Employers must do more to support family life for millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha

Jennifer Liston-Smith’s reflections on leadership, work-life blend and the meaning of work.

As employers look to the needs of younger generations in and entering the workforce, what do we know about putting the basics in place to support higher performance? For the rising generations, it may mean that unless employers support life outside work, we cannot expect a commitment to careers within it. 

A Deloitte survey last year found that the key to workplace happiness lies in “the intersection of money, meaning, and wellbeing”.  

Great advice for shaping careers and employer brand. But the thing some employers forget is that you are never creating employee experience for an individual in isolation. No man is an island, as John Donne pointed out, in 1624. 

 

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Heavily wrapped up in those key drivers of happiness are our relationships with those we’re closest to. Everything we hear about the rising generations reinforces the high value placed on community and relationships.  

Waking up to family 

Some employers used to imagine the ideal employee as “unencumbered”: a man whose only baggage was a briefcase, with a nice trad wife carrying the rest of the load, and 2 kids, at home.  

Then, men and women were both coming into work and it took a while for employers to remember the children must still be there. The concept of childcare as infrastructure gradually dawned.  

Then we noticed that families themselves have different structures and phases – same-sex couples, solo parents, many really involved dads. Teenagers. Adult and elder dependants. Couples, or throuples, with no children by design, but wanting time together. And of course furry, multi-legged family members too.  

Most of us will ultimately say that these relationships are what give our lives the most depth and meaning. We want careers that are satisfying, and we want to have enough of ourselves left over for life outside work. 

For desk-based workers, everything behind us swam into view six years ago when work went online, and went home. Now, even though those loved ones are no longer fully on camera, we surely can’t unsee those wider lives. 

What would Maslow say? 

The work needs that Deloitte pinpointed – money, meaning and wellbeing – are, strikingly, like a re-jig of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  

The famous pyramid has what Abraham Maslow called “deficiency needs” at its foundation. Opportunities build in layers but only become available as basic needs are met: physical and security needs; friendship, love and belonging; and esteem: recognition, competence, respect. If these foundational needs are not met, the individual is likely to feel anxious, tense and unable to pursue the higher aim of “self-actualisation”. 

Maslow has been critiqued for a bias towards Western individualism. However, it still makes intuitive sense that it’s hard for Gen Z and Millennials to attain their sense of meaning (or self-actualisation) unless we first address the deficiency needs involved in making complex 21^st century careers work. Money and wellbeing capture a lot of that.  

A hierarchy of needs for employees and their dependants 

If, as employers, we recognise that a happy employee is one who is also happy in their wider family life – whatever family means to them – we see those basic needs more clearly.  

It looks a bit like this: 

Physical & security needs: Overall, there’s a need for reward that sustains a good lifestyle, financial wellbeing, including planning for the future. For family, it includes the employer actively supporting ongoing and ad hoc care arrangements (child care, partners, elders), and ensuring flexibility to keep it do-able. 

Friendship, love and belonging includes having trusted colleagues / work friends but also having time with those we love outside work, while not being exhausted by work. One way to bridge the gap is having networks of work peers who help the challenges feel normal and make success in integrating work and life seem possible. Employee Resource Groups, and mentor/buddy schemes hit the target here. Then to have enough energy for outside work, job design must allow boundaries around work plus innovative policies like Being There Leave to allow time out for key milestones.  

Esteem: Recognition and career progression are key and increasingly sought by younger job seekers. But how level is the playing field; and does possibility diminish over the lifespan? The Gender Pay Gap increases after the age of 40, which – as the Women’s Budget Group points out – underlines how traditionally divided family responsibilities pull against routes to seniority at work. In the Deloitte study, only 6% of Gen Zs said their primary career goal is to reach a leadership position. They will not sacrifice wellbeing and connection in order to get there. 

This will apply to people of all genders as the division of household labour becomes less stereotypical. Here, positive career opportunities need the dual guardrails of removing biased assumptions / equalising policies and coaching to support time to think and to envision a desired future.  When employers engage with the work-life equation, in all its diversity, having it all looks more possible. 

Self-actualisation / Meaning: This entails working in an organisation that has purpose, that contributes to social good. It also means having time and energy to continually become more of the person the employee wants to be, at home too. This requires ambition on the employer’s part, to be good enough to be part of that person’s sense of meaning; and sufficient humility to understand that much of the meaning lies outside the office wall or the factory gate. 

Check your hierarchy of needs 

Employers need to keep on addressing deficiency needs, in order to help employee reach higher needs. Have you got the basics in place?  

Ask yourself: can parents and carers take time out? Can they access good, reliable care with your support? Are all workers equally visible in a return-to-office environment, or do you need to support with care needs and other work-life requirements, in order to equalise? 

Are you offering great career paths but then overlooking the competing pulls that prevent hands-on parents and carers accessing them? That’s trying to meet a higher need without the scaffolding of the foundational need below it.  

Empowering your people to reach the esteem needs of career satisfaction might mean equalising parental leave to address the Gender Pay Gap and recognising the role of caring for all genders. Then noticing the ongoing needs as the day-to-day balancing act is often harder than the initial period of leave. It also means waking up continually to the widest aspects of family life, as Kinship recently highlighted with their Spot the Difference campaign, showing the inequity of a lack of leave for kinship carers, who step up to raise a child when they can’t live with their birth parents.  

It’s not about being nice 

In a world of budgetary pressures, it’s important to be clear that this is not about simply making kind gestures. It’s about understanding that employees can’t possibly perform at the top of the pyramid of needs if the lower needs go unaddressed. If we want to see potential fulfilled, we have to build the infrastructure to support it, in a world that always has basic physical needs and puts a high value on social connection.  

Being successful in our outside-work lives builds skills for our jobs too. I will always remember the very put-together and impressive HRD in a magic circle law firm I was working with to bring in a parent transition coaching programme. I asked him why it mattered to him to support parents and without any hesitation he remarked that having children was what gave him real, genuine empathy and that made him so much more effective at work. To him, retaining talented people throughout these life transitions simply made the firm better. 

It’s true too that in a world of competition for skills, and where younger generations see work as a series of skill-building projects, rather than loyalty to one employer, it takes a very strong value proposition to cut through and attract the best, let along keep them.  

The figures add up for the nation too. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicted an economic gain of £2.68bn could be achieved through implementing 6 weeks paternity leave at 90% of average weekly (capped) pay.  

When we meet basic needs, people can then perform at higher levels, for themselves, their employer and the nation’s benefit. 

A time to choose 

Many have an increasing sense that accountability is in the air. We may not all be in the unenviable position of political leaders or other high-profile figures regretting ill-advised decisions through the glare of hindsight. But whatever our sphere of impact, in 2026, there’s no pretending we ‘don’t know’ anymore. 

One thing we ought to know by now is that life outside work plays a huge role in whether our people are happy at work. And that happiness is built up through layers of different needs. 

The French health ministry has been writing to France’s 29-year-olds, urging them to think about have babies. The aim is to tackle falling birth rates. But everyone agrees that words alone are not enough unless the basic supports and incentives are in place.  

If we as employers have goals of high performance, what do we need to put in place as the foundations for that, in a world where relationships, community and family are highly valued?