National Personnel Authority Issues Guidelines on Balancing Parenting with Work

The Japanese National Personnel Authority drew up guidelines for national government employees on how to balance their careers with child rearing duties, and notified all ministries and agencies of these guidelines in February 2005.

The guidelines place their main emphasis on the roles played by human resources departments and supervisors in each workplace, encouraging them to facilitate an environment supportive of achieving a balance between work and family life. Supervisors as asked to involve their whole departments in helping employees achieve a balance between work and child-rearing duties by devising ways to share work, giving sufficient explanations to fellow workers and encouraging subordinates who are pregnant or caring for a pregnant family member to use the systems provided.

The guidelines also recommend that government employees should take advantage of family-friendly policies such as childcare leave, flexible working time, working-hour reductions which allow the worker to take a break for childcare at the beginning and end of the day, and work at home.

The guidelines especially point to a necessity for encouraging working fathers to play a more active role in childcare, in view of the fact that the rate of parental leave taken by working fathers is only 0.5 percent whereas the rate for working mothers is 92.2 percent. In particular, the guidelines aim to promote programs targeting male employees, such as paternal leave before and after childbirth and childcare support leave. As well as encouraging working fathers to take leave to care for children who are ill, they recommend that working parents make plans to share childcare between partners and take parental leave or use reduced-hours work programs in turn.



Posted: 2005/06/09 06:36:50 AM
Japanese version