On The Horizon – March 2025: News & Insight for Employers of Working Parents & Carers

The case for rising investment in benefits

A truly helpful account of the cultural value and talent engagement impact of family support was given by Tom Hill , HR Business Partner at Bright Horizons’ client Hill Dickinson LLP in a recent Personnel Today webinar, hosted by Rob Moss .

There is certainly a moment at play when slowing pay rises and high employee stress levels are causing leaders to turn again to benefits as a differentiator and talent retention tool. A third of UK employers plan to reduce pay uplifts in 2025 as a result of increased employment costs (particularly rising employer National Insurance), according to Towers Watson WTW National Insurance Pulse Survey. Lindsey Clayfield , senior director for work and reward at WTW has said: "reviewing benefit offerings and non-monetary rewards can help support employee needs, particularly for those that might be affected by below-inflation salary increases.”

Employees are surely in need of support. New research by MetLife UK revealed that “40% of employees feel burned out, with higher rates among women (47%) than men (31%)”. Further, “36% of employees reported balancing personal and professional responsibilities as a cause of anxiety.” According to Employee Benefits ' report, “MetLife’s research highlights that many employees take ‘sickies’ due to personal obligations, from childcare to medical appointments.” This very much backs up the findings in Bright Horizons UK recent Modern Families Index that employees are reporting high levels of stress and that they are likely to take time off sick due to work-life balance clashes including childcare. There is a strong case here for employers to provide access to the practical support needed, such as back-up care.

Towergate Employee Benefits ' survey of 500 HR decision makers further flags a need for support with caring. The survey found 31% of employers see an increased demand for mental health support. Other areas where employers think they will see an increased demand for support in the coming year include financial wellbeing (19%), general fitness (18%), male mental health (17%), and caring responsibilities (16%). Debra Clark , head of wellbeing at Towergate, has said: “While mental health may top the list of requirements, helping employees to deal with their financial and caring responsibilities, along with their physical fitness, will help too. Employees are being pulled in so many different directions, with a need to keep themselves, older relatives and younger dependants healthy and happy.”

Supporting the Return to Office

Employee Benefits Benefits carried a helpful piece on how employers can support the Return to Office (RTO). It includes urging employers to consider support with childcare. Among the suggested ways of empowering in-person working, it suggests: "While employers can offer financial wellbeing support such as commuting allowances, season ticket loans, and help with parking costs, they could also invest in and offer comprehensive benefits for child and elder care, in the form of a subsidy to hire care at home or external childcare, perhaps near the workplace. Caitlin Duffy, PhD , senior research director, employee experience, at Gartner has commented: “Employers could also help by offering pet day care on or off-site, dog walking, insurance, or by becoming a pet-friendly office.”

Meanwhile, LinkedIn is opening a new Experience Centre in London and to coincide with this, conducted a survey exploring hybrid working / RTO. The findings show most (nearly 4 in 5) workers are willing to attend in-person workplaces and see high value in collaboration in that way. However, they prefer to have some say in the 'when' and 'why' of it.

International Women’s Day – beyond ‘gesture politics’

Did you notice this year that the LinkedIn posts for #InternationalWomensDay had fewer people making the suggested gesture than in previous years? 2022 saw social media festooned with crossed hands for ‘Break the Bias’, 2023 held many of us in a slightly cringey self-hug for ‘Embrace Equity’ and 2024 made way for the ubiquitous hand heart to ‘Inspire Inclusion’. 2025 urged us to ‘Accelerate Action’, with plenty of posts on what’s needed but few instances of those proposed flexed biceps! After a flurry of different stances in recent years, have we now quite literally moved beyond ‘gesture politics’?

One highlight in the news was the progress in female representation at board level. Mary Walsh , representing the authors of the FTSE Women Leaders Review report, has said: "By sharing best practice and experience, and showcasing the policies and actions that move the dial on women in leadership, we can support organisations in their drive to achieve sustainable change". Better family support is well-established as playing a key role in the advancement of women (and hands-on parents of all genders) and closing the gender pay gap.

