Family-Friendly Working: What a Performance! An Analysis of the Relationship Between the Availability of Family-Friendly Policies and Establishment Performance

This paper uses the Management and Employee Questionnaires from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to consider whether the performance of workplaces which offer a range of family-friendly policies are superior to that of workplaces without such practices. It is found that in almost all cases where there is a significant relationship between the use of a family-friendly practice and workplace performance, this relationship is positive. In addition, it appears that workplaces which offer an extensive range of family-friendly policies are much more likely to have above-average performance than those with no such practices. The paper moves on to consider whether employers offering policies which enable employees with families to maintain a full-time presence in the workplace e.g. a workplace nursery, have better performance than those which offer policies which result in reduced-visibility e.g. working from home, part-time work. The evidence from WERS98 suggests that this is indeed the case.