Treating employees differently if they have children has been easy to justify for too long

Interesting how the most vociferous proponents of the office return post-Covid are rarely tied to the nine-to-five grind themselves.

Millionaire plumbing boss Charlie Mullins is a case in point, ruing the “laziness” of remote working – from his Spanish villa, sentiments echoed by TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp tweeting that people should be eager to get back to the office and “prove their worth”.

Of course, those far better acquainted with the daily commute tend to feel differently. Even when the job is good and a company culture and environment supposedly dynamic, a certain drudge inevitably seeps in – the rules, routines and politics that sap energy and spirit. It’s not a huge surprise that a survey from Strathclyde Business School found fewer than one in 10 of 3,000 workers questioned want to return to the office full-time having experienced a sustained and more flexible alternative over the last couple of years. A hybrid workplace is set to be the most palatable compromise.

Significantly, the pandemic has seen flexible working adopted more broadly and indiscriminately than the traditional skew towards working parents or arbitrarily assigned perk on an employer’s whim. At the height of the first lockdown last April, 47 per cent of the UK workforce worked from home compared with 11 per cent in 2018 according to government statistics.

It meant that while the narrative at the time was consumed with frazzled parents balancing the day job with home schooling, a quieter revolution was pulsing away under the radar. Those without children used to fighting for a better work-life balance, seeing their needs pitted against those perceived to be more deserving, got used to the freedom, and there may be no going back from this cultural shift.

Indeed, a sign that old inconsistencies will be less palatable was evident in the criticism of Facebook’s decision to give up to 10 weeks of paid time off for employees with children whose schools closed in the crisis. Those who didn’t qualify for the benefit, but were still working hard during a difficult time, spoke out at feeling overlooked and unrewarded.

As remote or semi-remote working becomes more normalised and mainstream, it remains to be seen whether a rare benefit of Covid’s legacy will be broadening a divisive debate dominated by working mothers trying to have it all. It’s long overdue. Because while significant progress in calling out race and gender discrimination in the workplace has been made in in recent years, the momentum hasn’t always extended to this particular bias. For whatever reason, societally and culturally, treating employees differently depending on whether or not they have children has been easier for employers to justify and perpetuate.

I’ve experienced it first-hand both in global organisations, where discrepancies festered under the scale and multiple layers of bureaucracy and in smaller, informal setups where the boss was the HR department and any deviation from the status quo could be slapped down with little recourse. Both situations played out slightly differently, though a unifying theme and motivation from my immediate superiors seemed to be exploiting my child-free status to keep me chained to the desk.

In the case of the global charity, it soon became apparent that a key part of my role was to offset the absences, late starts and early finishes of the two women managing the communication department on a part-time job share. I was there in the office, a consistent, sole presence of the four-strong team to appease the next layer of management and deal with any questions, emergencies and meetings intended for my managers. While this undoubtedly provided some peace of mind for those slipping away at 4pm to attend the school play, it was only made possible at my expense and an ever-expanding and elastic workload.

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Similar frustration emerged at the small business. An initially convivial atmosphere that can flourish fast within in a small, close-knit team soon evaporated when I queried why I my own request to work flexibly (one day from home a week) was denied, when the same arrangement had been granted to a colleague. The explanation given was she had children and lived some distance from the office, while I didn’t. A matter-of-fact response and reasoning I was expected to accept with little more exploration. Far from any awkwardness over the inconsistency, the focus fell entirely on my motives and intentions – because without needing to do the school pick-ups, the exact reasons for my request became a source of unfathomable mystery. I tried to explain that I thought flexible working would be better for my mental and physical wellbeing, but it had little bearing on the undercurrent of mistrust; the matter was closed, the debate impenetrable and the inequality and injustice grated. This was 2016.

To get some reprieve, I switched to a four-day week, while my time in the office was clouded by a souring atmosphere. In fact, the extent of my faux pas became clear in an email I wasn’t intended to see – an expletive heavy rant between the boss and his deputy, over my “demands”. My reasonable and legal request to work flexibly and clarification around the double standards, was reframed as a selfish audacity and a lack of understanding over my colleague’s need to work flexibly when all I had expected was the same courtesy.

There’s a myriad of issues that underpin this bias, but at its most stark, the overriding subtext is clear: without kids what life have you really got to balance? It’s betrayed by the casual remarks when I’d mention I was doing yoga or running after work, along the lines of “well, you’ve got the time for that haven’t you” – an indulgence their own busier domestic lives denied them.

New government proposals, making flexible working the default, brands the post-Covid climate, “the chance to seize the moment and make flexible working – in all its forms – part of business DNA”. Yet it’s not going quite as far as it could – rejecting the idea of replacing the current Right to Request flexible working with a “right to have”, which would remove the right of an employer to turn down a request. Instead, the aim is to “encourage a better discussion between employee and employer – rather than one side imposing certain ways of working on the other, or rejecting them”.

How fair and productive this will be, however, will still be largely determined by the attitude of whoever is calling the shots. In my experience regressive attitudes and mindsets are rarely malleable. Furthermore, one of the eight business reasons an employer can use to turn down a request can easily be manipulated to justify a refusal if there is an inherent resistance to the concept. Perhaps an empowered workforce that have experienced better and expect it to be sustained will be in no mood for undignified bartering anyway and take their talent elsewhere.