For years the ING Banking Group has been promoting initiatives to foster the inclusion and care of its employees, with a particular focus on enhancing the skills of employees who are parents.
This is why ING was chosen by Lifeed in 2022 as a Caring Company, an award given to companies capable of valuing people and expressing a social role through concrete and measurable actions.
As part of its Diversity & Inclusion initiatives, ING had identified a need around the topic of caring: the aim was to help colleagues improve their self-efficacy during periods of uncertainty and time away from work due to personal needs.
Since 2020, ING Italia has therefore introduced the Lifeed programme for its employees who are new parents with children 0-3 years old, in order to support them in this important transition and facilitate the transfer of skills between private life and work.
“We believe that harnessing the link between people’s private life experiences and work can improve engagement and inclusion,” says Teresa Mancino, Talent & Learning Lead at ING Italy.
Busy with other things. Overwhelmed. Invisible. This is often how companies see caregivers, employees who in their private lives regularly take care of someone (elderly parents, children, partners, friends) or do voluntary work.
Already today 7 out of 10 workers are caregivers. With the increase in the average age of the population, their number is set to grow. In addition, more and more individuals in the so-called “Sandwich Generation” are having to manage the care of children and elderly parents at the same time. But are companies able to see them?
Companies can make two choices: pretend nothing is happening, with a negative impact on people’s well-being and related costs for the business; or see and harness the talents that caregivers train every day precisely in caring for a loved one.
Do not waste your resources: use the Lifeed Care programme
With the Care digital self-coaching programme from Lifeed, companies foster the well-being, engagement and retention of caregiver employees, who can transfer up to 63 skills trained from their private life experiences to the workplace, improving productivity, engagement
and well-being.
Want to find out more? Download the whitepaper
This report presents data collected from the 2021 Lifeed Survey, which analysed the responses of 1,258 participants in its learning pathways. Skills and resources developed by people in their life transitions emerged: becoming a parent, becoming a caregiver, or more generally going through a period of major change, such as the pandemic or returning to the office.
The analysis of the results demonstrates the effectiveness of Life Based Learning, the method devised by Lifeed that enables people to transfer soft skills from private life to work and vice versa.
The emotions, moods, discoveries and skills developed by the participants in the learning paths fit into five main areas of impact: well-being; leadership; soft skills; effectiveness; cultural change.
TO DISCOVER ALL THE DATA, DOWNLOAD THE IMPACT REPORT
The Unipol Group has been committed to Welfare services for many years that aim to make life both deeper and lighter, through programmes focused on the two fundamental pillars of care: parenting and caregiving.
In order to expand and strengthen its initiatives to support parenthood, in 2017 the Unipol Group introduced the Lifeed Child Masters’ course, aimed at colleagues who are new parents.
The aim was to unlock, both on a personal and corporate level, the wealth of benefits from the development of transverse skills that the parenting experience generates and to create a positive exchange between the two areas.
The data on the Child Master’s programme highlight the enhancement of the ability to combine the identity of parent with that of professional, the increase in energy, skills and positive exchange between the two spheres. This is further enhanced by an increase in identification with the company.
“With Lifeed, we wanted to legitimise even more in the company the fact that caring for children releases positive energy and makes people thrive, and the results prove it,” says Sabina Tarozzi, Head of Welfare Programmes at Unipol.
From the private to the professional sphere, everyone is “many things” at the same time. Knowing how to see the different identity dimensions in oneself and in others and taking care of those differences makes people more effective and reduces the fatigue of managing everyday complexity.
As scientifically demonstrated through Lifeed programmes, in the multiple roles of everyone’s life, skills are trained that are also useful for business. However, only by taking care of oneself and other people can hidden talents emerge and a new model of “caring leadership” be developed.
Caring is therefore a driver of inclusion, well-being and talent development for individuals and companies that aim to improve the well-being of their people and promote Diversity within the organisation.
It is only by feeling recognised in their entirety rather than partially as mere professionals that people can also thrive in the workplace, where they use only 30% of their abilities while the other 70% emerges in personal and family roles.
