Some employers are doing more for working parents. Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash
The end of the school holidays is drawing near, bringing with it relief for many parents from the juggle of school holiday programmes or babysitters.
But what if you only had to work in term time, or your employer provided holiday programme help?
Mela Lush, founder of Jobs for Mums, said term time working was common among the jobs advertised on her platform.
"It's a highly desirable offering for parents … if you think about the school holidays, you've got three months of school holidays and four weeks of annual leave. If you have a partner you're still four weeks short if you were to take leave separately.
"School holiday programmes, afterschool care is very expensive … my daughter just started school and it feels like they come so quickly and before you know it you've got to find two weeks of leave."
She said about 20 percent of the jobs on the platform offered the option of term-time working. "Flexibility is our point of difference. We work with about 220,000 parents nationwide and they're highly skilled - you've got amazing candidates who are actually more experienced than most … the candidate pool for those demanding term time work is usually pretty phenomenal."
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She said term-time work would often mean a reduction in pay but people were happy to make the sacrifice. "You'd happily take a couple of percent off your total pay if it also means more quality time with your family."
She said she hoped to see it become a more common option. "It's all about work-life effectiveness. As society develops we're just catching up with the way that modern families are."
Mela Lush. Photo: Supplied
EY was one employer that offered term-time working. "We provide parents the opportunity to purchase additional leave, between nine and 12 weeks, in order to work full-time during the school term dates and take additional time off during the school holidays," a spokesperson said.
Some employers offered subsidies for school holiday programmes. Fleur Fitzsimons, national secretary of the PSA, said it was most common in local government organisations that also ran recreation centres and swimming pools.
"We get feedback from workers all the time that school holidays are impossible to juggle. We do not have enough annual leave in New Zealand to cover them. Parents need more flexible work arrangements to cope with the school holiday periods."
Nicola Taylor, co-founder of Tax Traders, put on a holiday programme for her staff's children.
"We have our children split across two age groups, so up to seven and then over eight … we have a ratio of four kids max per nanny, make sure they know about all the allergies, all the details are taken care of.
"We run it two to three days a week for each week of the school holidays … they have an amazing time. They come in in the morning with their parents so they get that lovely drive in together and then there's usually an outing. Recently we've done Weta Workshop, ice skating, trampoline parks, indoor playgrounds, rock climbing, movies the zoo, Kelly Tarltons … we don't charge the parents, so that's just free."
She said there had been 15 children in the programme these holidays. "The kids form little friendships as well with each other and it makes them so positive about their parents' work."
She said the business offered full-time nannies for younger babies year-round.
Taylor said 0.16 percent of the overall business budget went into the holiday programme. "A tiny, tiny cost."
Staff member Carla Haugh said it had been life-changing. "To have a company intentionally think of their parents is amazing. More companies should think of their people this way."
Joanne Mutter, a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland business school, said flexibility was increasingly important.
"While the focus is on, and rightly so, providing parents and particularly parents with young children flexibility to allow them to progress with their careers, there are so many other areas where people would also benefit from having that flexibility available to them."
She said productivity could improve when people had flexibility because there was more work-life balance.
"If we could just normalise flexible working so that everybody took advantage of it and it no longer was a woman's issue, then women wouldn't have to pay for flexibility, which is fundamentally what they do now."
She said this year's improvement in the gender pay gap could be partly because of an increase in flexible work arrangements.
But she said it needed to be seen in the context of flexibility for everyone, not school holiday help for mothers.
Employment law expert Alison Maelzer, of Hesketh Henry, said employers could offer a system where people took one week of paid holiday and one week unpaid and split the payment over two weeks.
"Coming at it from a different point of view, those people who don't have school aged children might feel a bit miffed that they weren't receiving this benefit, so the employer would need to be a bit careful re:discrimination on the basis of family status. This would probably mean that employers would need to offer a similar/equivalent benefit to people without school aged children, which then all starts to get pretty complicated."
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