Management
Care mentoring
A mentoring system could be implemented in the organisation for the purpose of (self) care and work-life balance. Executives (as well as others) are asked to choose one person they trust as their “care mentor”. This person is available for personal support and will occasionally inquire about his well-being.
Discuss work-life balance
How to balance work and family life should be a regular topic in meetings and seminars for executives and people in the human relations field.
Meetings timetable regulation
This measure consists in the regulation of the meetings timetable, with special emphasis on avoiding meetings before or after the company's regular working hours.
Personal Leader Training and Coaching
It is important that executives are skilled in work-life balance issues and know the potential difficulties in achieving it within the company's framework. Training or coaching can provide executives with conscious strategies to influence employees’ patterns and choices in this area through structural and cultural measures in the company. This topic should also be included in regular leader training.
The role of top management
Activities on work-life balance issues must be anchored in the top management.
Sanitas
The Spanish health insurance company Sanitas forbids executive meetings in the afternoon. All meetings take place in the morning. In a Spanish context this prevents meetings in the evening and enables executives to work shorter days.
Microsoft
As part of Microsoft Norway’s Daddy Package male executives are encouraged to take 6 months parental leave. Many executives do this. This sends a signal to the employees that it is accepted within the company to take long parental leave also for men and that they will not be punished careerwise for doing so.
FOCUS
The project Fostering Caring Masculinities is an EU-sponsored project with five partners; Germany, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain. The project has aimed to examine and improve men’s opportunities for balancing work and private/family life in order to encourage the preparedness of men to take over caring tasks. To reach this goal the project has focused on companies' framework conditions to perceive and include men as actors and target groups in equality policies.
Each partner has carried out studies in two different companies, one private and one public. The guidelines presented here are based on these work place studies and examples of existing practices from other companies.
Fostering Caring Masculinities
