Flexible Work Insights Report 2025

The landscape of work has undergone a profound transformation in recent years, accelerated by the pandemic. While flexible work arrangements have become more common, challenges remain in policy clarity, managerial support, and technological enablement.

The 2024 National Working Families Report

In 2019, Parents At Work and our partners released our landmark National Working Families Report, following a survey of more than 6,000 working Australian parents and carers.

We reported on the difficulties experienced by workers in balancing their work and family commitments, with their personal wellbeing and family relationships suffering as a result. That report led to real change. Since then, in the face of a global pandemic and social distancing orders, Australian workplaces shifted overnight to remote and flexible working.

In 2021, Parents At Work partnered with UNICEF Australia to develop and deliver Family Friendly Workplaces, a benchmarking and certification for Australian workplaces that meet the world’s best practice National Work + Family Standards.

Now, five years on, 2024 provided an opportunity to update and reissue the survey, to measure the impact of changing workplace trends on more than 6,200 of Australia’s working parents and carers.

Whitepaper: Advancing Paid Parental Leave

July marks the beginning of new family-friendly policies in Australia. Changes to Commonwealth-funded paid parental leave have come into effect, giving families access to an additional two weeks of leave (up from 18 weeks to 20 weeks), as well as further flexibility on accessing the leave. But the job is far from done. Australia still lags behind much of the OECD on paid parental leave (PPL).

As the latest Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum tells us, countries that lead on promoting shared care through comprehensive PPL policies and heavily subsidised childcare, also lead on gender equality. This Whitepaper highlights the business case for parental leave equality, and what employers should do to bolster the continued limited PPL offered in Australia.

Report: Bridging the Work and Family Divide

The Bridging The Work and Family Divide Report provides a strong evidence base supporting the benefits of investing in Family Friendly Workplace policies and practices and ensuring employees are fully enabled to utilise these. It combines a detailed review of Australian and global academic research with stories from the lived experiences of founding partners and their employees.

The Report draws on data and insights from 70 businesses that participated in the inaugural year of the Family Friendly Workplaces initiative and are now certified, collectively these businesses employee almost 300,000 Australians.