Building Systematic Thinking for Creating Family-Friendly Workplaces

 On April 13, 2023, Timeline’s second workshop on “Creating Family-Friendly Workplaces” of the year was successfully held.

It is in less than two months that Timeline conducted a workshop of the same topic twice, only because this topic is extremely new, in line with the direction of national and local government policy guidelines issued in recent years, closely related to the majority of workers and their families, enterprises, and even the high-quality sustainable development of the entire society, attracting a high degree of attention from the industry.

Participants of this workshop included senior CSR/ESG managers from international brands and large trading companies, senior management from large industrial groups/supply chain companies, CSR/ESG and HR practitioners, as well as social organization staff. The workshop facilitated participants to have a clearer understanding of the policy guidelines and specific connotations related to family-friendly workplace, and to build up a systematic and framework understanding. In addition, Timeline also discussed and exchanged ideas with participants on concrete measures to create family-friendly workplaces in companies and how to connect this topic with previous work on gender equality, inclusion and diversity (DEI), worker well-being, workplace dialogue and cooperation.

l  Being family-friendly is conductive to business sustainability

After Timeline shared the relevant data and research findings, participants gained a better understanding of the policies and social background related to the topic of creating family-friendly workplaces, as well as a deeper understanding of the importance of this topic to companies, workers, brands, and even the society, especially contributing to solving the tender points of recruitment and retention that supply chain companies are particularly concerned about nowadays, and promoting the formation of good employee relations and sustainable development of companies, thus enhancing the stability and predictability of the supply chain.

l  Developing systematic working ideas to create family-friendly workplaces

The workshop showcased international conventions and domestic policies and guidelines related to “family friendly workplaces” and clarified some of the misconceptions of participants about “family friendly”. Based on this, Timeline focused on the topic of how to create family-friendly workplaces in companies, and facilitated the participants to gradually establish clearer and systematic working ideas, from policy formulation to specific activities, as well as the methodologies that can be applied when carrying out related work.

l  Being family friendly gives visibility to DEI and other related efforts

The brands and companies that took part in this workshop have been promoting “gender equality in the workplace”, “workplace dialogue and cooperation”, “inclusion and diversity” and “worker well-being”. The theme of this workshop, “Creating Family-Friendly Workplaces”, provides a new way of thinking for the participants, as it does not conflict with or duplicate the abovementioned work, but rather provides a concrete, actionable, and implementable entry point to link the abovementioned work and make it more visible.

At the end of the workshop, participants expressed what they would like to do for the next steps. The brands focused on promoting creating family-friendly workplaces within their own companies and to their supply chains; the industrial groups/supply chain companies paid attention to sorting out and reviewing their work and starting with concrete and actionable areas; the social organization hoped to establish group standards for “family-friendly workplaces” in the future.

Review of workshop highlights

All the participants actively interacted, asked questions, discussed and shared their thoughts during the workshop, which made the workshop a success. In particular, we would like to give special thanks to all the participants who made a special trip to Guangzhou to attend this workshop! We look forward to seeing you all go further and be fruitful on the topic of creating family-friendly workplaces!