AUSTRALIAN EMPLOYERS need to engender cultures which encourage men to spend more time with their families without fear of losing their job, according to federal Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson
AUSTRALIAN EMPLOYERS need to engender cultures that encourage men to spend more time with their families without fear of losing their job, according to Federal Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson.
She said men often struggled to meet family commitments because of work demands, despite the best efforts of employers to develop family friendly workplaces.
Speaking at a conference on globalisation, families and work, Senator Patterson cited research from the Social Policy Research Centre, which found that only 18 per cent of fathers used flexible work hours to balance work and family, while 73 per cent did not use any family friendly provisions of workplace agreements.
While 81 per cent of workplace agreements contained at least one work and family provision such as flexible working hours, only 46 per cent of the agreements contained two or more provisions.
Senator Patterson encouraged employers to take advantage of provisions in the Workplace Relations Act, which allow for employee flexibility around meeting family needs.
“Employees, supervisors and some senior managers feared that breaks or reductions in working hours would irreversibly damage their careers,” she said.
“We need to look at how we can change that culture. We need workplace cultures that actually support men to take advantage of the provisions.”
The Senator’s call came before the release of research, which found that employees are spending more time at work because they feel they need to be seen by management, rather than being assessed on results.
Conducted by Managing Work/Life Balance’s Barbara Holmes in conjunction with CCH, the 2004 Work/Life Balance Survey found that the banking industry was the worst example of ‘presenteeism’, with 43 per cent of respondents reporting that their ‘presence’ was rewarded rather than results.
Almost a third of organisations reported an increase in average employee working hours, and 40 per cent said they had cut back on staff but failed to reassess workload priorities. Longer working hours were most common in government and white-collar organisations.
Twenty-four per cent of organisations reported an overall increase in stress-related absences over the past 12 months, and the banking, insurance and financial services sector fared the worse with an increase of 34 per cent.
