Supporting Parents at Work: An SME Toolkit
What is this Toolkit, and who is it for?
This Toolkit is designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with 1-249 staff.
- It supports both SME employers and employees, helping you understand each other’s perspectives and priorities.
- It explores key stages of the parenthood journey, including expectant parenthood, parental leave and the return to work.
- It addresses the needs of all parents, including mothers, fathers and other non-birthing parents
- It considers SME specific challenges and opportunities linked to supporting parents and provides good practice examples from our large-scale research project.
Why does the Toolkit focus on SMEs?
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SMEs make up 99.4% of all UK businesses, but most guidance on how to support parents at work is designed with large organisations in mind. This often overlooks the unique realities of smaller workplaces.
SMEs are diverse, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to parental support. However, many smaller organisations share key characteristics – such as informality, flexibility, and limited resources – that influence how they support working parents.
These characteristics can bring both challenges and opportunities when supporting new parents. This toolkit shows how SMEs can harness these characteristics to implement support measures that are both affordable and highly valued by staff.
While the focus is on SMEs, including workplaces in the public and third sector, we hope that larger organisations will also find the toolkit useful and inspiring.
How to use the Toolkit
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This toolkit provides bite-sized information so you can choose whether to learn about specific aspects of the topic or to get a more comprehensive overview.
It includes:
- Real-world examples of supportive practices in SMEs
- Guidance on/signposting to legal responsibilities
- Resources to support both SME employers and employees
Our approach:
This toolkit is not prescriptive – it promotes a collaborative approach, encouraging openness, flexibility and creative thinking, so that employers and employees can work
