Many organisations still aren’t geared towards attracting working parents, according to Chris Underwood, managing director at recruitment consultancy Adastrum Consulting.
While organisations are increasingly aware of the benefits of gender diversity within their employee base, this is often not backed up with suitable flexible working policies, he reported.
“It’s great that I now get asked eight out of 10 times to make sure I have got women on the shortlist,” he told HR magazine. “But when I ask ‘what have you got in place to support [working mothers]?' people say ‘what do you mean?’”
“I say ‘have you got something in place where people can work four-day weeks?’ but they just don’t think in that way sometimes because they are pre-disposed to think it has to be full time.”
Underwood said that the term ‘part time’ still has negative connotations for many, and is inexplicably still synonymous with those not particularly committed to, or focused on, their careers.
“People often say ‘I don’t think we could make that work for us'. And yet if someone requested it internally you’d have to have a bloody good reason not to accommodate that. It’s ridiculous.”
Underwood also reported a still prevailing disconnect between individual businesses within the same larger corporation. “There are a lot of FTSE 100 companies out there where you’d think they would be sorted and have very sophisticated governance systems, but nothing they do is the same as the next unit along.”
He explained that failure to standardise processes and values is often a symptom of the short-term nature of corporate reporting. Regarding HR’s role in driving standardisation and unity, Underwood said: “The HR piece is absolutely vital. It’s about setting that cultural agenda, making others aware of those leadership values.”
