Are you doing enough to look after parents?

Balfour Beatty’s Vikki Skene outlines a mentoring scheme introduced to help staff before and after they become parents.

In the UK, the engineering and construction industry is accountable for 7% of GDP and employs around 10% of the working population. With over two million people employed, the industry must take its responsibilities towards working parents seriously if it is to truly embrace diversity and promote equality of opportunity.

For Balfour Beatty – which employs 10,000 people across the UK and Ireland – a talented, motivated and sustainable workforce has always been important. In March 2014, the company launched its new Parent-to-Parent Mentor scheme to support its working parents by establishing mentoring relationships within the organisation.

The scheme will help to build parents’ confidence in their ability to handle times of change or challenge and strengthen their parenting skills by offering friendship, advocacy and mentoring support.

We want a culture that encourages people to seek support or flexibility they need to fulfil their potential because ultimately this will benefit our business.

The aim of the Parent-to-Parent Mentor scheme is to provide a support relationship for parents in the period prior to and throughout maternity, paternity or adoption leave and on return to the workplace. A mentor will share their knowledge and pass on valuable information that may be useful from their own experience of becoming a parent, including how they balance this responsibility with a career.

Parents are told about the scheme upon their notification of impending maternity, paternity or adoption leave. As a purely voluntary scheme, Balfour Beatty hopes that its provision of support and reassurance from a mentor who has experienced the same exciting and life-changing event will prove popular.

To ensure a high standard of support, mentors must be a parent within Balfour Beatty’s UK and Ireland construction business and therefore have been through the same experience to enable them to pass on the knowledge and experience to support their mentee. All volunteer mentors will be provided with training.

Successful mentoring is based on encouragement, constructive comments, mutual trust, respect and a willingness to share and learn. Mentors must be willing to give time and commitment to developing a mutually beneficial relationship – starting with a face-to-face meeting organised by the mentor.

Following the first meeting, an additional meeting will be held prior to commencing leave. Where contact takes place during leave, this is agreed in advance with the mentee on an individual basis. Contact during leave or in preparation to return from leave can include calls or meetings, and can continue for up to six months following the return to the workplace.

In recent years the expectations that parents place on their employers have changed. With the new Parent-to-Parent Mentor scheme the message from Balfour Beatty is clear – it’s okay to be a parent in the construction industry. By supporting its working parents, the company will become more competitive as a business and more attractive as an employer.

Vikki Skene is engagement & reward director for Balfour Beatty’s UK construction business