For the world of work, this figure represents a daily waste of talent.
However, as Lifeed is able to scientifically demonstrate through its method and technology, all private life experiences (from parenting to caregiving) are an opportunity to develop skills that are transferable to the professional sphere and represent a very real training ground for those soft skills that are so useful in all our life roles.
For companies, there is an improvement in what Lifeed has defined as the “Diverse Talent Index”, which measures the percentage of overall available talent that is used in the workplace.
Therefore, companies today have an opportunity to look at their employees in a new way, following the logic of the “whole self” that considers people in their entirety, in order to bring out their talents and promote inclusion and well-being through caring.
DO YOU WANT TO FIND OUT HOW TO TRANSFORM CARING INTO A STRATEGIC ASSET? DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER
Being a parent is a unique training ground for developing relational, organisational and innovation skills that are increasingly in demand in companies. In particular, motherhood is an extraordinary experience capable of activating the natural skills of mothers, which can also be harnessed to their full potential at work.
Unfortunately in 2022 there is still a lot of work to be done in this direction, as illustrated by the recent words of Elisabetta Franchi. During a conference, the fashion designer stated that she only hires women “of a certain age” in her company because “when you put a woman in a very important position, you cannot afford not to see her coming in for two years because that position is left uncovered” due to motherhood. “I as an entrepreneur in charge of my company I have often gone for men”.
And she added, with regard to the so-called “women of a certain age” (i.e. over 40), that “if they were going to have children or get married, they would have already done it, so I take the ones who have done everything they have to, they are by my side and work 24 hours a day, which is important”. These words stirred up great controversy, not least because they were uttered by a female top manager and a mother on Mother’s Day 2022.
That is why today it is more important than ever to make our voices heard loud and clear: for Lifeed, motherhood is a unique opportunity for both individuals and companies to train skills that are transferable from private life to work, to discover new talents and improve individual and organisational well-being. It is scientifically proven that valuing motherhood at work makes mothers feel better and, as a result, produces major measurable benefits for companies.
An example? Data from the Lifeed Work-Life Observatory show that in 2021 it was mostly mothers who said they found themselves stronger than they thought they were (82%) and that they saw an improvement in their leadership skills through their caring roles (74%).
Therefore we are publishing an excerpt below from a recent article by Riccarda Zezza, CEO of Lifeed on the AlleyOop blog of Il Sole 24Ore on the subject of motherhood and work: “Motherhood is not an obstacle, it is actually a Master’s qualification. On the contrary, experiences such as the birth of a child and caring for one’s parents actually bring about a radically different model of leadership, one that draws on the instinct of the human species towards life and knowing how to take care of one another”.
“If we are still here, on Mother’s Day 2022, counting the resignations of working mothers, being outraged and commenting on stories of women being demoted, bullied and fired, wondering where the guilt of a working mother is (in space) or celebrating the cases where a pregnant woman is hired or even promoted as exceptional … then something is wrong”.
“We need to invest in awareness and knowledge, so that we can stop looking for new adjectives to give meaning to words that have lost their capacity to describe reality. We must question everything invisible and make it visible by referring to things by their real name and making ourselves aware that we can choose”.
“Finally, it is time to accept that diversity, like leadership, does not require us to work to make new recruits conform or to assign them the right ‘diverse’ attributes, but instead to work to transform those who were already there. Now that would be a good way to celebrate mothers in Italy in 2022”.
Photo: Ansa
Today, the achievement of organisational well-being requires human resource management that puts human sustainability at the centre. Thanks to this approach and the actions it has put in place for its employees, Q8 was honoured in 2022 by Lifeed as a Caring Company, an award for companies capable of valuing people by expressing a social role with concrete and measurable actions. Fortunato Costantino, People care, Employees & Unions Relationship Manager atQ8 discusses how work-life synergy is possible and what the benefits of this vision are for people and companies.
