The conciliation of personal and professional life is trending topic in corporations and on the streets nowadays. This is good news as it means that society is mature enough to realize that “the family “ is a key stakeholder of corporations and so important that it should be protected to promote a healthy society.

Without families there is no society and without society there are no companies. We understand “family” as an economic unit of more than one person with emotional links and where procreation takes place, although not necessarily. A family can have no children and still mean a home, a place to find shelter, rest and to enjoy spare time. We all seek to have that and specially we seek to have time to spend with it.

Corporations know that it is not enough to be profitable and to have effective talent management policies. Companies know that they need to be a driver of change to support families and help their employees live a more balanced professional and personal life, as this will definitely impact their results.

The level of awareness of the importance of conciliation of personal and professional life differs from country to county, and Spain unfortunately is not in the leading group. The main reason is that in Spain we still find a lot of corporate culture that promotes spending long hours as a way to show commitment, no matter the workload for the sake of being there. The “seat heating” it’s called. Most probably the main reason for this is that the current bosses where once the “seat heaters” and therefore they think “this is the way to go”, and “this is what it takes”. Breaking that cycle is what really needs to happen. More specifically that one boss one day says: “just go home if you finish, no need to stay”, and that will be the end of the nonsense.

The truth is that Spain is also one of the countries with the lowest productivity rate for the hours spent working, which means that a lot of people are just sitting there pretending that they are working instead of being with their partner or children.

Companies need to understand that assessing their employees by the hours they spend is outdated and counterproductive and the more trust they put in them the better results they will get. We all have good days, bad days, different workloads and therefore the employees should be the ones organizing their work to reach a balance where they can deliver and reach results and at the same time do the personal things that they consider to be important, like picking up your son from school.

Studies find a clear link between conciliation and competence and therefore we want to encourage companies to trust their people and create options for them to live better less stressful lifes.

MissBabysitter advocates for the need to conciliate as a mean to build a better healthy society where more children are born in a better environment and where people are not evaluated by the number of hours they are physically in a place.