Childcare: New solutions to age-old problems
Feb, 2009
By Isabel Metz
Organisational behaviour senior lecturer
Melbourne Business School
Finding the right child care is difficult enough, but a more important childcare debate rages around turning existing work/life balance policies into practice.
The solution requires intervention by both the government and by employers.
Despite limited childcare arrangements available in Australia-grandparents, mothercraft nurses and nannies who come to your home, and childcare centres-most people choose childcare centres.
Of course the biggest problem associated with these centres is the cost which is further exacerbated by penalty rates that apply to late pickups.
Where both parents are establishing their careers, their responsibilities invariably involve long hours. With childcare centres closing at 6pm, one parent really has to be there to pick up the child, otherwise the after-hours penalty rates start to become extremely expensive.
One possible solution might be to operate a childcare centre in shifts-morning, evening and night, with each shift costing the same rate as the last one, so you don't pay penalty rates if you pick up the child outside normal business hours. These types of centres have recently been successfully introduced in the US and Europe.
In addition to this, employers must remove workplace obstacles which prevent parents from taking advantage of work/life balance policies.
It's a question of mindset. Both the government and the employer must consider the balance between work and family responsibilities as part of life, not just on a special case by case basis.
The government has a role to play in terms of reducing the cost of childcare through subsidies and tax breaks, and the organisation must focus on making it viable full stop.
Often organisations have very good flexible work policies in place, but managers are reluctant to use or encourage them. They must turn these policies into practice.
One way to do this is to make managers more accountable for their commitment to equal opportunity, diversity management or work/family balance.
These measures should form part of their short-term key performance indicators (kpi) and be measured alongside their other short-term kpis.
Other human capital indicators should include the degree of gender diversity in work teams, the proportion of women who leave in comparison to men, the percentage of women applicants for a job and what percentage of them were actually employed, and the proportion of staff (broken down by gender and position level) who actually take advantage of any flexible work policies such as job sharing.
We can take it from here and just be creative. For example, the government now requires organisations to report on a number of outcomes, instead it could require organisations to report on the measures of those outcomes-how many people in the organisation are job sharing, and is that increasing?
Someone has to be the organisation's conscience and it can't always be the leader or CEO.
CEOs change. While we see a lot of leaders paying lip service to these initiatives, most are not committed to the stage where they live the initiatives themselves. Very few practice what their policies preach. Few have a balance of women in senior management. And few encourage women or men for that matter, to take advantage of the flexible hours offered by their work policies. This needs to change; research clearly shows that employees, including some men at executive levels, would welcome the opportunity to use the flexible policies that their companies offer without fear of prejudice.