The health emergency has made society more aware of its own condition of structural incompleteness, thus accelerating a shift away from the traditional paradigms of the social sciences, such as the mechanistic and deterministic paradigm according to which certain actions and behaviours implemented in the present are always able to direct and control the future. Instead, we must prepare ourselves to live in extremely fluid and variable economic and social scenarios, which cannot be explored or predicted (dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty), and in this changing context, ‘self-renewal’, i.e. the individual’s ability to be resilient and adapt to change, becomes crucial. For the development of both private and public companies, and for the entire country-system, placing proper value on the human factor therefore becomes central. The readiness of organisations to be socially sustainable will be the key to permanently overcoming the Taylorist paradigm that focuses only on the individual’s capacity for productivity, adopting instead a person-centred approach, i.e. one that focuses on full, integral and authentic human development, considering the individual as the main strategic asset of the company, as well as of civil society, and creating the conditions for personal and organisational well-being.
This radical cultural change can only be based on a new style of leadership that is functional to sustainability, capable of combining the inalienable objectives of profitability with the concrete promotion of human capital. This must be implemented through continuous discussion and transparency in the sharing of information and strategic objectives, encouraging everyone to exercise their talents and developing the multiple dimensions of identity that each employee is capable of expressing. What is needed, therefore, is “sustainable” leadership capable of taking a holistic view of the individual, overcoming the work-life trade-off, aware that the existence of each individual is an integrated experience that reflects the multiple dimensions of being and of the roles played, and that would lose its meaning if abstracted from any of its essential components. If one does not accept the idea of this inescapable interpenetration between dimensions of being, one cannot even begin to understand human reality, society and the overall order of its projects.
It means moving beyond the static approach to the identity dimensions of the human being and considering life and work as a single entity. In HR, this translates into valuing the person in his or her entirety and in all his or her experiences, from private to professional roles. The individual is the primary strategic asset to be valued and the company can do this by seeking to harness the valuable interactions between life and work. When people feel they are listened to and valued for who they are, they generate more value in terms of engagement and motivation, becoming true brand ambassadors for the organisation. Consequently, relationships within the company also become more resilient and sustainable.
At Q8 we have complemented traditional training programmes with specific courses on harnessing life experiences. We are convinced of the importance of developing soft skills arising from life-work synergy. That is why we have introduced the Life Based Learning method devised by Lifeed, which has proved to be a unique source of learning. Just think of the fact that 30% of talents are expressed in professional roles while 70% are found in private roles, such as being a parent or caregiver: these are experiences that bring out innate talents which, if transferred to the workplace, provide great added value. This creates boundless opportunities, which must be seized by companies to increase value both in terms of individual self-coaching and in terms of talent retention, employer branding and organisational well-being for the company, especially in an increasingly competitive market.
We wanted to adopt an effective and practical global sustainability strategy, aware that this goal clearly had to include ESG parameters. We realised, however, that special attention had to be paid to the social parameter, convinced that the human or social sustainability of the organisation, its ability to generate value not only for itself but also for its employees and for the local area, is a privileged driver for the organisation’s success and for consensus among all possible stakeholders. We realised that the key to achieving this was to recognise the value of the individual in concretely measurable terms through the adoption of appropriate tools and methodologies capable of generating self-discovery and self-coaching skills by stimulating awareness and understanding of one’s talents and aptitudes. At Q8 we have therefore expanded Lifeed courses for our employees over the years because we share the same “open vision” on the value of the individual and because Lifeed has developed objectively qualified training tools and methods that have allowed us to achieve very positive results over time.
We have seen a more mature self-awareness among employees, who now live their experience of the company with more efficiency and motivation and say they feel better. This care for our employees has led us to be recognised by Lifeed as a Caring Company, an award of which we are very proud. Personally, I also find tools like MultiMe and Lifeed’s Diverse Talent Index ingenious and very useful. The improvement is apparent in several respects: for example, employees have overcome previous reticence related to a lack of self-awareness and feel more listened to thanks to the fact that the company has made the Lifeed courses available. This makes them more aware of their abilities and encourages them to be more proactive at work.
