children on which days, booking holiday clubs, organising camps, planning activities" - all while the expectations at work, or the ones they set for themselves, haven't shifted an inch.

And here is the crux of it, most of them say nothing. "One of the biggest challenges I see is that many working parents don't talk about it," Nedelcoux says. "They carry on trying to demonstrate that they're just as committed, just as ambitious and just as productive, because they don't want anyone to think that becoming a parent has somehow reduced their career aspirations."

That instinct to hide is what employers most need to understand because, as Nedelcoux is quick to stress, the parents doing the hiding are not asking to be let off. "Working parents still want to do a brilliant job. They still care about progressing their careers, delivering great work and making an impact. They're not asking for lower expectations or special treatment. They're asking for understanding, true flexibility where possible, and the opportunity to have honest conversations without feeling judged." The employer's task, then, isn't to lower the bar. It's to remove the pretence.

Rules, yes but with common sense

Ben Simonds-Gooding

Chief People Officer, Fever-Tree

None of which means throwing out how a business works. Ben Simonds-Gooding, Chief People Officer at Fever-Tree and, by his own admission, a father of two whose "juggling days are behind" him with two grown-up children now aged 21 and 22 - makes the case for holding firm on the fundamentals while flexing at the edges.

Fever-Tree runs a hybrid model with a mandatory three days a week in the office, and Simonds-Gooding is unapologetic about it. "We've thought deeply on this and passionately believe that we are at our best, and most agile, when sharing, learning and engaging in person. Productive osmosis," he says. "These are the rules and we firmly stand by them for considered reasons. But we do apply common sense."

Adding, "A temporary exception isn't a breaking of the rules," he says and the mechanism for delivering those exceptions is the manager. One of the focuses of Fever-Tree's lean people team, he explains, is "helping managers manage": equipping them to be "impactful and respected leaders of their cohorts" who "truly manage, rather than just have a title." In practice that means: "If there are squeezes at certain times of the year that are unavoidable, then the managers will work with their team members to understand, and make temporary provisions to facilitate a healthy working parent routine."

There is, he insists, nothing mystical about it. "No magic dust on this issue. Just good understanding and relationship between managers and their staff."