What women want

Research conducted with a number of organisations over the last four years with the aim of helping them retain talented female employees found that there are certain critical stages in women's careers when they are vulnerable and it is at these periods when they tend to lose their key female talent.

One of the key stages is when they start a family, or when their families grow, and the challenges of combining careers and family life become too extreme. Many women can be coached, which helps individuals feel more in control of the maternity transition and their career. For managers, the support enables them to retain talented members of their team and minimise the impact on the business, clients and the extended team. During this time it has become apparent that there is another common challenge in the retention of women.

When women start to plan for a family in the months or years ahead, they will start to make some conscious and/or unconscious decisions about their employer. Even before professionals have children they start to size up their company in order to understand if it is the right environment for them to combine a career and family. If the answer is no, then you can be sure they will be looking at the job market for a more likely suitor.

Flexibility

I recently helped to run a focus group for a number of City institutions to ask their graduate employees about their desires and needs for flexible work arrangements.

Twelve women, all fairly new to their jobs, attended the session, but no men, despite the invitation going out to staff of both sexes. I found that a common concern for all of these ambitious, intelligent young women was not whether their company could provide more flexibility at work today, but whether they could offer it in the future if and when they wanted to combine their careers with a family. And this was a group of women who considered having babies to be some way off on the horizon for them. So it would seem that the process of individuals finding the right organisations that can demonstrate that they are parent friendly starts sooner than we think. In most cases it seems this is a very conscious decision for women.

So what will they be looking for? What are the key questions that hopeful parents will be asking:

n What maternity policies and practices does a company offer? Are they as good or better than other comparable companies in the market?

n Do they offer any additional benefits to demonstrate that they are parent friendly, such as maternity coaching, childcare provision, support such as emergency childcare facilities, parent networks, lactation facilities at work?

n What are the policies and practices surrounding flexible working? And, more importantly, is there evidence of other staff actually taking advantage of those policies?