Creating Flexible Work And Supportive Workplace Culture for Single Parents.
During this recent pandemic, many single parents were forced out of the work, had to cut back hours, or rethink work options under the weight of workplace closures and home schooling.
For coupled parents, trying to manage a shared load of home schooling and working at home during the pandemic, highlighted issues working single parents, have struggled with for years.
Working Solutions is looking for businesses and organisations who will make an effort to not only hire single parents, but find a way to honour their true value to the workplace, without loss of access and promotional opportunities.
We need to stop thinking employing based on old measures of an’ ideal worker’ like ‘always available’, ‘works overtime’, ‘takes work home’ While these measures These have historically been favourable, workers with care-giving responsibilities (particularly single parents) cannot measure up. They are wronglynseen as holding less business value because they cannot ‘over provide’ their contributions in the workplace.
Let’s design work systems and processes that recognise all workers might have care responsibilities and family demands outside of work. Let’s change the structured interviews questions, the artificial intelligence or algorithms used to sort through resumes, based on old notions of the “ideal worker”.
Workplace culture needs an overhaul. Educate your managers to drop assumptions that single parents don’t have a career plan. Give single parents the opportunity to openly discuss how their role can progress within the business and what kind of supports right be needed to meet these goals. .
Let’s Stop Normalising Overworking – Let’s Work Creatively and Flexibly.