Report: Top Employers for Working Families Benchmark 2018

Work/life balance charity, Working Families, has released its latest report to assess the flexible, agile, and family-friendly working policies of its employer members. It captures the experience of 630,000 employees across public, private, and third sector organisations.

Key findings

• The percentage of top performance ratings for part-time and reduced-hours workers is higher than the percentage of top performance ratings across all staff at 34 per cent vs 14 per cent.
• More than two-thirds of the companies go beyond legislative requirements and offer their employees the right to request flexible working from their first day of employment, while more than a third are routinely stating the opportunities for flexibility in their job adverts.
• However, over half of employers have only trained half or fewer of their staff who approve flexible working requests to assess the business case for flexibility. A similar figure have only trained a quarter or less of the managers who manage employees who work flexibly, while 23 per cent have provided no training at all.
• 77 per cent of respondents were found to match Shared Parental Leave (SPL) to their contractual maternity provisions, with 82 per cent of members having seen fathers use SPL.

The Top Employers for Working Families Benchmark was established in 2010. It offers a way for employers to see whether they are ahead or behind the curve in the development of flexible and family-friendly working policies.