Is the pharmaceutical industry at risk of losing new dads at work?
The pharmaceutical industry is one that has arguably created more breakthrough feats of human endeavour than any other, but is it missing an important new breakthrough closer to home?
The modern day father
I run DaddiLife – a platform for modern day fatherhood and a community of over 150,000 modern day fathers. The reason I set it up was to create a space that reflected the enormous generational shift for modern day dads. Dads who are becoming more involved, more active, and becoming more of an equalised parent, banishing the stereotypes that dads are a secondary parent.
Recently we partnered with Deloitte to deliver The Millennial Dad at Work report – a research programme with over 2,000 working fathers aged 24-40 across every region of the UK to uncover the work/life balance issues affecting today's new generation of dads at work.
The results overall have been startling:
Only just over 1 in 2 dads believed they were treated equally to mothers when it came to their workplaces
Almost 2/3 (63%) have requested a form of flexibility at work since becoming a father, but the levels of flexibility being granted are very low by comparison.
1/3 of all fathers overall had left their job since becoming a father in order to find better parental balance at work.
Dads in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry
Looking into the data in more detail for dads in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry specifically an even more damning picture is emerging.
54% of all the dads in the pharmaceutical industry had requested a change in working hours since becoming a father, with 70% being successful. While 50% of the dads in biotech had also requested a change in work hours since becoming a father, and 59% successful. That is a fairly encouraging picture.
However, a somewhat less successful picture is the other areas of flexibility at work. Only 10% of the dads who had requested ‘working from home 1-2 days a week’ had been successful in the pharmaceutical space, and no one in the same industry had achieved approved compressed hours.
The picture for dads in biotech was a little different. Only just over one in five dads (21%) who had requested working from home one-two days a week had this approved, but a slightly more encouraging 10% of those dads requesting compressed hours had this granted.
Dads are voting with their feet
The consequences of the relative lack of flexibility for new age fathers is now starting to bare a significant talent retention problem:
While the national average of dads who have left their jobs since becoming a dad was 33%, this over indexes for dads in pharma, with 38% of dads in pharma having left their jobs since becoming a father in order to find better parental balance.
Actions ahead
What can organisations in pharma and biotech start to do to ensure they are keeping their very best talent here?
I believe there are three key areas to address:
1. Paternity Leave – more and more leading organisations are re-looking at their parental leave policies. Deloitte for instance recently doubled their paternity leave. But while the momentum around adjusting parental leave policies is gaining pace, the level of paternity pay still needs major consideration. For too many fathers looking into schemes like Shared Parental Leave, the level of pay means that most fathers are compensated at only statutory levels after a few weeks of that leave. Until we can equalise this area, the take up will continue to be limited to those who can afford the significant financial hit.
2. Compressed hours – it is an incredible statistic that in over 2,000 surveyed dads, we could not find one working in the pharmaceutical industry who had compressed hours accepted. There may be certain job conditions that make this harder, but with new technology and more mobility in modern day work teams as a whole, is this a wider industry problem that needs solving?
3. Line management – policies are only as good as how they are lived in practice, and training for line managers around the role that new dads want to have is essential in breaking any hidden silences.
Bio: Han-Son Lee is the founder of DaddiLife - a platform for modern day fatherhood and a community of over 140,000 dads. He is an avid campaigner of flexibility in the workplace for dads and led the research programme into the "Millennial Dad at Work."