We have recorded an identical percentage (50 per cent) of men and women participating in Lifeed courses. From 2020 to date, around 200 people have registered, with 109 between April and May 2022 alone: these numbers demonstrate the growing resilience of the path we have taken and have prompted us to expand our collaboration with Lifeed through the ‘Work-life synergy’ training path. Participants are keen to talk about their experiences (we have gathered 2,500 reflections on the platform). 70% of them say they feel they have improved their soft skills, 81% have improved empathy and listening, 87% have developed change management, and 70% cent feel better able to handle stress. I was particularly struck by the fact that employees said they were more attentive to personal relationships, after having directly experienced major life transitions. As a result, they became more able to empathise with others and became more attentive to others. And there is also another fact of which we are very proud…
100% of the employees who became fathers in 2020 and 2021 requested the supplementary leave made available by Q8 in addition to that provided by law, demonstrating that the participants in Lifeed’s parenting courses have gained a new awareness of the fact that the role of father does not have to be subordinate to the professional one but, on the contrary, it actually improves synergy with work.
People Analytics is a very important source of insight for the company in order to get to know employees and put in place more effective data-driven plans to promote engagement and wellbeing. In our total well-being proposition, we believe that it is crucial to detect and identify the real needs of people, which are dynamic and constantly changing. To this end, we are confident that Data Analytics, supported by Artificial Intelligence, will enable us to capture changes in needs over time and consistently tailor the well-being and welfare services offered to our internal stakeholders (i.e. employees) based on their actual needs, while ensuring the social sustainability of the organisation in the future.
Mondelēz International in Italy received the HR Innovation Award 2022 for the category Valuing Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing, organised by the HR Innovation Award Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano. The company was honoured at the conference organised by the university for the project undertaken in conjunction with Lifeed.
In fact, between 2020 and 2022, Mondelēz started two training paths in partnership with Lifeed dedicated to the recognition and enhancement of the soft skills that people develop in their private lives, which can also be recognised and applied in the workplace. The first path is dedicated to the advancement of caregivers, aimed at all employees who take care of other people, developing skills and expertise that are also useful in the professional sphere.
Constant monitoring of engagement data showed that 85% of the people involved expressed greater well-being and closeness to the company, and increased their sense of responsibility, leadership skills and decision-making.
The excellent results prompted Mondelēz to expand the self-coaching solution to the entire corporate population with the aim of developing greater work-life synergy and exploring people’s identity dimensions by appreciating their uniqueness and hidden talents.
“For years at Mondelēz International in Italy, we have focused on listening to our people and promoting actions aimed at supporting our well-being. The Lifeed masters courses are part of the company’s range of welfare – such as the programme aimed at stress-free parenting – and well-being services, which are designed to support people by harnessing the soft skills that emerge from their vast array of life experiences. Recognising the expressed identity dimensions of people creates a greater synergy between work and private life that makes everyone feel recognised and therefore included”, says Olga Lo Conte, People Lead at Mondelēz for Italy.
Tra i benefici, la possibilità di analizzare i dati aggregati della piattaforma sulla quale vengono organizzati i contenuti digitali per far emergere tendenze e valori condivisi dalla popolazione aziendale. Inoltre, i dati permettono di misurare e migliorare l’engagement dei partecipanti ai percorsi. Il beneficio più importante ottenuto attraverso il progetto è rappresentato dall’aumento della consapevolezza che le persone hanno rispetto alle loro competenze e abilità trasversali sviluppate al di fuori del contesto organizzativo.
“This is not just a reasonable intuition: the data we observe every day in Lifeed and the experience of companies like Mondelēz show that recognising and valuing what people are outside of work produces major benefits in terms of engagement, well-being and skills development”. Chiara Bacilieri, Head of Data at Lifeed commented: “This is why we are delighted with the recognition obtained by Mondelēz, which we consider to be one of the companies most focused on taking care of its people and most committed to this process of cultural change in our country”.
The HR Innovation Award, established in 2011, aims to create awareness and promote the sharing of innovation and improvement projects in human resources management and development processes through the adoption of the most innovative digital technologies.
