Businesses praised – and shamed – over family-friendly benefits transparency

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Businesses are making modest progress in communicating details of parental pay and leave to candidates, research has found.

More than a third of companies (37%) now publish policy details, including pay and duration of parental leave. In 2020 only a quarter (24%) did so and in 2019 less than a fifth (18%).

The increase indicated that, as pandemic restrictions loosen, employer awareness of the need to be transparent on parental benefits is increasing.

However, this leaves nearly two-thirds of employers still not publishing basic details of family friendly policies including parental pay and leave, according to Executive Coaching Consultancy, a specialist in improving gender diversity.

The findings published in a report called The 2021 Parental Fog Index: Cross-Industry Report, come from the third yearly benchmark by ECC of the transparency of parental benefits for the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, as published on their websites.

ECC’s research found that companies were making more efforts to position themselves as family-friendly.

Among the 63% of companies who did not disclose these details, the number who provided no clear details of parental benefits fell to 26% from 44% in 2020. The remaining 37% simply provided generic details, up 5% from 2020.

The study, which placed employers into five categories of visibility, rated 11% of employers in its top “beacon” group, up from 9% last year. A further 26% of businesses reached “fully visible” status. In addition to publishing full details of parental policies, these employers actively marketed their support to working parents as core to their employer brand.

The companies awarded beacon status this year were:

• Accenture (up from fully visible in 2020)
• British Army (up from fully visible in 2020)
• Civil Service 
• Deloitte 
• EY 
• Grant Thornton 
• KPMG
• Linklaters (up from visible in 2020)
• Lloyds Banking Group (up from fully visible in 2020)
• PwC 
• Unilever

Geraldine Gallacher, CEO of ECC