Most people want better from their employers when it comes to support around family life. They want an employer that recognises their present family circumstances and is alive to those circumstances changing in the future. They want an employer that offers a working environment that supports families to thrive sustainably over the long term.

Those are the central findings of new research from charity FASTN. It polled 3,000 UK respondents who have been in their job for at least a year and asked them about how their families have changed, how supportive employers had been and what they would hope for from a future employer.

The survey explored how respondents, who worked for a broad range of employers across public and private sectors and had diverse family structures and situations, viewed their employers as supporters of family sustainability.

Did employers recognise just how quickly family circumstances change? Did they respond positively or could they have done more to help their employees as they navigated the emotional and practical ups and downs of bereavements, births, marriages, separations? What would they look for from a future employer?

Over 70 per cent of respondents said that their family situation had changed whilst in their current employment – one in three (32 per cent) said it had changed a lot. The figure was even higher for younger people aged 16-24. Four in every five young people (82 per cent) said that their family situation had changed whilst in their current employment.

As might be expected, there were significant differentials across job levels with those respondents in higher and more secure positions reporting that their employers were more likely to support their families to thrive. 

Most people wanted better. Over two thirds of all respondents (69 per cent) said that an employer’s track record on supporting families to thrive would be important to them if they were to look for future work. That increased to 76 per cent of single parent employees.

In short, for most people the workplace is free of family understanding and the pressures that life brings to bear.

How can we make sense of these findings?

One way is to view the issue through the lens of ‘sustainability’. We tend to think of this as an environmental viewpoint. It is defined by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development as something ‘that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

It is a concept that is being applied more widely, for instance being incorporated into some larger companies social responsibility and good governance programmes. ‘Sustainability’ thought about in these contexts can help companies think beyond the immediate return to shareholders and consider how to protect its stakeholders’ interests in the longer term.

When those stakeholders include – as they always should – the company’s employees, it becomes possible to suggest that employers have a bigger role in supporting employee families to thrive than a begrudging nod to work-life balance and subsidised childcare.

Family realities are fluid and changeable and lead to ever changing definitions of what makes a family, yet the term remains core to political rhetoric and policy. Its fluidity is its strength as a concept while the positive lived reality of family is a set of relationships that can see us through the best and toughest of times, helping us to thrive individually but also offering community coherence and stability.

The tension between the fluidity of the concept and the stability of the lived reality can be bridged by the use of sustainability in thinking through the consequences of actions in the here and now that impact on the future.

Sustainability acknowledges that the context for families is dynamic, and focuses attention on the primacy of life outcomes, particularly for children. 

Neuroscience, psychology, education and social work evidences strong correlations between family practices that provide secure, dependable and nurturing family environments in the present, brain development and the future life outcomes of family members. 

Employment practices can support or undermine employees in creating, sustaining and deploying those healthy, dependable relationships and in doing so have a profound impact on whether families and communities thrive or wither. 

Families are diverse and while some employers may offer limited consideration to immediate family responsibilities around things like childcare, there is little evidence that it is a general part of employer culture to consider families undergoing the significant changes experienced by the majority of people they employ.

For too many companies, the ‘ideal worker’ is one able to avoid family incursions into the workplace.

In recognising only a narrow subset of family experience, employers cannot appreciate the realities and complexities facing employees, in some cases leading to significant impacts on the sustainability of their families and wider society.

For employers to meaningfully support the sustainability of contemporary families, these assumptions about the ‘ideal worker’ must be overcome., This is because the notion permeates workplace policies and practices and dictates manager behaviours definitions of performance, pay and prospects.

Whether the employer chooses to listen and accept partnership with family, depends on an understanding of family realities and cultural acceptance of some responsibility for this key relationship and for good corporate citizenship towards families

Of course, government can and should provide a legal and policy framework which encourages employers to do the right thing.

The Department for Work and Pension’s 2014 Family Test introduced a framework for policy makers to assess the potential impact of their practices on families of different structures and experiencing different family situations from family formation to transitions and separation. 

The test offers departmental policy makers a simple framework through which to assess the impact of policy on families of whatever kind going through changing circumstances.

The Family Test should be applied systematically across government and it should be extended to employers as part of what will be decades-long government intervention in the post-pandemic economic recovery.

In this way, a sustainable economic recovery will be accompanied by policies that help families sustain and thrive.