We have a couple of female employees working in the same team who take a lot of time off to attend to child related issues. For example, young child under 5 is sick and mother wants to be with them; child around 10 years has ongoing issues at school for which the mother has to attend regular meetings; mother has stress relating to the child being ill. The number of reasons is endless. We have taken a very supportive approach to date and offered them alternative working hours and “counselling sessions” with myself and the line manager in order to try to resolve the absence issues. They have now had approximately 20 days off for child related reasons on probably 12 or more occasions in the past 12 months, in addition to a lot of time off for their own sickness. The manager is now getting to the end of their teather and the Managing Director has the issues on his radar. Each time we have a counselling session we are told that the mother has to be with her child when they are ill and what do we expect them to do. There appears to be a lot of ‘taking’ and no ‘giving’. We have been extremely sympathetic and supportive and now I feel we need to take a firmer approach. Has anyone experienced a similar situation and how have they approached it? I am concerned that both mothers are ethnic minority and both the menager and director are white middle collar. Both mothers have also had time off for stress for child-related reasons and have issues within their personal lives.
Jessica