Men at work: making fatherhood functional

A week ago I launched the first in a series of articles examining working fatherhood.

That article, called ‘We need to talk about dads’, clearly struck a chord. Dads told me again and again: “no one has ever asked me about this.” But many of you have started the conversation now.?

This week, I delve deeper into how fatherhood plays out in the workplace.

What’s limited about this piece.

As a reminder: this is a partial picture.?

The men I've spoken to are senior leaders and middle management in fields such as the armed forces, consulting, engineering, law, recruitment, sales, tech. They are university educated professionals, married or in long-term partnerships, and had children of primary school age or younger. They’re primarily (but not exclusively) UK-based, and majority heterosexual.

This – clearly! – does not represent the totality of the fatherhood experience. But there is something really interesting happening for this group.?

What’s interesting about its limitations.

Whilst the prohibitive costs of childcare can mean that for families on lower incomes, it simply doesn’t make financial sense to spend your post-tax income on exorbitantly expensive childcare. (This hard financial reality plays out in paternity leave too. In the UK, only a third of dads take their statutory allowance of 2 weeks, small though it is – either because they aren’t eligible for it or can’t afford to take the hit on income). Then we have the other end of the spectrum. For the very highest earning families, only the most fulfilling work may make the hassle of managing a second role worthwhile.?

So it’s in the middle, where a dual-income model is often seen as necessary, often desirable, and also – let’s be honest – remotely achievable, that we see some of the most equitable models: the leading edge of working parenthood.?

And the frontier isn’t always an easy place to be.

The previous generation hasn't always updated its ideas of what's feasible, let alone desirable.

The archetype of ‘the Provider’ can be a punishing model for men: it is identity-limiting, and burdensome. It’s also increasingly unaffordable. Parents today are facing dramatic shifts in cost of living. Childcare costs in the UK are rising faster than inflation, and are already amongst the highest in the world.?

It’s natural that parents want to offer their children an equivalent standard of living to the one they themselves grew up with. The gap between their own expectations and reality is already painful enough.

What became clear when I spoke to dads is that there’s also a growing gap between employers' expectations and parents’ realities. Too many senior figures imagine there's a “little woman” at home (actual gender immaterial) to take care of the house and kids. They may envisage a level of paid childcare support (eg, live in nannies) that may be unaffordable for the wages they're paying.

One dad told me, “I think the senior guys genuinely expected me to have a night nanny.” For the uninitiated, that’s someone who arrives in the night and quietly handles all the baby’s nocturnal wake-ups, for the first 3 months’ of a child’s life. For 5 days a week this is charged at, say, ￡1500 a week – or a total of ￡18,000. (If you’re in the market, check out the likes of Maternally Yours.)??

“I didn’t want to do that, and I couldn’t afford it even if I did. And I’m on six figures.” Many of the interviewees reported dealing with senior leaders whose ideas of what was feasible, let alone desirable, were seriously out of date – “paying day-care wages for nanny service.” There are jobs, said one father, “that expect to be number one priority, but don’t pay accordingly.”

In the mean time, men are more conscious of their families’ financial security than ever. Since paternity leave beyond the statutory 2 weeks is not only discretionary, but something of a novelty, fathers are operating in a grey area. There might be a policy, or it might be up for negotiation. But either way, said one father, “if you piss people off you’re going nowhere. It’s not an abstract fear.”

Flagship paternity polices matter, but this can be out of step with attitudes from leadership.

Paid paternity leave reserved for fathers is undoubtedly the future. (And if you want to support steps towards this, you can get behind the campaign from Pregnant Then Screwed to move the UK statutory allowance up to 6 weeks on 90% pay). But despite attention-grabbing policies (and there’s a growing number of businesses that have introduced generous paid leave for fathers), attitudes sometimes remain unchanged, leading to fathers working while on leave or being overlooked for progression.?

This may explain why, some progressive corporates find that even when a competitive paternity package is offered, men don’t always take it, says Sarah Sternberg, of Movember.

Amongst the men I spoke to, some fathers had been asked to lead sales pitches when their baby was only a few days old. Others worked 1-2 days a week throughout their paternity leave. (The implicit assumption being that the father is ‘free’ during that time, and that someone else must be doing the care work).?

Occasionally attitudes were simply inhumane, such as when one dad reported, “they asked me to ‘just quickly take a look at a few things’ – code for several hours’ work,” right after learning that his baby had died in utero.?

It was hard for me to hear some of their stories without anger.?

But many of the dads I spoke to were philosophical:

“You have to remember that you’re asking for something they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing.”

