S1.Ep1. Introducing the Parent Experience.
With Rachael Jordan and Dr Krystal Wilkinson.
Most companies overlook one of their most vital growth channels: the experiences of their parent employees. In this eye-opening episode, Rachael Jordan and Dr Krystal Wilkinson reveal how understanding and supporting parental journeys can revolutionise workplace culture and unlock hidden potential.
Imagine a workplace where mental health, fertility struggles, and parental transitions are openly acknowledged and expertly supported. Krystal shares her groundbreaking research on perinatal mental health, revealing the silent struggles many parents face, and why organisations are missing out by ignoring these issues. Meanwhile, Rachael discusses the vision behind the Parent Experience Index, a simple yet powerful tool to measure and improve how workplaces support parents at every stage of their journey.
You'll discover:
The surprising gaps between policy and practice in supporting parental mental health and fertility challenges
How to use data and open conversations to create a truly inclusive, empathetic work environment
Practical steps to measure your organisation’s parent-friendliness and identify quick wins for impact
Why the "motherhood penalty" persists and how to eradicate it through targeted support and cultural change
The importance of manager training, clear communication, and signposting resources to foster psychological safety
This episode is essential listening for HR professionals, leaders, and anyone committed to building a workplace where parents thrive, not just survive.
If you're ready to challenge outdated norms and foster real change, this conversation will inspire you to rethink what support really looks like. Join us as we explore how simple, strategic shifts can reduce absenteeism, boost retention, and transform organisational culture, making your company a benchmark example for supporting working parents everywhere.
Don't miss out on the insights that could unlock your organisation’s full potential and help create a better future for families and businesses alike.
Episode Transcript.
Rachael Jordan (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Parent Experience podcast. I'm Rachael Jordan and with me I have Dr. Krystal Wilkinson who is the co-founder and co-director and the very wonderful person behind the Parent Experience. We are really excited to start this podcast. We have loads of amazing guests and topics to talk about and we will be delving into all things work and early parenthood.
Rachael Jordan (00:26)
So we're really excited to get going, but today we thought we would talk to you a little bit about ourselves, about our lives and our work and what has brought us together and led us to create the parent experience. yep, excited to get started. So Krystal, do you want to introduce yourself to everybody?
Krystal (00:33)
Thank you very much, Rachael. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, so I'm Krystal. I'm an academic and my research at the moment, my whole research agenda really is on the work-life interface, wellbeing at work, and it's increasingly looking at the things we don't talk about in common HR agendas around EDI, so equality, diversity and inclusion, wellbeing at work. My main focus at the moment is on women's reproductive health across the life course and parental transitions and parental journeys. my background is human resource management. So was an operational human resource manager for years before transitioning to academia. And I think it's really important to acknowledge right at the start that so many things that I focus on in my research now were just not on my radar at all when I was working in HR, because no one was talking about it and I didn't know. And so. really keen to meet employers where they are in terms of the things that maybe they haven't considered and kind of support employers to start thinking about how to cater for more people's challenges and wellbeing issues.
Rachael Jordan (01:47)
That's such an important point, isn't it? That things are not necessarily done because people choose not to do them. It's because people aren't aware that they exist and that's a really strong theme in our personal lives as well, you know, when it comes to motherhood and parenthood and starting a family and yeah, we'll pick up on that theme a lot in the different episodes that we have.
But thank you for that, Krystal. So you are a mum as well. Tell us about your family.
Krystal (02:15)
I am.
Yeah, so I've got one little boy, William, who is, he's just about to turn eight, so he's turning eight this month. He is the light of my life, absolute joy of my life. one of the reasons for my interest in kind of parental journeys and the challenges through that is that we had a very, very rocky start to me becoming a mum. And, you know, I really think workplace support for us was really, crucial in that and I'm very aware from my research that a lot of people don't have a lot of support with transitions to parenthood. So definitely a personal motivation for what I'm doing as well.
Rachael Jordan (02:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, and same here. I have two children. I have a daughter who just turned 11 and I have a son who is almost 10. So quite close together, not intentionally. But hey, I'm very glad that in retrospect that they are so close together. yeah, similarly to you had a very difficult start to motherhood.
