Today is the start of Baby Loss Awareness Week (9th – 15th October, annually). I’m all about enablement and freedom, but if there’s one phrase I would want to see banned from the HR lexicon is the dreaded “family friendly”.
No doubt many of us have seen a bunch of policies on maternity, paternity, shared parental leave, and flexible working etc. bundled together under the heading “Family Friendly”. Fewer HR buzz terms grate on me more than this one. I’ve always used ‘work-life inclusion’ instead, and this is enshrined throughout the Glass Ceilings Work-Life Inclusion Policy Framework® and all our work.
Before creating any people policy, employers should always ask the ‘why’ and the ‘who’ questions: why are we doing this and who is it for?
Not everyone requiring these types of leave or support will need it for ‘family friendly’ reasons. The phrase is presumptuous about people’s personal circumstances, and in some cases could be triggering for employees who have experienced baby loss or fertility issues (and other types of bereavement too).
The purpose of these policies is to inform people of their rights and set an inclusive culture. Seeing the term ‘family friendly’ when you access a policy to understand your rights and entitlements around baby loss can cause a great deal of pain to some people. Very often these policies are written from a position of setting out entitlements with an assumption that all has gone well with a pregnancy and birth. They may be written in gendered language, or the old fashioned presumption of what a family should look like or even how it’s come about.
There should be policies in place, which you hope nobody ever has to read but in the sad circumstances someone does experience baby loss they can easily access and very quickly understand that they are able to take time off to process and grieve their loss, like any other bereavement.
It is not just a policy issue but operational too. Approaches to workforce planning should not make any assumptions about childless employees. Many people will probably have been assumed to be available over Christmas “because you don’t have children” without any thought of what that sentence means to the person on the receiving end of it, who may find Christmas one of the hardest times of year and work the last thing on their mind.
Glass Ceilings Change Management has a wealth of experience and expertise in this area, which has been valued greatly over the years by organisations and people.
If you need support with a particular situation or developing your approach, get in touch: [email protected]
Laura Evans, CEO