University students promote family-friendly workplace

University students are promoting the concept of family-friendly measures in the workplace, inspired by a survey which shows that 44.8 per cent of inactive women are willing to work given the right conditions.

The aim of their campaign is to encourage employers to introduce more family-friendly measures, such as the options of flexi-time and telework to address these women's needs.

The idea is to drive home the business benefits and win-win solutions of family-friendly measures. Employers can benefit by extending the organisation's hours of service, saving office space and overheads, reducing employee absenteeism and stress, and retaining qualified members of staff. For employees the benefits include a better work-life balance and reduced stress levels.

The campaign, launched by final year students reading for a degree in Communication Studies as part of a credit, is being managed in collaboration with the Employment and Training Corporation's Gender Equality Unit.

The students conducted a series of interviews with four enterprises that have introduced family-friendly measures, namely Pricewaterhouse Coopers, KPMG, the Malta Tourism Authority and Orienta.

These interviews will be published in the coming weeks in the hope that they will serve as role models to other organisations.

Sue Zrinzo, a student who yesterday delivered a presentation on the subject, said the need to promote these measures originated in 2003 when the ETC carried out research on women's aspirations and work.

This study, conducted among a sample of 820 inactive women from over 100,000, was quite an eye-opener. Anna Borg, head of the ETC's unit, said the majority, 71 per cent, had been employed before with 49 per cent having held a job as a machine operator or assembler, 19 per cent a clerical job, 16 per cent had been involved in services and sales and nine per cent in elementary jobs.

The 50.9 per cent of women who were not willing to return to the working world had numerous reasons for their decision, from the fact they were now older, had more children, had older children or had a low educational attainment.

Meanwhile, those willing to work clearly pointed out that they would not do so under standard working conditions, such as a 40-hour week, which offered little or no flexibility.

These women strongly believed that it had to be worth their while to seek employment and notwithstanding their desire to work, they still put a lot of value on caring for the young and elderly.

Family-friendly hours were a top priority for the cohort aged between 25 and 44 years, while 42.9 per cent of those aged 35-44 were keen to ensure their partner's tax did not increase.

Brenda Murphy, a lecturer and course coordinator, spoke of the importance for the university to collaborate with industry, saying that this campaign was one way of achieving this.

The campaign will close with a workshop at the Foundation for Human Resource Development where human resources managers who took part will address other employers about their positive experiences.