“Building an inclusive workplace” is a phrase you’ll often see thrown around on social media — but what does it actually mean, and how does it look in practice?

Quite often, it’s reflected in the benefits offered by the business, and the culture it’s trying to foster.

One of the ways scaling businesses can focus on building an inclusive workplace is by offering support to parents.

1. Offer dedicated coaching and re-onboarding

I was responsible for launching an initiative called 9fam. This is our parental support offering, and includes one-on-one coaching and a dedicated re-onboarding programme to help returning parents get back up to speed after extended time off work.

At 9fin, we’re trying to intentionally build a workplace with diversity at its heart — it’s one of our values. Our co-founders, Steven Hunter and Huss El-Sheikh, are laser-focused on how we can achieve this.

One of the reasons we launched this initiative was to attract working mothers to 9fin. The rigidity of some tech companies towards mothers can be disheartening, so we wanted to buck the trend and offer support beyond just a generous paid leave policy.

I noticed a clear gap in what companies were offering parents. In most cases, the support manifested as leave during the first few months of their child’s birth — and while that period is crucial, it’s equally important to support parents getting back to work after that time away.

Returning to work after being on leave for so long can be really daunting — for birthing and non-birthing parents. We wanted to focus on additional benefits that would ease the process.

2. Remember non-birthing parents

We’re moving towards a world where genderless parental leave policies are becoming more commonplace — which is great. It offers a truly inclusive, gender neutral approach, allowing each family to choose what works best for them.

We wanted to do our part to contribute to this — our policy offers 12 weeks fully paid leave for non-birthing parents to use as they wish. They can choose to take all 12 weeks in one go, or spread that time out over the year.

One advantage of this is that it allows birthing parents the opportunity to get back to work sooner, if they wanted.

The other, more important, part of this policy is that it offers a healthier balance between work and family — ‘family and health come first’ is another one of our values and this is just one of the ways we see it in practice.

We also extended this parental leave to all employees that have had children during their time at 9fin.

It’s a strong first step, but there’s still plenty more we can do.

3. Build up a flexible environment

I’m really proud of how we’ve created an environment of flexibility at 9fin. This benefits all of our employees but in particular allows parents to be parents without feeling like they’re compromising on work.

This flexibility manifests in different ways:

• Core hours that give parents the freedom to do school pick-ups and drop-offs
• Up to 90 days to work abroad — which is useful for parents who have family in a different country and need additional childcare support
• A ‘leading by example’ approach — the leadership team make the most of this flexibility, encouraging others to do the same

Above all, we make sure this benefit is communicated as explicitly as possible to existing employees and future employees. The People & Talent team send candidates a pack that outlines exactly how parents can use our flexible working policy should they join the business.

It’s also something we communicate with new joiners in the onboarding stage. Platforms like Flexa are excellent in helping us showcase these traits, so candidates looking for flexible workplaces can learn more about us.

It all comes down to trust

Trust is the underlying factor in a successful, flexible workplace — if you prioritise output and trust that your people are working hard in a way that best suits them, everything else falls into place.

There’s a huge trend in scaling businesses claiming to offer flexible working, but the picture can be very different, with demands to be in the office on certain days or at certain times.

If parents are offline for 45 minutes picking up their children from school, then managers need to trust that the work will get done regardless, instead of focusing on the time they’re not at their laptops.

Having that culture of high trust is the best way to create an environment in which employees — and in particular working parents — can thrive.