The benefits of an emotionally healthy workforce are widely recognised: When employees have good social and emotional functioning and wellbeing, it supports performance, productivity, staff retention and team dynamics. Skills like collaboration are seen as key to success in many modern industries.
PEDAL’s new report, written for The Centre for Emotional Health, suggests that emotionally healthy workplaces might have longer-term benefits too, helping to shape the emotional health of the future workforce. Our report suggests that when employers support the emotional health of parents in the workforce, this can support their capacity to provide nurturing and stimulating care which supports their children’s developing emotional health.
There is clear scientific evidence that parents’ wellbeing, behaviours and interactions with their children play a critical role in children’s development – particularly in early childhood. Positive interactions with parents during this period can support children’s social and emotional development. And because this period lays the foundation for lifelong health and happiness, getting it right in early childhood makes it more likely that children will be emotionally healthy throughout life.
This is an issue that employers need to take seriously: It has been estimated that improvements in early childhood development would lead to £27.5bn in additional earning for the UK workforce and £11.8bn additional profits for businesses.
Our review of the literature found little research into the impact of employers’ practices on parents’ emotional health, parenting or family wellbeing. In the absence of research, PEDAL created theoretical models describing how we believed employment practices in some workplaces could impact parents’ emotional health, with knock-on impacts on their parenting skills and behaviours, and their children’s development. For example, LEGO’s playful working practices may help parents to be more playful at home, and Ella’s Kitchen’s focus on employee wellbeing might help parents to provide more emotionally stable environments for children.
With around 4.69 million working parents of children under five in the UK, our report calls for more attention to be paid to how employers support the emotional health of parents in their workforce. It points out that creating emotionally healthy workplaces is not about “yoga sessions or wellbeing hours” but about the habits and structures that create genuinely emotionally healthy environments.
There is a need to develop the evidence base to help employers to make informed decisions about practices which could have a positive impact on their employees, and their families and communities for decades to come.
How can emotionally healthy workplaces support emotionally healthy families?
Read the full report here
