Power of the Parent 1: S6 Ep1: Defining Your Parental Support Strategy

1. You can blend transactional and transformational 
2. Benchmarking is important but so is knowing your business
3. Feedback comes in many forms

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Power of the Parent, the podcast. This series is a new format and we are going to be focusing on a different topic each week, bringing you three things you need to know about whatever that may be, mainly from an employer perspective. But of course, there’s plenty of reframing that parents could do to benefit from the content as well.

We will be covering everything from parental leave transitions, managing boundaries, what to do when your talent pipeline looks a bit dodgy, tips on gathering feedback, and things like establishing parental support networks.  So let’s dive in. 

 In today’s episode, I am going to be talking about defining your parental support strategy. And the three things that I’m going to be covering are, one, that you can blend transactional and transformational.

Number two, that benchmarking is important, but so is knowing your business. And number three is going to be that feedback comes in many forms. 

So let’s dive into number one. So first of all, that you can blend transactional and transformational. So let’s face it, the word strategy can nudge a particular reaction in many of us, but love it or loathe it and all that’s in between, we do need it. 

We need to understand our direction of travel, the goals that we’re working towards and the impact we want to have on our valued employees, of course. So this first point is all about knowing that, bigger picture, longer term thinking needs to coexist with shorter term, quicker, pivotable action.

Let’s take an example. You have a strategic priority with the headline of crafting a workplace where everybody can thrive, ensuring that you’re building an equitable culture with a wonderfully powerful feeling of belonging. Now within that pillar, you know that supporting parents is a deliciously hot topic you have to put some oomph behind. Maybe you’re losing talent, specifically within the first two years of someone returning from parental leave, and maybe there’s a dangerously common conversation about parental burnout going on. 

Some of the strategic moves you could make could be to understand things like your talent management, ensuring that really is inclusive, that you’re operating with an intersectional  lens when it comes to helping parents and carers in the workplace and looking across the next 12 to 18 months at your line manager population to see what development they need as well as how you communicate all of this.

Transactionally, you might need to jump to it on things like a phased return policy, the crossed T’s and dotted I’s of your pay review or bonus eligibility, perhaps offering returner coaching or workshops and getting some good quality feedback from your glorious workforce. Essentially, if you focus only on the big picture, you’ll be going around in metaphorical circles, fueled by rhetorical questions and wobbly answers.

If you go straight for the, let’s fix this with some training, it’s very likely that once that training is over, the longevity will be dodgy because there’s no welcoming cultural support to keep it going.

Number two, benchmarking is important, but so is knowing your business. Now in a previous corporate role I had, I worked with a director who was nothing short of obsessed by benchmarking. It would show up on the daily over the smallest of things all the way through to informing big strategic decision making  and sometimes it helped to get those insights and provoke some creative thinking and a little competition.

Personally, I can’t argue that I didn’t get some really valuable experience and picked up an abundance of skills in investigative practices and breaking down some complex findings into proposed solutions.  However, with this laser focus on what everybody else was doing, it was infinitely harder to get folks to listen to what our organisation needed. 

We need to do what XYZ because company ABC are doing it is not a platform that I’m willing to jump from and neither should you. 

Sure, maybe look around if you’re genuinely struggling for ideas, but don’t get yourself stuck in the treacle of analysis paralysis. And to quote one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever worked with and continue to be grateful to have in my life, even just a little bit, the great Amrit Sandar,  comparing yourself to those in the same sector means nothing.

Being bad together isn’t an accolade we’re going to get involved in. Focus on you.  

And finally, feedback comes in many forms. This is a bit of a beast, but it’s one that I’m willing to tame. We can cut this many different ways. And I’m going to focus on two headlines, format and alternative insights.  So first of all, format. 

This is all about inclusivity and psychological safety in my experience.  If we only ever offer up face to face feedback, we’re leaping to a place of belief that everybody is okay with providing their thoughts in this way.  And whilst in an ideal world, we want everybody to be able to share loudly and proudly, this isn’t the reality for many, for an abundance of reasons. So consider what you can do to really let people know that they have options and they’re safe to share what they think. You could include things like anonymised surveys, one to one conversations, standalone questions rather than a five page questionnaire. 

Have a look at the kind of mechanisms that have had lots of engagement in your organisation before and see what you can use to adapt as well.  

Now onto alternative insights, I’m talking about things perhaps a little less obvious. Things like policy uptake stats, leaver surveys, attrition stats, engagement insights, and the less formal anecdotal stories.  For example, let’s say you’ve introduced Equal Parental Leave. Yay! But the numbers accessing this form of leave is woefully low.

It may be that you don’t have a heap of folks who need it at the moment, but is it definitely that? Or is it because of how it’s been communicated? Or the internal PR it has or hasn’t got? Another could be to look at your demographics when it comes to something like flexible working. Is there a gender split? Do you gather info on why people might be using flexible working? You can begin to build a picture and some hypotheses to go out and test in your organisation and then link back to any changes you might need to make. 

That’s all for this episode. I’ll be back soon with three things you need to know about supporting parents in the workplace. Take care.

Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Power of the Parent with podcast. If you have got a few spare minutes, who am I kidding? Of course you haven’t got a few spare minutes, but if you would like to choose to spend a few of your minutes  giving me any sort of review or rating, I would massively appreciate it.

It does help other people find it. And it also lets me know that I’m hitting the spot with listeners. For more free resources, you can head to the show  where you’ll find a link to the Power of the Parent website. Or do head on over to LinkedIn and give me a follow. Search Charlotte Speak and my grinning face should pop up.

Until next time, take care.