Krystal (03:03)
Okay.
Rachael Jordan (03:14)
which took me completely by surprise. I was very mentally unwell, but didn't realise with Lily, my daughter, and because there wasn't a lot of time between Lily being born and Isaac being born, I felt like the pregnancy and becoming Isaac as well so soon after kind of still processing having another baby slash toddler at home definitely compounded my mental illness and because I didn't know what was happening to me, I just assumed that it was my failure and that this role that I dreamed of doing my whole entire life of being a mum, I just felt, no, I can't do it. I'm failing. I'm not doing it like everybody else is doing it. know, breastfeeding failed. Yeah, just, the fact that I felt I couldn't cope just really attacked my self-esteem and my kind of identity and kind of sense of worth, I suppose. And yeah, that just got me into a vicious cycle of just thinking that they were better off without me, essentially. So, but thankfully did eventually receive help. And, you know, that help was very crucial at that point. But my mental illness
Rachael Jordan (04:29)
It definitely had an impact on my husband. He also didn't know what was happening to me, to him, to us. Yeah, so this kind of lack of awareness and the fact that a lot of us, a lot of parents automatically blame themselves when things don't look as they think that they should, based off of...
these social constructs that have been created that just make parenting look natural and easy and everything's wonderful and everything's joyful. in my experience, of personally and professionally, when things don't go that way, people can often blame themselves. And then imagine being in that head space and trying to work if you're pregnant or trying to kind of integrate back into work.
And got all of these things going on and you've got a kind of all of these doubts and, you know, the lack of confidence, I suppose, that might have come from having a rough start. And yeah, I think I really love to hear the experience of yourself and Chris, because, you know, it's really important to know that help is out there and see the difference that it makes. But then my experience from a workplace perspective is very different.
So there's a real inconsistency out there, right? And that is one of the many goals that we have with the parent experience is to bring understanding and awareness to employers of everything that can happen to a person when they're thinking about having a baby, planning for a baby, trying for a baby when they're pregnant and what happens after pregnancy in those kind of early years of parenthood, so much that goes on and there's not a lot of understanding of that, there's not a lot of awareness of that in the workplace. therefore there's not always support for that or empathy for that, an understanding of that. So, and we'll explain more about the parent experience as we go through the episodes, but to bring that consistency of the major things that can happen.
Rachael Jordan (06:22)
This is the impact that it has on people and this is how you as an employer or as a manager or a supervisor or a colleague or HR team can design processes and policies and be able to have conversations to really support people through that. There's so much, isn't there, about the motherhood penalty as it relates to women and the penalties that are there and are real and exist for tens of thousands of women in the UK, which mean that their career doesn't go as they wanted to go or intended it to go. And we really feel that this can play a part in helping to change expectations and change understanding of how to support people in this really completely life-changing phase of life.
Krystal, do you want to talk a little bit more about your professional interests?
Krystal (07:18)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so just just thank you so much for, you know, for sharing. It's difficult to talk so openly in a podcast about about the challenges. I just want before I go into my interest in it, just it really, really resonated what you were saying about just completely the struggles sort of coming out of nowhere and not recognizing that you were were unwell. And so we have done research on some qualitative research. So talking talking to people with lived experience of different issues and just a lot of my interviewing style is just sort of telling a story. So I've done research on complex fertility journeys, which is where people kind of self-identified as struggling with trying to start a family. A lot of them did have go through fertility tests, fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, coming to terms with childlessness when they wanted to be parents. But we did one on mental health challenges in pregnancy and post-birth.
Rachael Jordan (08:08)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (08:09)
And that research we did particularly in the context of policing. So, you it was a context where, like you, you you're a professional, you're kind of, you're used to being in control of things, of things going to plan. And these were men and women who self-identified as having mental health problems in pregnancy and post-birth. And I was expecting from all of the research that I've read around mental health and policing and motherhood and policing of kind of stigma, you know, so people feel like...
Rachael Jordan (08:19)
Yeah.
