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How Employers Can Help Working Parents with Benefits

Juggling both work responsibilities and parenthood can be a daunting experience for employees, leaving them feeling as if they’re not fulfilling either role at times. To remedy this, employers should seek to provide further benefits for parents and other guardians. 

Beyond parental leave, some other notable benefits could include childcare support and flexible working arrangements. This Pacific Prime UK article will delve into how employers can help working parents by providing additional benefits. 

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Why Benefits for Working Parents Matters

Starting a family is an exciting new chapter in life, but working parents often experience stress because they struggle to balance work and home life, or they must leave their children during the day. 

According to a study published in the International Journal of Human Resources Studies, the following are common challenges working parents face:

  • Work-life conflict
  • Stereotyping
  • Exhaustion and burnout
  • Fluctuating work schedules
  • Career growth opportunities

In some cases, struggling from some or all of these challenges could lead to employees leaving their jobs altogether, particularly mothers. This is why it’s important for employers to provide benefits for working parents. 

Employers who look after working parents by offering benefits such as parental leave or flexible working arrangements can help the employees feel valued and understood, while the organization gains a competitive advantage in employer branding, talent retention, and employee productivity. 

How Employers Can Help Working Parents with Additional Benefits

In an effort to increase overall employee productivity and talent retention, employers are offering a variety of benefits that cater to employees’ parental needs. Some notable benefits include the basic parental leave, flexible working arrangements, and more. 

Below, we will discuss the various measures that employers can take to assist working parents.

Parental Leave

Parental leave refers to the legal right for parents to take time off work to look after their child. Many companies have outdated parental leave policies that may not meet the needs of modern working parents. Fortunately, employers can turn things around by making adjustments to the parental leave policies by offering paid parental leave or extending parental leaves. 

Offering paid parental leave can help give employees peace of mind in taking their time off to take care of their children without having to worry about their finances. In the UK, for example, statutory maternity pay is a contractual right for employees with over 26 weeks with a company. 

Extending parental leave by a few weeks can also help parents bond with their children for as long as they need before returning to work. 

Flexible Working Arrangements

When it comes to working parents, timing is a huge problem. For instance, some parents may need to urgently go home before their usual working hours are up due to urgent childcare matters such as picking up their children from school or sudden medical emergencies surrounding their child. 

You can talk to your employees and come up with a suitable flexible working arrangement that will allow them to fulfill any childcare matters without compromising their work outcome. By communicating with your employees, you ensure your employees feel valued and understood at work, which amounts to overall improved employee productivity and talent retention. 

Wellness and Wellbeing Programs

According to research from the Ohio State University, 66% of the working parents surveyed reported symptoms of burnout at work due to the dual responsibility of fulfilling work duties on top of parenting, making it difficult for them to allocate time to manage their wellbeing. 

Thus, support from employers is key to helping employees balance their lives. Mental health and stress management can really come in handy for helping them cope with juggling their dual responsibilities at home and work. 

You can offer stress management seminars or completely confidential one-on-one counseling sessions with the affected employee. By allowing your employees to voice their inner concern and come up with a solution through discussions, you contribute to helping them balance out their home and work responsibilities. 

Other Family-Oriented Benefits

Beyond basic employee benefits such as gym membership or employee health insurance, employers can go the extra mile by offering family-oriented benefits catering to working parents. This would be greatly appreciated by working parents, as they will be able to see that their employers genuinely care not only about their health and wellbeing but also their families.

Some of these additional family-oriented benefits could include support on moving costs if you need to suddenly move due to familial reasons, tuition fee imbursement for the employees’ kids, or health insurance for the employees’ family. 

By going the extra mile with offering some family-oriented benefits on top of the usual wellness benefits for employees, employers can show employees genuine care and empathy, once again contributing to improved employee productivity and talent retention, the latter of which gives them a competitive edge in the labor market when it comes to recruitment. 

These are just some of the examples of benefits employers can provide for working parents. 

Conclusion

As you can see, juggling responsibilities between parenting and the usual “nine-to-five” duties is serious business for employees, particularly working parents. Without proper benefits that cater to their dual responsibilities, working parents could feel stressed from overwhelming workload and childcare duties back at home on top of their default tasks.

Fortunately, companies can always lend a helping hand. From basics such as parental leaves and flexible working hour arrangements to more complex wellness benefits and family-oriented benefits, you can help ease the burden of working parents and further contribute to improved employee productivity as well as talent retention overall. 

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As an experienced international health insurance broker and employee benefits specialist, Pacific Prime UK can help both expats and local citizens seek out suitable health insurance plans and assist organizations with adequate employee benefits solutions

Whether you’re looking for appropriate health insurance plans or you’re looking to ensure your employees’ wellbeing and satisfaction, we will be more than pleased to help you out with completely impartial advice at no additional cost.

 

Content Writer at Pacific Prime UK
Wish Sutthatothon (Nickname: Guy) is currently a content writer at Pacific Prime Thailand, an insurance broker that connects individuals and businesses with insurance providers worldwide. He creates and edits blog articles, guides, reports, webpages, and other types of digital content.

He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Arts, Media & Communication major (concentration: Creative Content) from Mahidol University International College (MUIC). During the compulsory major elective period in the summer of 2021 and voluntarily during the summer of 2022, he also interned as a video and photo editor at Mbrella Films.

He has experience working as an English Content Writer at a real estate buying/renting/selling platform in Thonglor. There, he crafted company blog posts on a multitude of topics. Topics include market trends, legal issues and disputes in property businesses, financial guides, expat guides, home insurance, home decoration and maintenance, and weekly real estate news quick-recaps. Occasionally, as part of the blog-writing process, he would also translate existing Thai blogs to English.

In his free time, Guy enjoys doing scriptwriting and storytelling for comic strips, watching movies, and listening to music (particularly film scores).
Wish Sutthatothon