Guidelines - Towards a Corporate Culture of Care
Many companies have focused on how to enable women to combine work and family life. More and more companies now also recognize the importance of work-life balance for men. Are men and women being treated in the same way in your company? Are they met with the same expectations and the same opportunities?
Family friendly companies
Productivity has its limits and the personal satisfaction with life also significantly influences how employees perform their tasks. Therefore more and more companies promote themselves as family friendly companies. They recognize their employees not only as employees but also as individual with personal needs, as fathers or mothers, as friends etc.
Increase employee commitment
The introduction of work and family conciliation programs can create a new labour scene in which people feel motivated and supported, thus generating a group of employees who are productive and loyal. This in turn reduces absenteeism and increases the commitment of the personnel. Thus, what in principle could be perceived as a handicap for companies becomes a competitive advantage in the labour market. Research shows that many men strongly prefer to work for an employer who allows them to combine work and private life in a more sustainable way.
Men’s health
Family and private life are usually perceived as an opposition to work life and organisational goals. However, they are in fact closely interlinked. Men traditionally pay for their careers with work-life imbalance and high health risks. Individual burn-out and health problems are some of the consequences. Men as well as women wish to have a good work-life balance. However, self-care is still not very common among many men.
Concrete measures
These guidelines propose different measures that your company can implement in order to facilitate a good work-life balance for your employees.
The guidelines are divided into nine different categories. You will find the categories in the menu on the right hand side. In each category you will find a set of ideas for organisational measures and some examples of existing practices that we hope will be an inspiration for your development of measures.
Our suggestions are particularly aimed at men’s situation, but it is important to emphasise that all measures have to be open to both men and women and to employees on all levels of the organisation when you implement them in your company. It is also important that your company’s strategies in the work-life balance area follow national and European legislation on working environment, working hours and gender equality
Target group for the guidelines
The main target group for these guidelines is executives and personnel managers.
But they will also be of interest to union representatives, politicians and employees in general.
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.
