According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 1 million families in Australia are headed by a single parent, and in most cases that parent is female. In one-parent families with dependents, 67.3% of single mothers are employed, compared with 75.5% of single fathers.
At Austech Wire and Cable, Jerry decided to tap into that pool of talent and hired several single mothers looking for work – he’s never looked back.
“There are a lot of single mothers who still want to be part of their child’s life. They still want to drop off their kids to school, they still want to pick them up. They’re the ones that are finding it difficult to get back into the workforce because of the limited hours that they can offer”, he says.
Jerry admits that it wasn’t an overnight decision and that the transition was tricky. Implementing change often is.
“It was difficult at the start to understand how this could help the business, but it’s just making more and more sense these days,” he says.
“There are potentially good workers out there who aren’t given opportunities, just because of the amount of time they can offer.”
At the time of writing this article, Jerry had five single mothers in the team. He would happily hire more. Flexible working arrangements pay off - some of the women work part-time, others are on full-time contracts. If they have family commitments they need flexibility around, Jerry tries to accommodate their requests.
The company is also exploring how they can best optimise their shifts and work hours to be mutually beneficial to employer and staff. The manufacturing plant is open 24 hours. Traditionally most of the work is done during the day and there’s a smaller team in the afternoon, followed by an even smaller crew at night.
“We’ve never looked at why we needed certain departments or people to start work at certain times,” says Jerry.
“If someone can only work from 5am to 1pm, what’s stopping us from exploring that?"
“The doors are open anyway and there are people here all the time. We need to start considering individuals’ working hours and tailor it to them.”
Jerry says supervision is a consideration, but the more independent the operators become, the more trust management can put in them to do the right thing. As a young company, they’ve invested heavily into automated time keeping, which makes it easier to consider these kinds of changes.
“For us, eight hours is eight hours,” he says.
“It really doesn’t matter what time of day you do it, as long as the work gets done.”