Family care burdens continue to weigh heaviest on women, especially mothers, with a negative impact on employment: of the 42,000 resignations of parents of children aged zero to three in 2020, 77.4% involved mothers (National Labour Inspectorate).
And yet, data from the Lifeed Work-Life Observatory show that mothers, if acknowledged and valued by companies, can make a positive contribution in the professional sphere, drawing specifically from the skills developed through the parental experience. 82% of the mothers involved in Lifeed courses discovered that they were stronger than they thought and that they possessed skills they did not think they had. Leadership skills are also higher among caregivers, especially new parents.
How, then, can the life experiences and skills of mother carers be harnessed in companies? This was discussed during the Caring Company Digital Talk Mothers’ skills transferred to the workplace promoted by Lifeed and moderated by Chiara Sivieri, Lifeed Customer Executive, through the testimonies of managers from leading companies
The Lifeed Life-Work Observatory analysis showed that 80% of mothers feel they always put their own needs and desires second, because they experience time for themselves with conflict and a sense of guilt.
Motivations? There is a lack of a culture of self-care, which is seen as something optional, not as a priority and not as something that generates productivity. Self-care is perceived as a selfish action, a whim or something sterile. Almost all mothers (98%) experience the time devoted to self-care as time taken away from something else considered more important: care of the family, the home or work. For fathers, this perception emerged in 65% of cases (33% less than for mothers).
In addition to this, there is a more practical reason why mothers are so reluctant to take care of themselves: the lack of time, reported by more than half of the mothers (55%), means creating a hierarchy of priorities where self-care ends up in last place compared to tasks and needs that are considered a priority. Lack of time is also reported by fathers, in 30% of cases (-25% compared to mothers).
But data from the Lifeed Work-Life Observatory show that time devoted to oneself and to self-care – understood as an integral part of daily life – not only improves wellbeing but also trains six fundamental skills in mothers, which are also useful in the world of work: initiative (88%), innovation (65%), attention (54%), stress management (45%), self-confidence (25%) and relational skills (20%).
Caring activities (for children and the elderly) are mainly the responsibility of women, who cover several private and professional roles at the same time. In the absence of state-provided services, corporate welfare can be a very effective solution for taking care of caregivers, says Sabina Tarozzi, Head of Welfare Programmes at UnipolSai. This means building care at different levels: family, social, corporate. To do so requires a paradigm shift around the sense of guilt linked to caring for oneself, which, according to Tarozzi, is actually an act of altruism because it allows mothers to feel better and have more energy to devote to others.
The key is therefore to work on overcoming stereotypes, transforming selfishness into altruism. In order to have the strength to ‘put it all together’, mothers must first take care of their own personal well-being. For Tarozzi, even so-called creative idleness generates skills and well-being. Having corporate tools that favour work-life synergy is of fundamental help in bringing out the richness of the parenting experience. Not separating the dimensions of mother and professional as two ‘silos’ makes it possible to increase well-being: to achieve this goal, a virtuous circle of work-life synergy must be activated.
In UnipolSai’s corporate welfare, parenting and caregiving are the two pillars of care. The aim of the services and tools made available to employees who are parents and caregivers is to legitimise caregiving, free of guilt, to lighten the burden and allow people to thrive.
Altruism related to self-care can also be defined as a ‘kind selfishness’, says Martina Borsato, Data Strategist at Lifeed, explaining that mothers are often rewarded for sacrifice, but this causes them to lose part of their identity. Developing the right level of awareness of one’s roles helps to create a network of family alliances (for example, making more room for fathers), but also social alliances (from the children’s teachers to the nanny) and professional alliances with bosses and managers who are able to enhance motherhood.
When all this is accomplished, mothers no longer feel indispensable and this taking a ‘step back’ eases the burden and stress, while ensuring a healthier system that can function without them.
As Alice Brioschi, Publishing Editor of books such as Non sei il tuo senso di colpa (You are not your guilt) (Prospero Editore), points out, the negative culture around this issue accentuates the problems and guilt of mothers, who simultaneously fulfil other ‘energy-consuming’ roles related to jobs, friendships, passions or other interests.
