There are ways you can promote the important role of fathers/father figures in your workplace to help normalise fathers making time for their families and taking on caring responsibilities. This will also encourage work/life balance among your colleagues, which has been found to increase work productivity.
There still remains some stigma around fathers taking on the caring role. When staff and workplaces encourage and promote father involvement from birth, it has significant impacts across the board. From gender equality in the workplace, reduces work-family conflict and most importantly, positively impacts child development and wellbeing.
Top Tips
- Show leadership about the importance of fathering in your workplace.
- Build a network of parenting allies at work. This helps fathers on two levels: Support and advocacy.
- Support men who make decisions to be with their family instead of prioritising their work.
- Encourage good fathering amongst your colleagues and be a role model.
- Make work father-friendly. This not only supports fathers to be more involved, but promotes gender equality and positively impacts child wellbeing.
- Schedule one change per week in your work environment to encourage good parenting.
“I think being a father is really helpful to my work. It has made me more sensitive to the needs of my staff and how they relate to their own families. My work has helped me to be able to give advice to people about the balance they achieve between their work and their home life. If I weren’t a father I wouldn’t be able to give that advice.” – Warren Reynolds, businessman and aerobatics pilot.
“Fathering has helped my work a lot. I think it has made me more patient (you can’t try to apply logic to a two-year-old and lose patience when they can’t follow your line of reasoning). Also, I have learnt to communicate at someone else’s level. In the workplace it is really important to communicate at different levels, and kids can teach you that.” – Daniel Petre, entrepreneur and philanthropist.
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