By Nick Isles, (Director, Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys)
24 September 2025
Parenting Out Loud’s first-ever Working Dads’ summit was a roaring success. I know because I was there. Speaker after speaker made the compelling case for workplaces and employers to embrace flexible working practices such as hybrid working, flexible working, and critically, decent parental leave for men as well as women.
The arguments have been well known and well made for many decades now. Much work – indeed some might argue most work – requires varying degrees of discretionary effort. When worker well-being is attended to by high performance work practices that discretionary effort tends to go up. Everyone benefits – workplaces and workers alike.
Some workplaces are exemplars. We heard from Deloittes, E.ON and Universal Music Group about their parental leave policies; their cultures that are pro-supportive of dads and their leadership teams who agree to and champion these measures.
However as I was drinking a coffee and meeting people attending the summit I heard from one man whose employer has mandated a four day return to office; for another it was five days. Both parents, both needing to optimise every minute of their days juggling between caring and working. As one said, the only time he feels he gets any real quality time with his kids is during the Christmas and summer holidays.
In each case the CEOs and leadership teams of these companies will argue they have some good reasons for doing so. And yet what does the evidence suggest? Professor Nick Bloom’s work at Stanford University has shown hybrid workers who work two days a week from home boost productivity for their firms.
Moreover, other research has shown that return to work mandates are often used by CEO’s to reassert control over employees and suggest that poor performance was due to workers working from home. All that happened was workers became disillusioned and often left and firm performance stagnated. As so often in the world of work the human factor – prejudice, gut feeling and above all cultures get in the way of doing the right thing for the firm and its people.
On parental leave CPRMB has made the case for dads getting more parental leave earlier this year. The UK is a laggard against many other countries in this regard. The better news is that the government is listening.
Following on from the Dad’s Strike earlier this year, Parenting Out Loud’s first-ever Working Dad’s summit is to be applauded. As we collectively strive for higher levels of productivity perhaps doing more for working dads might help firms and our economy achieve the growth we so desperately need.