Krystal (08:36)
I can't talk about this in this context because people are going to make assumptions about me. I'm kind of different. I'm a problem. And that did come through, but much more prevalent. And before that was people just did not realize that they were unwell. And it just came up time and time again. I just thought I was a mother. I just thought I was a father. I just thought I was a police officer. You know, and it,
Rachael Jordan (08:42)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Krystal (09:00)
One of the participants I remember saying that she was in the mother and baby unit and the only thing that really started to click in her head is when the psychiatrist or psychologist in the mother and baby unit was pointing out the other women on the ward and there was a lawyer and there was a surgeon and it was kind of these were people who were used to being in control. They'd planned for a baby, they'd worked for a baby and they expected to be able to manage, they expected to be able to be competent.
Rachael Jordan (09:14)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (09:27)
And when we've shared this research with people in other contexts, in nurseries, in the NHS, again, it's people, you I work with babies. How can I not cope with being a mum? you know, it's this kind of total kind of blindsided. And I'll talk about my own experience at some point, but...
Rachael Jordan (09:35)
Yeah. Yeah.
Krystal (09:47)
I'm kind of different in that I very much expected to be unwell. So I got a prior mental health diagnosis. I'd been depressed before, I'd been manic before, you know, and I was looking out for symptoms that I recognized. My mum, I've got a family history of perinatal mental ill health problems. And yet when I was becoming unwell, it was so different to what I was expecting that I didn't recognize it. just thought I was...
Rachael Jordan (09:55)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Krystal (10:09)
I can't cope, I'm doing it wrong, I'm scared. I shouldn't have been a mom, I can't cope. And I think that's something to acknowledge as well, that whether or not you're expecting it, can still not be my professional interest in people who are trying to be parents, becoming parents, the complications along the way, it really does span a lot of the a lot of the topics that the parent experience is there to look into. My PhD was on people who live alone and don't have children and some of their challenges. And one of things that really came through in that research was a lot of them didn't want to be so lucky to live alone and not have a partner and not have children forever, but there was workplace factors that were making it very, difficult for them to find a partner and to develop relationships. And it's kind of gone on with looking at the fertility complex fertility journeys research, the perinatal mental health research, doing a big maternity management project at the moment in the NHS, just acknowledging a lot of the challenges that come up in certain job contexts where policies are in place and people, managers and so on, they want to support people, but just the operational realities is that your manager might be different person on different days that there's short staffing that, you know, when you go on maternity leave, you might come back to a different manager. You know, there's all these things that just really, really do make it difficult.
Rachael Jordan (11:16)
Yeah.
Yeah,
it is tricky. it's such a multi-layered complex time of life, right? And it's difficult to be super prescriptive from a workplace point of view, because there are just so many kind of intersecting things that can happen in life and different problems off the back of that. So
It's very much, you know, within the parent experience of not to be overly prescriptive, but to look at kind of themes and principles and general things to look out for because often, certainly in my professional background working in perinatal mental health and especially in the workplace, is that people, you know, often don't know the basics, like often don't know
the name perinatal mental health, they certainly don't know that it's more than just postnatal depression. And, you know, they don't know some of the basic things around, people not being themselves or not behaving like themselves and, and knowing to kind of ask questions when they notice, you know, different behaviors over a prolonged period of time. So
This really is the parent experience, quite a basic introduction to parenthood, but hopefully builds really strong foundations of understanding and awareness so that organizations can then develop that, however, and build on that and use experts. There are so many experts and specialists even within the nonprofit sector who look at fertility, who look at mental health, who look at pregnancy loss who look at all these various different elements that the parent experience talks about and can help then organisations take that deeper dive into detail of really getting under the skin of any particular area and helping workplaces know how to build that into their organisation in a way that suits them best. the parent experience think of that as good solid foundations of understanding and awareness of a really wide spectrum of issues and topics during planning, trying, being pregnant after pregnancy. And then the next step from that is to implement the basics and then following that if needed delve into any particular area in more detail with a subject matter expert, which we can help introduce organizations to because after many years now Krystal and I know quite a few organizations and people because they're advocates of the parent experience. So it's all exciting and it's a journey that has been a culmination of a lot of different experiences and both professionally and personally for you and I, right, Krystal? And maybe I'll go into a little bit of detail as to how we met and why we built the parent experience. Krystal, you are, I hope you don't mind me saying this, quite a prominent name in your particular area now.