Women’s Day… is all about the dads

One of the resounding messages of International Women’s Day #IWD this year was the need to recognise and support dads, with extended and better paid paternity leave: a win-win for parents of all genders, for children, and for employers with the higher engagement that follows. The Fawcett Society was among those calling for better paternity leave as was Pregnant then Screwed.?

The Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) in the UK Parliament is holding an inquiry into ‘Equality at work: paternity and shared parental leave’. On 26th February, the Committee took evidence from both Joeli Brearley , Founder of Pregnant Then Screwed and Jemima Olchawski , Chief Executive at The Fawcett Society, as well as Alex Lloyd Hunter , Co-founder at The Dad Shift and Dr Sarah Forbes , Co-Director at The Equal Parenting Project. The consensus is that better supported leave for dads and partners benefits women as well as men by loosening traditional gender stereotypes and encouraging sharing the domestic load among other social goods.

However, Stella Creasy MP ’s proposed amendment to the #EmploymentRightsBill to force a consultation on fuller parental leave has not been considered among recent amendments to that Bill. Might we see further progress on gender-neutral leave by the time we reach International Men’s Day in November? Or perhaps the mid-way date of International Non-Binary People’s Day in July?

And talking of dads, it was a pleasure to contribute to Editor Benjamin Broomfield ’s engaging article in HR Grapevine, positioning England men’s football manager Thomas Tuchel as the ‘poster boy for flexible working’ given his ‘working from home’ over in Germany to spend time with his family.

The equal parental leave trend, a decade after Shared Parental Leave

Cecilia Crossley 's From Babies with Love , part of Uplifting People , published its 2025 Cutting Edge Family Policy guide exploring current practice in gender-inclusive parental leave, fertility and neonatal leave, pregnancy and baby loss leave, recognising returning to work and grandparents at work. The research showed “only 15% of people believe company support for working parents has kept up to date with society”. However, there is a growing cohort of employers now equalising leave with around 26 weeks fully paid, many Bright Horizons partners among them.

The launch event, hosted by 德勤 and sponsored by the The Insurance Families Network had a great panel discussion with Victoria Gallagher Brown , Mariama Conteh and Frances Hunter . This included much mention of the need for grandparents’ leave. This was hotly debated ten years ago when Shared Parental Leave (SPL) was launched in 2015. At the time the reason given for not extending SPL to grandparents was the concern that if birth mothers shared their leave with their own mothers, for example, this might bypass fathers altogether and defeat the aim of shared parenting.

There have been shifts and progress over the last decade and the trend now appears to be in the direction of new and separate leave (rather than shared) whether for partners or even grandparents. This year, Bright Horizons will again run our biennial Parental Leave and Family Support Benchmark, last published in 2023.

Michael (Mi?a) Klime? , investment banking and capital markets editor at The Banker , carried out thorough research into the generous parental leave policies in several leading banks ahead of International Women’s Day. He also asked the question whether taking up such policies is actually career-limiting in practice. Our response, captured in the article, is that senior role models play a part – seeing people of all genders attend to family life, and still succeed, is vital. The other aspect, not covered in the article, is that the juggle does not stop at parental leave: in fact it only begins. So ongoing family supports such as coaching, back-up care and employer-sponsored childcare play a decisive role, both in productivity itself and in expressing a family-inclusive culture.

Further honourable mentions

Apart from the several articles and events involving Bright Horizons above, it was very encouraging to find BH listed among the FT Top 500 UK employers, right alongside so many of the leading employer clients we partner with. The independent survey from a sample of about 20,000 employees was completely independent of any employer involvement and showed authentic employee ratings of these highly valued employers.

It was also a joy to have our colleague Daisy Newbery Assoc CIPD invited to take part in the Reward Gateway / Edenred event ‘Budgets, Benefits & The Bottom Line, describing what an ‘Employer of Choice’ looks like in 2025, based on Bright Horizons’ commitments to employee experience, captured in the phrase ‘You’re the Difference’. ?

First published 12th March 2025: On The Horizon – March 2025 | Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions