By Ros Bragg, Director
Maternity Action’s new toolkit for employers provides clear, accessible, free guidance on managing pregnancy, maternity and parental leave in the workplace. Aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, the toolkit consists of checklists, model policies and concise information on key questions. The toolkit is focused on communicating the legal framework, outlining precisely what employers are required to do. Our aim is to give employers the information they need at the time they need it, reducing the time demands on employers and reassuring them that they are meeting all their legal obligations.
We are delighted to be working closely with the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter to promote the toolkit. The Good Employment Charter’s inaugural Good Employment Week was an excellent opportunity to hold a roundtable bringing together local employers with an interest in supporting parents at work. Hosted by Acas North West, the roundtable brought together micro, smaller and medium-sized employers and heard examples of very good practice in supporting mothers at work.
In developing the toolkit, we drew on our experience of preparing resources for small and medium-sized employers in 2005 and 2016, in projects commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. We also drew on our work with Acas in 2013 on their guidance, Accommodating Breastfeeding on return to work.
In our first project, we spoke with nine employers to identify questions that an employer resource should address and to identify common areas of misunderstanding. We then road-tested the resource with 14 employers from across England, Scotland and Wales.
Employers told us that the information on the web which targets them is often inaccurate or out of date. There are several statutory bodies responsible for different aspects of managing pregnancy at work, creating challenges in finding the full breadth of information needed. Employers often found it difficult to get an answer to their specific query, as this might be included in longer publications. We also found that employers often didn’t know what questions to ask, so didn’t know how to find the information they needed. Employers also commented on the amount of time needed to track down information.
In 2016, we engaged with 20 employers and were disappointed to hear many of the same concerns. Our 2013 work with Acas on breastfeeding guidance also brought home the importance of distinguishing legal obligations from good practice recommendations and health guidance.
We are treating our new employer toolkit as a work in progress. Feedback from employers using the website is welcome and we will regularly add or revise material in response to emerging needs. Our in-house legal team will keep the resource scrupulously up to date with changes in the law. If you’d like to tell us your thoughts on using the toolkit, please get in touch at feedback@maternityaction.org.uk.
Our work on the employer toolkit was funded through the VCSE Health and Wellbeing Fund, part of a partnership programme between Department of Health & Social Care, NHS England and UK Health Security Agency.