A healthy work-family life balance

Achieving a healthy balance between work and family life is a wish shared by many employees. However, these days, employers too are placing increasing value on supporting families. From flexitime and flexible working arrangements to workplace childcare facilities, a wide range of measures are being put in place. The reconciliation of work and family life is also an important issue at family-owned company MBFZ toolcraft GmbH. To improve its own measures and schemes in this field, the firm is now a member of Familienpakt Bayern.

Familienpakt Bayern – an initiative uniting politics and industry
The worlds of politics and industry have joined forces to develop an initiative known as Familienpakt Bayern to help Bavarians to strike a better balance between work and family life. The partners of the scheme are the Bavarian state government, the Bavarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce (BIHK), the Bavarian Industry Association (vbw) and the Bavarian Trade Association (BHT). The objective is to create family-friendly conditions and to raise public awareness. It is hoped that doing so may lead to a shift in culture and attitudes that could help family responsibilities to be valued more highly as well as contribute to greater support being offered in this area.

As a medium-sized, family-owned company, toolcraft is fully aware of the importance of family support. “Spending time with your loved ones is essential for your personal development,” says Bernd Krebs, managing director and owner of toolcraft. “We want to maintain our family-like working atmosphere even as we take on more and more staff,” add Karlheinz Nüßlein and Christoph Hauck, also both managing directors of toolcraft. Mutual trust plays an equally important role here as regular family events, flexitime and part-time contracts, and flexible shift and holiday plans.

Wide range of measures provide extensive support
Besides giving information and advice, Familienpakt Bayern is striving to improve childcare infrastructure. Measures include guaranteeing the availability of all-day childcare, opening more nurseries and offering emergency childcare in all-day schools. Another area of focus is the creation of better infrastructure for people required to care for family members, for instance through the expansion and building of new daycare centres. The initiative has produced handbooks for companies on how to implement family-friendly policies in the workplace. The information can be applied in an extremely broad range of fields and covers working time regulations, working arrangements, fringe benefits for families, employee development programmes and ensuring that every single member of staff, all the way up to senior management, appreciates the importance of family life.

Award for exceptionally family-friendly employers
Even more media attention is being given to Familienpakt Bayern thanks to the competition “Erfolgreich.Familienfreundlich” ("Successful.Family-Friendly"), which this year is taking place for the second time. The award ceremony will be held in Munich on 14 May 2018. Here, the two Bavarian Ministers of State Ilse Aigner and Emilia Müller will present the prize to exceptionally family-friendly companies. Companies will be assessed according to five criteria for the family-friendly services that they should ideally be able to provide, taking their size, industry and location into account. On the one hand, working hours, workplace facilities, working arrangements, and services and support programmes designed with families in mind as well as a staff development programme and a sustainable family-friendly personnel policy are of fundamental importance during the evaluation process. On the other hand, information and communication policies as well as a corporate and leadership culture that place sufficient emphasis on the importance of family play a decisive role.