“Parenthood: a challenge for society, an essential for business”

Since 2017, Pamela Corbin-Audoux has been committed to diversity, equity & inclusion in the workplace. After two years at Doctolib, she is now at Decathlon Digital as head of diversity and inclusion. Her mission: to make sure teams reflect a little more closely the society we live in.

Among her favourite themes: parenthood at work. Pamela stands out for her pragmatic approach. Here she shares a few tips for any organisation looking to care for its (future) parents.

Is parenthood a new inclusion topic,
on the doorstep of the “personal”?

Many companies organise end-of-year gatherings and gift handouts where you come across your colleagues' children. Others offer nursery places to make life easier for new parents. Health insurers offer contracts that cover the healthcare costs of dependants. And yet I still hear plenty of contacts working in HR wondering whether we aren't doing too much for parents, whether we aren't bordering on interference.
I think the COVID crisis acted as an accelerator within HR departments. During lockdown, we entered our colleagues' homes via video calls, and certain personal and family circumstances were brought to light. This forced blurring of the work/personal boundary obliged companies to work around constraints that until then had often been considered as belonging exclusively to the private sphere. 

Today, parents' expectations of their employer lie in this area, and they seem fairly reasonable to me: we are mainly talking about flexibility and support. Ignoring them means risking the loss of talent, parents and future parents, who do not feel supported.

So what social and societal responsibilities should companies bear today and tomorrow? Parenthood raises many challenges, just like plenty of other inclusion topics: gender, nationality, disability, and so on. Society with a small s has a part to play so that Society with a capital S becomes better.

The legal framework around parenthood is evolving slowly but adapting to shifting attitudes. As proof, there is the government's plan on birth leave announced in January 2024, which aims to overhaul a text dating from 1977, reworked in 2015 and again in 2021. The goal in sight: a working world that is more inclusive for parents and, in principle, less discriminatory towards women. To achieve this, the plan provides for better pay during leave so that both parents can be with their child for six months. Watch this space…

What would your advice be
for a successful “parenthood” policy?

Over the years, I have catalogued a few good practices put in place by all kinds of organisations. While there is no miracle recipe that works for every company, I can still see three points to keep in mind when rolling out a parenthood policy.

#1 Audit your own practices
First of all, take the time to review what already exists. List all the current practices. What proportion of parents benefit from these initiatives? Are they making the best use of them? Analyse the quantitative data, then consult your colleagues who are parents to interpret it better: are they aware of these initiatives? Is the information easy to access and clear? If they have used these services, are they satisfied with them? This stocktake will help you pinpoint the areas where improvement is possible.

#2 Bring your teams on board
Invent alongside the people concerned. Share with them the vision guiding your action. Survey your employees, run workshops, set the objectives together. You will make better-informed choices while building a climate of trust.
Strategies dreamed up for parents, but without parents, are quickly rendered obsolete by your employees' lived experience. Test your ideas, observe the results. Co-creation gives rise to solutions that generally fit parents' needs better. Very good ideas that require no dedicated budget come to life this way: a community of parents where people can swap tips and good deals, post small ads, or organise activities together between parents of children the same age…

#3 Keep improving, continuouslyAdopt a “test-and-learn” approach. Question the parents on your team regularly, take stock once a year: what is working, or not, and why? Find out about good practices around you too, talk to other HR people about it. And show some humility, because your solutions will not always be crowned with success at the first attempt. When that happens, acknowledge the failure with complete transparency. And then build a better solution, one that rests on the foundations of that failure and the experience gained.

What do you think are the main pitfalls to avoid?

I notice certain recurring missteps. Here again, I see three things to avoid in order to maximise your parenthood policy's chances of success.

#1 Communicating badly about what exists
This is one of the key points of the Parental Challenge: communicating employees' rights to them more effectively so they know about the schemes they can access. Is this information tucked away in some dusty corner of the intranet, reachable only after eight clicks? Is it worded simply and clearly? Providing understandable, accessible information is the bare minimum.
But communicating badly also means communicating at the wrong moment. If you concentrate all your “parenthood” information at the onboarding stage, your message will end up forgotten. The same goes if you settle for a single mention once a year in the newsletter. Remember, too, to send the link to the list of schemes automatically every time you receive a pregnancy certificate, or a request for maternity, second-parent or adoption leave, for example.

#2 Always wanting to do more
Before rolling out new practices to support parents, check whether what already exists has been optimised. Can the experience on offer be improved? For example: have we checked the state of the chair in the nursing room? Does the parent returning from leave easily find all the equipment they need to work? Does the template for the compulsory return-from-maternity-leave interview give us relevant information?

#3 Considering only new parents
Focusing your parenthood policies on the perinatal period means setting aside parents of school-age children, teenagers… and children with special needs (permanent or temporary). So it is important to know the ages of the children concerned in order to tailor your proposals properly. Offering discounts on tutoring, webinars on ways to handle teenage defiance, or help with UCAS-style university applications, within your “parenthood pack” could well prove wise. Not forgetting future parents, who might need support on their journey towards parenthood (information, health, fertility, assisted reproduction…).”

***

When we talk about parenthood policy, the question of fairness towards non-parents comes up frequently. If you offer some form of flexibility for parents, you also have to be able to think about carers more broadly. It is up to each organisation to fit its own reality by taking the time to ask the people concerned. What I observe is the shift in frame of reference now under way. Companies can play an even greater role for carers, and they will find it in their interest both to improve staff wellbeing, which is a key retention factor, and to make themselves more attractive to future recruits. So why not take the plunge?

TO GO FURTHER:
☞ "Parenthood at work: still plenty to do!" Flore Villemot (HR director, The Boson Project)
☞ “Doing everything to let parents make the most of it” Marie Barbier (HR director, Morning)