It will come as no surprise to many of you that I’ve had to face people telling me that providing support to parents and carers in the workplace is ‘special treatment’. It can go alongside things like opening floodgates and needing to treat everybody the same. Let’s not forget the ‘we’ve never had to do this kind of thing before, parents just got on with it.’ It’s quite the mix.
There are so many societal narratives that exacerbate pretty much all of the above. When you add in organisational culture eats so many good intentions for breakfast, it’s a noisy backdrop.
But here’s the thing – we have to face into it. It isn’t special treatment, it’s meeting people in their realities, enabling quality talent attraction and retention.
They can be uncomfortable conversations of course, and many of us won’t want to walk into conflict. Hopefully we don’t have to go from a place of unhelpful friction.
Story time…
I want to share a story with you about a leader in an organisation who were facing some big challenges with flexible working. It was seen as something for parents to enable childcare. That was it. The language used on application forms was very parent centric and it was creating so many organisational narratives that were becoming negatively challenging.
Enter: Emily. Emily was a senior leader in this organisation. She didn’t have children or any caring responsibilities, but she wanted to work flexibly for other reasons (I know, fancy that!). Emily’s initial reason for wanting to work flexibly was because she was training for a marathon. It was a long process and the way she wanted to train, you could have called it a lifestyle. When she looked around the function she was heading up, everybody working flexibly did it for parenting and caring reasons. She realised she’d never actually paid much attention to why.
Emily knew she might have a job on her hands. Not to get the flexible arrangement agreed, but would it be accepted by the wider team as a ‘valid reason’? She started to get curious and asked her peers across the business if they had any examples of people in their teams working flexibly. If so, could they share why?
On a mission
She started a one woman PR campaign for flexible working in their organisation. It needed enlightened conversations. It required a re-brand as being far more varied than people believed. And it needed belief that it added value to the organisation.
And it worked. They got better at sharing stories about why and how flexible working worked for people. Emily led the way in sharing her reasons for flexible working. It became easier for others who perhaps felt less deserving because it wasn’t a caring situation. They saw over a 30% increase in flexible working applications. The reasons were shared proudly. Wanting to finally make the leap of getting a pet. Using a nine day fortnight to visit different cities in the UK. Starting a new hobby. Simply having solo time. And yes, there were caring responsibilities in there too.
Emily helped the organisation see that flexible working isn’t special treatment for one particular group of people. The resentment, damaging myths and friction began to dissipate. And whilst I’m using flexible working as an example here, it applies to much more.
No special treatment
Policies and support helping people through their trickiest, toughest, happiest, wildest times aren’t reserved for one group of people. If we pedal the narrative that this is the case, we’re creating divisions where we simply don’t need them.
So, my nudge for you is to consider this approach in your organisation. What are you picking up from people? Where are things bristling and causing challenges because of this view of ‘special treatment’? How could you surface it? Give it the glow up it needs and positively change the experience for EVERYBODY in your organisation?
Let me know how you get on!