Released On 11 December 2015
The latest from Cityparents HQ
We finished last year with a bang, or rather, several bangs!
In November, we celebrated our 3rd anniversary of the launch of our first London-based network for working parents in City professions. At the same time, we rebranded our website to Cityparents and launched our new Cityparents logo, reflecting more fully our inclusive ethos and the diversity of our networks and membership. We were thrilled to win two prestigious awards: firstly, Cityparents received the ‘Professional Network of the Year’ Award at the Inclusive Networks Awards 2015. Shortly afterwards, Louisa won ‘UK Social Enterprise Entrepreneur of the Year’ Award at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2015. We were also delighted to be finalists at the European Diversity Awards in September. We hope this growing public recognition of Cityparents’ activities will enable us to be more influential in helping to bring about a more positive and equal experience of work across the City.
From your responses to our survey in December, we know that progressing in your career remains a key challenge, closely followed by achieving a satisfactory work/life balance, securing a promotion and managing your workload. Work/life balance has improved over the past year for a quarter of respondents mainly due to being able to work flexibly or from home or as a result of working fewer hours. For another quarter though, the pressure has increased, often due to an increasing workload and fewer colleagues to help. Read more about the experiences of other City parents in our article 'Across the City'.
We're on the cusp of welcoming our 8,000th member, another milestone in our continued growth. And we’re continuing to expand our offering. This year, we have more events lined up than ever before, including several new Seminar topics. Find out more about upcoming events or check out our Events listing of all the events planned this year. We now run in-house events for City firms as part of our Bespoke Solutions, so if you’d like to enjoy our events in the comfort of your own office or think your colleagues would be interested in them too, then please contact us. A speaker from Cityparents can talk about the challenges and successes experienced by working parents across the City or alternatively, we can arrange for one of our Seminar providers to deliver a session on a specific topic.
Our new online Experience Bank offers invaluable tips and advice to members who are planning to take parental leave or a career break or who are wondering how to manage the transition back into work. With the Experience Bank, members can share their anonymous experiences of parental leave, including maternity, paternity, shared parental, adoption, surrogacy and compassionate leave, and career breaks. Please take time to browse and add your own experience, even if your parental leave ended some time ago.
Our Mentoring Scheme continues to provide valuable 1-1 support to working parents, male or female, from our networks. We open a window for applications twice a year. To date approximately 700 individuals have been accepted onto the scheme. Our next application window will open in March/April, when we’ll email all members with more details about the scheme and how to apply. For more in-depth support on any work, parenting or work/life balance matter, Cityparents Coaching offers a high-quality coaching service at competitive rates to any member, parent or non-parent.
We’re also planning to expand our quarterly Cityparents Policy Works forum, where HR and Diversity & Inclusion professionals meet to share information and best practice on a range of HR policies….. more on that later this year. In the meantime, keep up with our latest news via our Twitter feed @citymothers and our Linked In group, and please do get in touch with any suggestions or comments.