How bosses can ease the summer holiday load

Aproposal to shorten the school summer holidays to ease the burden on parents is just one small Band-Aid on a festering gravel burn. National MP Nicola Willis is proposing a member’s bill to shorten the summer break by a week or two. It is simple maths. School students get about 12 weeks of holidays. Their working parents and caregivers get about four weeks’ leave.

This means that, over the summer, a lot of us are madly juggling, and for those who are parenting alone, on low incomes or with no family to call on, the juggling can be extreme.

Take the time my kids managed to get chickenpox one after the other. We used up all of our sick leave and then some annual leave on calamine lotion duty. The stress of covering the subsequent holidays that year is still etched in my mind.

Regardless of whether or not the teacher unions or the Government support shortening the summer holidays, the maths shows that even cutting them by two weeks will not solve the problem.

By sending the kids back to school earlier, we are looking for a solution in the wrong place. The right place to look is the workplace.

That is because, increasingly, companies are learning the value of offering flexible work for their employees.

Late last year, Perpetual Guardian formalised its trial of paying staff for five days but requiring them to work four.

We often think of flexible work arrangements as a perk for employees, especially women, but the value for employers is equally clear.

Supporting employees to manage their lives and giving them more control over their work has multiple benefits. A more flexible work environment would have meant less absenteeism for us.

Studies show absences decrease, particularly for those with caring responsibilities, when flexibility is available. And engagement increases.

Not surprisingly, employees working, within reason, how and where they want to are likely to be more productive, demonstrate more ‘‘discretionary behaviour’’ (that is, willing to go the extra mile), and are less likely to resign.

Famously the Virgin Group sees its flexible work arrangements as a key differential when recruiting. Sir Richard Branson trumpets its benefits. Its unlimited leave policy is seen as a way to attract the best talent.

Offering flexible work arrangements also reduces costs. The Ministry of Education is purported to have designed its new building based on a reduced footprint and hot-desking model that assumes a percentage of its staff will be working somewhere else each day.

Over the summer school holidays, working parents have to be incredibly creative. I realise how lucky I am because I earned a decent income. School holiday solutions are usually expensive.

When my children made the inevitable claim that they were too old for school holiday programmes, despite being too young to be home alone, my creativity and organising went to a whole new level trying to ensure they were cared for while I could still do an honest day’s work.

For those last few weeks of the holidays, we working parents will try to work from home if we’re allowed, split the working day with our partners and friends, or compress our working weeks, doing longer hours over fewer days.

These are all smart ideas for January. But how about we be even smarter and try this approach all year?

It would be a win-win to make parenting less angst-ridden, the workplace more enjoyable, and have substantial benefits to the bottom line.

Jo Cribb co-authored the book Don’t Worry About the Robots: How to Survive and Thrive in the New World of Work. She supports individuals and organisations to embrace the future of work.