Work-life balance is now a crucial issue in our existence, it reflects a growing awareness of the
importance of balancing professional commitments with personal life.
From the latest report carried out by Censis, it emerges that for 62.7% of Italians, work is not the main concern in life.
And indeed, 80% of Italian workers have expressed their
disappointment about the sacrifice of personal interests that work has entailed in the past, to the detriment of their well-being.
A reversal of trend, which lowers the sacredness of work and which is also associated with another global trend, the phenomenon of the Great Resignation, the Great Resignations, which took hold especially after the Covid pandemic.
An important sub-topic that is discussed is the well-being of employees, especially among the youngest but also among workers with children.
Recent research published in People Management highlighted that 46% of parents have left their jobs in the last year or are seriously considering resigning.
In particular, 40% of those interviewed have come to think of leaving their job because they find it difficult to balance their work and family commitments, with a greater propensity among the youngest, aged between 25 and 34 (45%), and mothers (46%).
A figure also confirmed in Italy, where, according to what the Labor Inspectorate reports, as many as 61,391 resignations of fathers and mothers were validated in 2022 (+17.1% compared to the previous year).
Most of these were resigned within the first three years of the birth of their children and mostly by young people between the ages of 29 and 44 (79.4%) and women (72.8%), attributing the cause to an increasingly accentuated difficulty in reconciling work and private life (63%).
Furthermore, those who leave their jobs are mainly workers who are expecting their first child or who have only one child.
How to have a satisfactory work-life balance, especially for parents?
How to have a satisfactory work-life balance, especially for parents?
“The data underlines the importance of effectively addressing the challenges related to parenting in the workplace, promoting more inclusive and family-friendly corporate policies and cultures", comments Debora Moretti, Co-CEO of Zeta Service who announces as a measure the opening of a desk dedicated to parenting: it is called "Parenting Help Desk" and intends to support parents by giving them answers on bureaucratic aspects. From a survey "Maternity, Bureaucracy and Times", which mostly involved new mothers or future mothers, it emerged in the company that over half of the women found it difficult to understand the bureaucratic steps to follow for example for requesting a bonus, submitting documentation, compulsory/optional leave. In particular, 9 out of 10 women would have liked to receive more information both on the part of the institutions, which often offer difficult or non-exhaustive information through the websites of the relevant bodies (40% in fact require greater clarity), and on the part of the companies.
When I was about to become a mother, I realised, both firsthand and through comparisons with other mothers and fathers, that the bureaucracy relating to parenting was truly a labyrinth from which it was difficult to escape with certain answers.
Hence the idea of the Desk providing a trial period to encourage its use”, she adds.
“We envisage 100% smart working in the last months of pregnancy, for mothers, and a month of 100% smart working, for fathers, in addition to the extension of paternity leave to 20 days.
These initiatives, in my opinion - she underlines - represent indispensable choices for businesses, whether small or large, since, by adopting parenting support policies, we improve the way in which people experience the company and carry out their goals ".
What can a company do to support parent employees?
“The key words are flexibility and closeness: the company must be truly interested in understanding the needs of its people, looking at them and listening to them as a whole, in order to introduce benefits that can promote a better work-life balance and have greater flexibility , although it is complicated to introduce this change of mentality in our country", concludes Moretti.
In fact, it is enough to think that in Italy only 12.2% of employed people work remotely, despite the fact that for more than 8 out of 10 workers smart working allows them to better reconcile family, private life and work, as reported by the VI Censis-Eudaimon Report on welfare corporate.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA