Applying for jobs after having their first children, Harvey and Grilli noticed there were a lack of jobs that accommodated working parents’ need for flexibility, while also matching their level of experience.
Grilli was a teacher who struggled to go back to work and find her career path after having children. Harvey had to change careers entirely to find a flexible job that suited experience.
“I realised that after my eldest son was at school, there was this time window within the school day where I could be really productive at work,” Grilli told HR magazine. She has two children, aged two and five.
“But there were no jobs out there that suited that sort of working. Both of us realised that those high-quality, part-time jobs were missing. It created this pool of parents that want to work, and have the experience and the qualifications behind them, but there's just no workplace that fits them.”
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Research published in April 2024 by the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed revealed that two in five working mothers have had their flexible working request turned down.
Meanwhile, just 31% of job adverts offered flexible working in 2023, according to flexible working consultancy Timewise.
Grilli and Harvey planned to create a community where parents could share their experiences with returning to work, which would eventually turn into a jobs board.
In May 2024, Grilli took to LinkedIn to share her experience of being a parent trying to return to work, and the lack of recognition her skills as a parent were getting in the jobs application process.
The post got 14 million impressions in 14 days, and more than 10,000 comments. Grilli said: “almost half of them were C-suite leaders, business leaders and senior leaders.”
People generally agreed: work was not working for parents.
Grilli and Harvey decided to create the Five Hour Club, a network and job board, to formulate a five-hour work day for parents that allowed them to attend to childcare either side of their working hours.
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The pair spoke to senior business leaders, who acknowledged the need for a new way of working.
“What surprised me the most was that people got it. Everybody was in support of this change of working,” Grilli remembered.
Senior leaders acknowledged that the current working day wasn’t working for parents, but there didn’t seem to be a solution to fix that, Harvey explained.
“When we came out with the Five Hour Club, it was to give that tangible solution. That’s why we started the job board,” she said.
The new work day design could help fix wider problems in the workplace, from the gender pay gap, to increased representation of women in senior leadership roles, Harvey added.
“We know that there's a gender pay gap, and lots of people try to get more women in leadership. The trouble is, we're not letting women or parents back into the workplace after having children in the first place, so there's no progression.”
One in 10 working mothers have quit their jobs due to childcare pressures, research jointly published last November by gender equality charity the Fawcett Society and hiring platform Totaljobs revealed. The research also highlighted that 84% of working mothers struggled to find a job that accommodated their childcare needs, and 41% had to decline a promotion that didn’t align with their childcare arrangements.
Over three quarters (76%) of employees stated that a 40-hour work week doesn’t suit them, a survey commissioned by recruitment firm Robert Walters (19 August) showed, underlining the need for the Five Hour Club founders' solution: a five-hour working day.
Most employers have a policy in place to accept flexible working, Harvey added, so solidifying a five-hour day is not too much of a jump.
“It might be a ‘new’ way of working, but it’s not really,” she continued. “It’s just shifting your meetings through those core hours that most people work most effectively in. It’s tweaking a little bit of what we have out there already.”
Read more: Half of parents consider quitting over office mandates
The Five Hour Club jobs board requires employers to: emphasise professional development and career progression for working parents; recognise candidates' previous qualifications and skills; offer a permanent or contract role; offer a minimum of pro-rata salary that is based on the market rate for the full-time role; and offer benefits that support parent's family needs and wellbeing.
Grilli explained that the Five Hour Club requires HR teams interested in posting on its jobs board to explicitly state the five-hour workday structure in their job descriptions.
She said: “The biggest pushback has probably been [employers saying:] ‘We’ve got this job description. Can we just use that?’.
“The reason we want to keep to a five-hour work day, rather than saying it’s just flexible working, is because by creating that boundary, we believe that it will be a benefit on both sides.
“The parent knows where they stand, the employer knows what that parent is able to give. You can then be a lot more clear in terms of meeting hours, and when you can do core work.”
