Balancing Caring Responsibilities, and the Rise in Flexible Working Requests

With the summer holidays now underway, have you noticed an increase in requests for flexibility from the parents or carers within your teams?

A recent study by Deloitte UK found that 64% of mothers feel overwhelmed, with 66% experiencing burnout due to a lack of personal time. This compared to 38% of fathers feeling overwhelmed, and 47% experiencing burnout.

With school holidays totalling around 13 weeks per year in the UK, compared with 5.6 weeks of annual leave, many families struggle to balance childcare responsibilities with work, especially during the school holidays. 1 in 4 parents reported to using 13 days of annual leave per year to carry out caring responsibilities, including ill children, school events, school closures and other responsibilities. On average, they take between 1-3 days off for themselves.

Where employees are struggling to balance their home commitments, this inevitably has an effect on their productivity at work. You may experience increased absence or lateness, requests for emergency or dependants leave, or fatigue and other physical symptoms which affect performance.

This of course doesn’t only affect those caring for children. Increasing numbers of adults now have caring responsibilities for older relatives, or parents. The “sandwich carers” who are in between younger and older generations requiring care often put their own self-care and needs at the bottom of the list of priorities. Increasingly this has a detrimental effect on mental health and wellbeing.

With flexible working now a day one right, many businesses have noticed an increase in the number of requests asking for flexibility. It is essential that employers consider how they can support these individuals, to not only achieve a better work-life balance, but also to retain (and attract) staff going forwards.

Another recent survey has found that 600 carers in the UK leave work every day due to being unable to balance their work, and home, responsibilities.

Flexible Working Requests

If a member of your team requests flexible working, this can be for any reason (not only caring responsibilities). You must agree to a request unless there is a “genuine business reason not to” – where a request cannot be agreed, it must be for one of the following reasons

• the burden of additional costs

• an inability to reorganise work amongst existing staff

• an inability to recruit additional staff

• a detrimental impact on quality

• a detrimental impact on performance

• a detrimental effect on ability to meet customer demand

• insufficient work available for the periods the employee proposes to work

• planned structural changes to the employer’s business’

There is a formal process to follow of meetings, letters and formal discussions.

If you need any support managing a flexible working request you have received, or reviewing how flexible your own policies are, please contact us on team@hrprime.co.uk