About

With the European project Parents@Work, the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men wishes to provide a practical answer to the needs of employers in developing a family-friendly policy at their company in the form of a toolkit.

This toolkit provides you as an employer with some practical and handy tools you can use to create a better work-life balance for your employees. It clarifies the Belgian legislation and leads you quickly to the right administrative forms. Alongside this, you can also gain inspiration from other companies' actions and measures.

More concretely, the focus is on the various phases of (family) life in which, for both fathers and mothers, the combination with work can come under pressure:

prior to the pregnancy;
the arrival of a new family member: pregnancy/motherhood – fatherhood – adoption and foster parents;
with (young) children;
caring for the elderly, sick children or other family members.

Checklists

All the legal stipulations and obligations are summarised using 9 checklists, for each phase of family life. The things you need to take account of as an employer with a pregnancy, medically assisted reproduction, adoption, care leave and so on. In addition, you will get some tips on going further than these legal obligations.

E-learning

An e-learning module lays out the legal basis around pregnant employees, fathers, co-mothers and so on, in a clear manner.

Good practices

Examples of good practice will show you how things work in practice at companies that have set up a family and gender-friendly policy. How do they go about things, what are their success factors and what challenges do they face?

Inspiring mesures

As an employer, on top of the legal stipulations, you can take extra measures and actions to support your employees with a good work-life balance. These extra measures around flexible working, leave and remuneration, disconnecting, family-supportive services, and information and communication will give you a few ideas to start with.

Family-friendly entrepeneurship

What is family-friendly entrepeneurship and why is it important? In order to arrive at a family-friendly policy, a working environment must be created that allows for such a policy and encourages it. We put you on the right track with a few points for consideration.

Lexicon

This lexicon explains concepts from the toolkit and describes the relationship between certain concepts further.