How parents have been balancing work and childcare during the coronavirus pandemic

Almost four in 10 parents have worked outside normal business hours in recent months due to having to care for their children, who have been at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. That's according to LinkedIn's latest Workforce Confidence Index, which also shows that 20% of parents have cut their normal working hours in order to provide childcare.

During the coronavirus crisis, the largest proportion of parents shared childcare duties with another adult in their household. However, men were twice as likely as women to manage childcare in this way. Almost a third (32%) of women provided childcare full-time, compared to 19% of men. 

When asked about the biggest challenges relating to childcare during coronavirus, the most common answer was being unable to focus on work responsibilities, with 50% of women and 48% of men saying this was an issue. Half of men said balancing childcare with a partner was a challenge, compared with 25% of women, and around a third of all parents said having to work late to make up hours was a problem. Here are some of the other challenges reported by those we surveyed and the percentage of respondents who experienced them:

• Caring for my child(ren) by myself: 20% (women: 27%, men: 15%) 
• Lacking government support for childcare provision: 12% (women: 14%, men: 9%)
• Coordinating childcare each week: 11% (women: 7%, men: 13%)
• Lacking employer support for flexible or work-shifted hours: 5% (women: 7%, men: 3%)

The personal impact of coronavirus

More than half (54%) of the UK professionals we surveyed said they had experienced increased stress or anxiety due to coronavirus. Some 33% said they had experienced financial instability due to the virus. Other ways in which coronavirus has impacted professionals are as follows:

• Spending more time engaged in social isolation: 59%
• Working remotely or at home: 58%
• Caring for child(ren) who are home due to coronavirus: 21%
• Applying for, receiving or expecting assistance from the government: 16%
• Caring for others who have fallen ill due to coronavirus: 6%

Some 6% of respondents said they had experienced none of the above, while 2% said they'd prefer not to answer.

Levels of professional confidence

Every month we ask members how confident they are feeling about their ability to get or hold onto a job, their ability to improve their financial situation and their career prospects. The result is a score on our Workforce Confidence Index, which ranges from -100 to +100. This time round, the score is 14, which is a two-point decrease from last month's score of 16. If we break the score down by gender we can see that the number was 19 for the men we surveyed, but 10 for the women.

We can also see which industries are feeling most and least confident right now. While the majority of industries have seen confidence levels fall slightly since the last edition of the WCI, there are some notable exceptions in the latest data. Finance professionals’ confidence has risen, taking the industry  to the top of the ranking, while retail workers have also grown in confidence, potentially due to the sector having been open for several weeks.

Construction has fallen down the confidence index, from one of the more confident industries in previous reports to now sit in the lower half with an overall score of 12. 

Some of the least confident industries are also in areas of the economy that remain particularly affected by coronavirus restrictions, including recreation and travel (scoring 11) and entertainment, which has the least confident workers in the UK.

If you have been balancing work and childcare, how has it been for you? Do any of the other findings in this month's Workforce Confidence Index resonate with you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below and subscribe to this newsletter to receive a notification when the next edition of the Workforce Confidence Index is published. 

Methodology:

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey that is distributed to members via email every two weeks. More than 1,500 members from the UK respond in each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we’re able to get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyse data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership and overall market population are not accounted for. Confidence index scores are calculated by assigning each respondent a score (-100, -50, 0, 50, 100) based on how much they agree or disagree with each of three statements, and then finding the composite average score across all statements.

Siobhan Morrin from the LinkedIn News UK team and Neil Basu and Artem Chelovechkov from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.