I came across an article recently where a parent/Mum spoke about her constant juggle with her home and work life balance. It got me thinking about my own work/life juggle. If you would like to check out the article written by Tania Tirraoro please check it out here at Special Needs Jungle.

I’m not going to lie, I wanted a career! It was important to me, it was one of my life goals. Happy and content mum means equally happy and satisfied children! I wanted it all… excellent career while juggling childcare and home life. For the most part, it worked, after having my eldest (11) I had no choice but to return to full-time work. Unfortunately, mortgages don’t pay themselves! I was lucky my Mum worked afternoons, so she had my daughter all day on a Monday and every morning. It was a life saver, as my employer was far from flexible. Childcare was one of our most substantial expenses and even with my mum’s help, it was still over £800 a month!

For three years, I worked up the career ladder, moved companies and continued to juggle family life. After having my son (8) things were going to be very different, he was born with Strep B and developed meningitis at three days old, please see my other post ‘My Son was Born with Strep B’.

Suddenly I had a baby that needed physio, occupational therapy, consultants, tests, scans, hospital appointments and needs beyond an average child. I was ever hopeful that my employer would understand my need to work part-time, it wasn’t your average circumstances. I didn’t return to my old job, it was no longer suitable and for a year I muddle along. I quickly realised how I saw flexible working, wasn’t how my employer did. I was continually taking holiday to attend appointments, having unpaid leave because nursery called as he had a temperature and the push came when I had to cancel three of his appointments. Appointments that once cancelled take three months to get booked in. I was having an emotional week, I walked into work and almost instantly nursery called and he’d been sick (he had reflux). I felt guilty for not giving work my 100% attention and I felt more guilty that my son’s needs were now suffering. He wasn’t doing well at nursery, he was struggling with his development and I went home that afternoon and wrote my resignation letter. The relief I felt was one of the best feelings. I never wanted to leave, but it wasn’t about me. Thomas needed his Mummy and nursery wasn’t going to fill the hole.

It was a decision that I have never regretted. It gave me time with Thomas to attend his appointments, plan for his future and spend the time that I just wasn’t getting while I worked. I worked part-time for a hotel, working a couple of evenings around my husband. It worked for us at the time.

Call me naive, but at this point, Thomas was still a toddler and developing averagely on time if not a little behind. He attended nursery two days a week, as I felt he still needed the social side of it and secretly I was hoping that once he was settled, I could get a part-time job and give up the evenings! Having taken the financial drop in pay, reducing the nursery costs, we lost most of our child tax credits. We muddled on for a few months until I cut nursery down to one day a week, it was pointless, but still, I wanted him to be like his sister and learn from others.

It just didn’t work, so I resided to the fact that it was best to remove him altogether. Fast forward two years, I thought the answer was return to education and get a ‘proper’ degree. He was young, at a nursery and it would work around it and for the most part it did but suddenly he wasn’t hitting his milestones, nursery kept calling me asking me to collect him for various reasons and then the file straw, I was two days late paying an invoice due to them undercharging, and they told me that they felt it best that he left.

I guess back then, I still had this idealistic view that I wanted him to have a healthy life. Like most parents with special needs children, we want what is best for them and them to feel included. My dreams of a mainstream school were quickly fading when his epilepsy was diagnosed. He attended a special needs nursery, who were terrific!

Six years on, I was still working evenings having struggled to find a part-time job that contained the flexibility of hospitality. Degree under my belt, but for what it’s worth it hasn’t advantaged my career, but it made me feel better.

How it Works for Us…

Three years ago, during my degree my husband came home from work one evening, told me he couldn’t do it anymore. We’d had a tough night with Thomas, neither of us slept well, and it made a decision we’d been struggling to make more comfortable. He would give up full-time work, become Thomas’ full-time carer and I’d continue my degree. He now works part-time from home, around Thomas’ school drop-offs and pickups.

I tried last year to return to full-time work, financially one of us needs to work full time. It wasn’t, however, that easy. I wanted something locally so I could be at home within 15 minutes, but it was impossible. Most of the commutes were at least 30-40 minutes each way and as a family, it would never work. I realised very quickly that part-time hours would be our only option,

Our biggest struggle is the school holidays, we have one or two decent child care providers in our area who can caterer for disabled children and as you can imagine they fill up quickly and limit the sessions that a child can attend. Unfortunately, we don’t have parents who are able to offer their services for a variety of reasons we rely on school, holiday clubs and a playscheme one or two a month on a Saturday. We are still lucky in that respect, but I do panic with all the government’s budget cuts concerning disabled funding that within a few years they will be closed.

I like to call these types of posts ‘the get to know me’. No real reason but to share a little bit about our lives and our world. Do you struggle with work/life balance? Have you had to make changes to your working life to adapt to the balance? Please share your own stories or blog posts below.

Thanks for reading…

I’m now officially in my mid to late ’30s. I was struck to realise that I have been left school for 20 years this year! I was born in the ’80s but grew up in the ’90s. My parents divorced in the part of the ’90s which saw my ‘homemaker’ Mum suddenly find herself a single parent, with bills, two children under 10 and no income.

