In May I attended the annual Working Families Conference in London on behalf of the network. Our founding Chair of the SHU Parent & Carer Network, Sara Daines, had been to the conference in 2018 and I know from her blog post that she found it really thought provoking and promising about the future of flexible working and unlocking employees’ potential.
A year later on and I found myself in a plush conference suite at the offices of the London law firm who were sponsoring the event. Despite the surroundings the delegates were from a real range of different organisations and sectors; on my table alone there were representatives from a national media company, an insurance group and a consulting firm, and whilst I was there I met people attending the conference from other universities and the public sector. What struck me in the context of so many different organisations was how similar our challenges are when it comes to work-life balance, and how important it is for any organisation to try and get it right.
A real focus of this year’s conference was on how organisations can support an aging workforce, a good example of this was age specific challenges such as the menopause and caring for elderly relatives. I think it’s fair to say that people still often associate ‘flexible working’ with working parents or the younger generation. Whilst it’s obviously important that organisations support their working parents (and that means dads as well, not just mums!) we do need to make sure that we aren’t falling into the trap of forgetting that work-life balance is important for everyone, in any circumstance and at any life stage. One of the conference speakers pointed out that recent research has shown that older employees can be just as keen to work flexibly, for any number of reasons. As the world of work changes and the ‘retire at 60’ career model disappears it’s going to be important to remember this.
The other main focus of the event was on the future of work. In the same way that our workplaces today have moved on from the world of work in days gone by (I’m not old enough to remember smoking in the office but I have seen the steady increase in the amount we rely on computers) organisations needs to think hard about the future of the workplace to make sure they can get the best from their employees. Technology will certainly play a huge part in this, which means organisations need to be ready to benefit from that technology and the flexibility it can bring, but also need to think about the human impact of being always ‘on’ and make sure that work-life balance is still central.
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