Even with the very best policies for parental leave in place, “you’re dependent on their empathy.” And, he added, “your track record.”

?

Not all jobs are fatherhood friendly.

Not all jobs make it easy to be more than the ‘secondary parent’. The hours might be long (eg consulting, law) or the work might require stays away from home (armed forces, civil engineering projects) or the working pattern could be unpredictable or unsocial (see especially, doctors on the route to becoming an NHS hospital consultant - a? career trajectory spectacularly mistimed for when most start a family).?

The right outcome is a very personal trade-off. As a woman, advice I received before having kids included, “whatever you do, make sure you do a job you actually want to go back to. Or it just won’t be worth it.” And in my work as an executive coach, I certainly see the sadness that staying in a certain role just for the maternity package can produce – especially if a longed-for child doesn’t arrive as easily as hoped.?

It’s perhaps time that men began to receive the same advice. You might take the route of being the primary breadwinner, and accept a degree of “always on” working, or perhaps sacrifice progression for the sake of family life. But either way, “you need something in the personal column,” as one dad put it.

That’s not just work you enjoy doing, but that aligns with your values and of which you can feel justly proud. For the dads I spoke to, that might mean turning down life-changing salaries to work in tobacco or the major carbon emitters.

Hybrid and flexible working are non-negotiable.

Home-working has revolutionised fathers' ability to be a part of family life. The commute doesn't just represent 'dead hours' - they're dead hours smack in the middle of bath time, book, and bedtime.

It’s not that parents are trying to combine home-working with keeping half an eye on older children. (Trying to check a few emails or answer a call whilst parenting was regarded as bad for work, bad for the kids, and bad for dad.) Instead, hybrid and flexible work allows them to be fully present for the right task at the right moment.?

There was deep and widespread scepticism of strict ‘back to the office’ policies, and whilst men were often content to work evenings and weekends to get the job done, partial flexibility was non-negotiable.

“When I see headlines like, ‘JP Morgan wants everyone back 4 days a week’, I think, well, I won’t go to JP Morgan then.”

Men also took a dim view of the leaders who insisted on strict back-to-the-office policies. “It’s driven by fear”, said one. “They just don’t have the skills,” he said, to manage output (the work product) rather than input (time at a desk they can measure). Another said, “I ran a consulting project for a client who wanted to get more people back into the office. The conclusion was they’d massively overpaid for a very long lease at the wrong moment in time and were trying to rationalise their mistake to the board. It had nothing to do with modern working practices and effective management.”

Employers who refuse reasonable requests for hybrid and flexible working aren’t just seen as task-masters, they’re condemned as poor managers and, perhaps worse, bad strategists.

Making work, work

Recommendations for working dads.

1. Do work you actually like doing. If this feels self-serving, it can help to envisage the example you would wish to set for your own son or daughter. (Role-modelling is one of a number of ways that we can helpfully expand our definition of what ‘provision’ means to us.)
2. Consider fatherhood-friendly workplaces. (NB: this won’t be the right, or indeed, a viable choice, for all men. My next article will address this in more depth). The men I spoke to recommended workplaces with explicit policies on parental leave and pay (ideally equalised), and a supportive attitude from management to go with it (senior leaders making use of these policies themselves was a good sign). Offices in multiple locations around the country and the world, rather than a single centralised HQ, also made a difference: it meant that the company would already be embracing hybrid and flexible working by necessity. Sectors that made ready use of output measures (eg sales) also tended to be less hung up on specific schedules.

Recommendations for leaders

1. Support the introduction of paid parental leave that is reserved for fathers. Shared Parental Leave is a start, but reinforces an unhelpful ‘me or you’ dynamic for couples. Parents are seeking ‘and, not or’ solutions. Take a sanity check on whether asking a man who has a 2 week old baby at home to come back to the office is really about presenteeism, or productivity.
2. If you are a parent whose children have since grown up, grapple with your own discomfort about what you perhaps missed out on. What might you have wished for yourself??
3. Role model. Maybe it’s too late to take the leave, but do the pickup (for kids, or maybe it’s for mum after the op). Care unashamedly. Precedents were enormously valued by the fathers I spoke to.
4. If you possibly can, offer hybrid and flexible working.?
5. Manage by outputs, not inputs. It’s not only the more rational choice for management, it’s also the only course of action that will protect your reputation as a leader.

Hello! I'm Tamzin Foster. I'm an Executive Coach working with senior leaders. This includes, but is not limited to, working fathers.

I have more material than I ever expected on fatherhood. I’ll be sharing more on this subject over the coming month. If you're keen to read the next instalment and would like to know when I'm launching more, please follow me here.

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