Bless my Mum, she’d left school at a time when secondary moderns were at the forefront of education and she left school with no qualifications. If you wanted flexible hours around school childcare (before the likes of after-school clubs), you worked in retail, care or cleaning. My mum dabbled in all three pretty much most of my childhood.

I grew up knowing that when it came to having my own family, I would have an education, work experience and career. I wanted to be able to offer my own family yearly holidays, weekends by the sea and days out.

At the time of having my daughter in 2007, the rules concerning maternity leave, pay and rights were shifting. You could have a year off, nine months of ordinary leave and three months additional leave. It caused a lot of confusion at the time. Lots of my family members telling me that I had to return to work or ‘pay back my maternity pay’. But more parents were using child care, both parents were working and flexible working hours was something you could ‘apply for’.

It was new to so many employers that the lines were blurring between what was required and what wasn’t. It caused a lot of confusion, myself included. I spent my maternity leave being underpaid due to an administration error. My HR manager at the time had to search the internet for my rights as I worked in a very male-dominated workforce and there was no maternity policy!

I actually spent what should have been time enjoying my daughter, being pressured to return to work. I’d been off three months when the first email arrived. Office drama, new director, when was I thinking of returning? Geez, I don’t know in six months?! But it didn’t end there and they piled on so much pressure that I gave in and returned when she was five months old. I wasn’t ready, there is a lot more to the story concerning my return, I will not bore you now! But I struggled…majorly.

I remember at the time having coffee with friends who just weren’t able to return to work as they couldn’t afford the childcare and their rights to flexible working were declined. Employers just couldn’t see the benefit of including part-time or flexible workers on their payroll.

That was nearly 12 years ago and I was shocked recently to learn that one of my friends took her employer to a tribunal because she requested flexible working hours and they didn’t deal with the request effectively. She won her case but it surprised me that with so many families now having both parents working that employers can’t see the benefit of flexible working.

On googling ‘flexible working’, I received over 21k hits! Mostly negative. I thought I would share some of the reasons why I believe we could benefit from becoming a little more ‘flexible’. This covers remote staff, part-time, flexible full time and anything in between.

Pros

1. Family – No more taking unpaid leave, using up annual leave or making up hours, with a little flexibility in our working schedules we could take that gym class, attend our daughters’ assembly and collect them from school. Not only this but with organisation, employers would be able to make arrangements.

2. Increased feeling of personal control – The introduction of facetime, skype, emails and social media has meant that as individuals we have communication on the go. This gives an added bonus to being in control of our own schedule. Meetings don’t have to be office based, a quick skype call and this gives us added power over our work environment.

3. The Dreaded Commute – Avoids traffic and the stresses of commuting during rush hours. You know how it is, you rush out the door at 7.45am makeup half done, coffee in hand while munching on a banana. You hit the main road and ‘boom’ a 30-minute commute turns into an hour. Working from home or starting at 10am instead of 9am means that you could be at your desk faster, logging on to those all-important tasks at 8.30am.

4. Environmental Considerations – Reduced consumption of employee commuting time and fuel costs. With ‘eco-friendly’ being an essential part of the workplace, employees are being rewarded at some companies for car sharing. Perhaps the bigger picture is with effective management of employees that could work from home or come into work less.

5. Happy Employees are Productive Employees – We all want to enjoy our jobs, whether it be time away from the kids, to keep our skills relevant or just to have adult conversations. An employee working 40 hours a week, with an hour, commute each way isn’t going to feel as empowered and productive as someone who works three days in the office, two days at home.

Cons

1. Team Environment – In team-oriented departments, teams still need to meet, which requires set guidelines. Some people take advantage of the flexibility and use that as an invitation to work from home which really means watch Netflix with their email screen open. There needs to be an extensive amount of trust, perhaps using a management board like ‘trello’ for example to keep staff motivated when not in the office.

2. Management Team – Some managers, who are used to seeing when their staff members come to work, watching what staff do all day at work, and knowing when people leave for home, have trouble adjusting to the new management style which requires trust. Hands-on managers (micromanaging) don’t adapt well to having employees away from the office, they often feel out of touch or struggle to keep track of their tasks.

3. Other Colleagues – Office-oriented people sometimes view their work-at-home colleagues as slackers because they can’t physically see their productivity. It has been common for employees to work at home to be seen as less productive, this isn’t true always true. But I think internal employees often feel that they are sat at home wearing PJ’s, munching on popcorn while watching Netflix. This isn’t always the case.

4. Availability – Compressed work weeks can make client handovers complicated—clients expect service 5 days a week during business hours and can be fussy when an employee isn’t in on Friday. It can be hard for clients to understand that at 2pm, you suddenly become unavailable or that on a Monday you won’t answer their email. Some companies cope well with this by including an email footer.

5. Job Types – Not all jobs can be flexible. Jobs that require customer-facing responsibilities only allow certain types of flextime. Whole days working from home are not an option.

Overall, the advantages generally outweigh the disadvantages and a good manager can handle the difficulties. Employees are keen to find employers who now offer more flexibility in their approach to work.

We obviously have a long way to go, perhaps you would like to share some of your own thoughts? Maybe you are an employee who works with flexibility, or perhaps you want to?

Thanks for Reading…