Give parents at work a passport to help them work flexibly

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/09/passports-for-parents-at-work

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It's an unwritten rule of the workplace that we drop other roles when we walk through the door. The modern workplace may be so relaxed that we don't have to wear a suit any more, but we're not mums, dads, bikers, comedians or poets or whatever we do in our spare time.

It's quite possible to forget your hobbies, but not those ever-present responsibilities and implications of parenthood, and despite all the policy advances in recent years, the traditions and culture of work haven't really changed. In that respect, we're still pretty much stuck in the 1950s, where women become mums and men focus on their career.

If any of the current and planned legislation on parental leave is going to have the desired effect – supporting families under strain and helping more people stay in work – then what's needed is more recognition and awareness that parents are different. Something with visibility that can be less easily bypassed and played down than a discretionary policy. Parent passports would be a step forward.

As voluntary documents made accessible to human resources departments and line managers, the passports could hold relevant information provided by employees who have, or are expecting, children. The passports would be gender-specific to make fathers visible and to avoid assumptions that the term "parenthood" applies only to women. The passport could allow, for example, the provision of reciprocal cover arrangements in the event of regular childcare needs or emergencies. No need to constantly explain your personal situation to different managers or renegotiate practices, it's all there on the table.

The idea is backed up by our research with Working Families into the problems faced by fathers at work. While work-family policies are intended to be gender neutral, many are still (perhaps inadvertently) developed and written to be used in conjunction with ideas of motherhood, based on the prevailing cultural assumptions that women will relegate themselves to the status of dependent second income earners or non-earners.

British fathers, especially those white-collar middle class men who you would expect to be best placed to take advantage of flexible working, are reported to show greater degrees of inflexible presenteeism and work longer hours than their peers. Paternal presenteeism is even worse as these fathers tend to work more intensely at this point than any other in their careers. And despite all the evidence, mothers are still often unfairly associated with unreliability, unpredictability, irrationality and poor health; while men are assumed by employers to be healthy, rational, reliable and highly committed.

In our conversations with working fathers we found they are well aware of the company policies and offerings, but feel it's a mistake to use them. Having an unsupportive manager was a near insurmountable obstacle to requesting a more flexible working life. They don't want to rock the boat, just in case. If they do make requests for flexibility then senior managers are very capable of either finding ways to block the change happening in practice, or agreeing in principle and resisting the practice.

Parent passports would start to redress this "invisibility" among working fathers and help genuine work-life balance to be introduced. Everyone seems to agree on the usefulness of flexibility to modern living, but letting go of those last strings of attachment to presenteeism, the remnants of old-school attitudes to what's done, is proving very difficult.

This kind of scheme could well be divisive. Parents who jump up waving their passport whenever times get tough are never going to be popular. But the fact is that no one is winning in the current, ossified set of arrangements. Stressed parents make poor workers. Stressed parent bosses, in particular, can make the worst managers. Only by making parent roles visible and part of an ongoing conversation about how people work best will we ever get closer to a practical, maybe even enjoyable, compromise.