The Juggle is real, and who is catching all those balls in the air?

It’s week 637 of the summer holidays and the term ‘juggle’ has reached a new meaning in my household. It’s been said before and will no doubt be said again: the length of school holidays and the amount of annual leave just don’t match up.

For working parents, this means cobbling together a schedule of expensive holiday clubs, which often don’t even cover the full length of a regular school day, let alone after-school clubs, and rallying the support of the grandparents. In our case arranging the latter took almost a year of planning just to find a compatible week! 

And don’t even get me started on working from home. Somehow this has become the default answer to all childcare challenges: just work from home and everything will be fine. Thanks, but no thanks. I can scarcely send a Teams message without a typo, never mind complete an entire day’s tasks with my daughter around. Between being passed notes that say, “you don’t love me mummy” to dealing with temper tantrums whilst trying to take calls, the emotional toll is every bit as significant as the practical one. There’s a big difference between being at home and being available but try explaining that to a six year-old. 

I digress. The “juggle” is something every working parent has to try and keep up, but childcare is just one of the many balls. Elder care, sibling care, emotional labour, health, work and community responsibilities all add to the balancing act. 

Within the Bloom UK network, we have many members who are all too familiar with this. 

In addition to raising children, they also care for elderly or ill parents and other family members. Sometimes, this care can feel like a constant outpouring of energy with little coming back in return. These care responsibilities leave countless women in our network, across the UK, and around the world feeling “sandwiched,” or even “squished,” by the sheer weight of it all, hence the term “sandwich carers”.

It’s difficult to fathom how much time and emotional energy caring responsibilities require until you’ve experienced them firsthand. Employers, in particular, need to show empathy before a crisis hits. They should consider their employees’ situations and ask themselves: if this happened to me tomorrow, what kind of flexibility would I need?

Because ultimately, our industry is a people-based and creative one. If we don’t create an environment that allows people to be people, rather than simply workers, then it’s not possible to produce great creative work. Employees shouldn’t have to feel anxious about ordinary life. They should be able to tell their employer that they need to pick up a child from nursery because they have a fever or take a day off to support a loved one in hospital without feeling guilty. 

But to achieve this, there has to be trust. If employers trust their employees to get the work done, their flexibility will be rewarded with dedication, leading to better work and stronger relationships. The focus shifts from asking, “Can I see you working?” to “Do I trust you to deliver?”

The culture that accompanies flexible policies is just as important as the policies themselves. I remember a job interview a few years back where I asked about flexible working and was told, it was fine as long as I didn’t ‘take the piss’ with childcare. While I sort of understood what the interviewer was getting at, it left me feeling uneasy. No parent can predict whether their child will suddenly have a fever. Simply put, the response didn’t inspire confidence that their flexibility really did exist.

Rather than emphasising presenteeism, we should focus on accountability for results. Flexible cultures foster creativity by allowing us to maintain a fulfilling life outside of work, grow personally, and bring those experiences back into creative work. 

In order to understand the current juggles that women in our industry are facing and what flexibility there is from companies to help them accommodate that and to live their lives in a way that ultimately will make them a better employee, we have launched The Juggle survey. If you are a woman or non-binary person working in the UK advertising, marketing and communications industry then we want to hear from you.