Using the right words also serves to change the paradigm on this topic, having the courage to bring out the negative feelings associated with being a mother, because motherhood cannot always be considered a positive experience.
Giving voice to the feeling of guilt, making it clear by sharing the experience with other mothers, is helpful in overcoming it. According to Francesca Martino, Coordinator of WeWorld Spazio Donna Milano, it is important for mothers to be able to carve out space and time for pleasure in their lives because this makes them more motivated, creative, productive and focused. This also expands their perception of space and time and allows them to have more energy.
In order to carve out autonomy, it is necessary to build a support network around them, not least because the consequences of the pandemic have exacerbated the negative situations of mothers who were already in difficulty. Identifying their resources and bringing them to the surface, according to Martino, makes women feel more competent: working on themselves, focusing on personal care, is the key to recognising their own value and making it flourish.
As of March 2022, more than 700 million people worldwide have obtained a new right: the right to productive absence. The only actor with the power to implement this quickly around the world, through a simultaneously political and cultural operation, was LinkedIn. And it has done so: it has in fact inaugurated the era of “career breaks”, activating in its profiling the possibility of filling old gaps with definitions, thus providing working life with a new vocabulary.
Indeed, in referring to them as “career breaks”, it uses a term semantically more akin to interruption than interval. The English language then, miraculously, allows them to be interpreted both as breaks in a career and as breaks “for the purpose” of a career. This is perhaps the reason that the term not been translated into Italian, thus retaining the privilege of ambiguity..
In making this choice, LinkedIn also made several others, all quite significant for work culture. First of all, it chose which categories to include under the umbrella of career breaks, thus legitimising a series of life events while giving it a name that was inclusive and semi-comprehensive of all possibilities.
The amount of effort put in can be seen in the number of categories from which it is now possible to choose: the taxonomy of life transitions inaugurated by LinkedIn consists of just 13 options whereas, if any of us were to list the number of expected and unforeseen events that can divert us from our career (itself a word ultimately derived from a word for wagon and indicating the road laid out for it), we would come up with at least 50 definitions.
This is a clear indication of the amount of work put in: the 13 LinkedIn categories are divided almost equally between family, work and the personal dimension, in some cases with a certain specificity and in others with an openness that does not, however, cloud their meaning. Here they are (note that even in Italy they are listed in English):
1. bereavement
2. career transition
3. caregiving
4. full-time parenting
5. gap year
6. layoff/position eliminated
7. health and well-being
8. personal goal pursuit
9. professional development
10. relocation
11. retirement
12. travel
13. voluntary work
The second choice was to present these options in a new way: by showing – based on the data – that 62% of workers have had periods of absence in the past and that a further 35% already know that they will have them in the future, LinkedIn in fact points out that this constitutes a stigma at the time of return to work, not least because one in five managers openly state that they would reject this type of candidate out of hand.
Rejection then goes well beyond this 20% of managers: the road to get “back on track” is tortuous for many other reasons, whether overt or not. To all intents and purposes, this is a huge pool of talent that ends up in a grey area of assessment due to a cultural stereotype that sees people divided up according to their different uses: with this view, if the area used for clerical work is “switched off”, there is nothing else to see, evaluate, measure.
LinkedIn therefore recommends being able to look at people in their entirety and reveals that 51% of managers would reconsider the same previously rejected candidate if they knew “why” they have that break on their CV.
This means seeing us better and in more depth, to break the stereotype of “nothing here” through a richer and more accurate account of our lives. This sounds easy to say. The problem is that stereotypes thrive above all in times of urgency and uncertainty: they are always effective shortcuts, they produce known errors and are protected by all the tools, procedures and conventions that they have generated over the years.
LinkedIn’s recommendation is therefore to sharpen one’s eyesight to be able to recognise the skills that these breaks have generated simply because they are intense life experiences.
The original article was written by Riccarda Zezza and published on AlleyOop, the blog of Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the full article, click here.