In a previous role, I was working for a perinatal mental health charity, a national UK charity. And I was organizing a round table at the House of Lords talking about specifically mental health in this context, but talking about that's mental health during and after pregnancy.
And we wanted to talk about why that's kind of missing from the agenda in the workplace. So just as a bit of context, you might be in an organization where you have family policies and you have mental health policies. But it is quite often that perinatal mental health is not included in mental health policies. Mental health first aiders might not be trained specifically in perinatal mental health.
And then from family policies, maternity, paternity, et cetera, perinatal mental health is often not mentioned in there either. it's kind of like the, quite often the forgotten area of, of mental and family health. So, Krystal was one of our guest speakers at that round table and did an excellent job. And we had lots of people there from different backgrounds. So Krystal was there representing academia and we met through that process and hopefully you agree we instantly got on. We really liked working together and yeah, that's how it started. That's how we met and the parent experience as a concept was something that just came to mind one day whilst I was sat thinking about how do we really move the needle with employers on all of these things that are kind of missing from the agenda of things that are not known about, things that are not catered for in the workplace as you becoming a parent. And my background prior to working in this charity is entirely in the private sector. And I started my career at a very, very well known consumer goods company who manufacture probably a lot of the household brands that you have in your house right now. And they were very, very good at measuring. were very, very good at key performance indicators and scorecards. And had the ethos of if you can measure it, you can manage it. And maybe a lot of you listening, you know, will be familiar with measures such as customer experience or employee experience. It just popped into my head. Parent experience, like what if we create a measure, something that can really give numbers and reason and logic to what is, like I said, a very complex emotional kind of human real problem. So I mentioned it to Krystal. Thank you. Thankfully you love the idea. The rest is history really so we now have the Parent Experience Limited one thing that Krystal and I love to do is talk to people, we love to talk to all different perspectives, all different backgrounds and the podcast element of the Parent Experience was something that we felt we could do having those conversations, but then sharing those conversations with a wider audience because I certainly learned a lot from talking to new people, especially kind So we're really hoping that this journey that we go on and the people that we talk to you find really beneficial to hear and learn things you might not have heard before and to ideally take that away back into your own lives and organizations and make even small changes. because awareness is so low of lot of the topics that we're going to talk about, even the most kind of simple basic changes can have a massive impact.
So we definitely encourage all of you listening as much as you can to think about how can I take this and how can I do something with it that's going to benefit even just myself and my family or myself and my colleagues. So that's a little bit about our history. Krystal, do you want to chat about the areas that the parent experience school looks at? And I can talk a little bit about the process that we go through.
Krystal (18:13)
Yeah, I mean what I really love about the parent experience as a provision is sort of different to maybe some of the things that are available in the marketplace at the moment is it's really focused on individual organizations. It's a piece of research on your parent experience and it's getting you know the the statistics what we're doing well but it's the kind of the real voice so we've got a lot of open questions
We've tried to keep the closed questions quite minimal over a range of topic areas right across those parental journeys. We're talking about policies that are available, but we're also talking about culture. We're talking about line manager competence. looking at. We've got questions around the different elements that span from trying to have a child through to being pregnant at work, navigating parental leave and then sort of the return to work. But we don't want a questionnaire that, I've done surveys before in organisations, research surveys where there loads and loads and loads of questions to really drill down at every kind of element and measure. And we didn't want that, we want something that's really easy for people to complete, but then we have these open text boxes where people can really explain why they've given a certain score on a particular question and really kind of draw out the things that we might not have asked them about. And it is, getting back to those kind of absent narratives. So we did this on a women's health strategy surveys in a large NHS trust.
And that was what was really telling it was the qualitative comments. So people were saying, yes, we have a menopause policy. Yes, my manager has been trained on menopause. But, you know, and it was all these nuances in terms of, you know, we're in a female dominated workforce where going to go through the menopause. How can I say I can't cope when we're already short staffed? So it's got some of these kind of pressures that come through that, yeah, we have a policy but I'm not actually going to use it for X, Y and Z reasons. That's what I'm most excited about about this is really sort of getting under the belly of these policies and things that might be there in how are the landing, what are the gaps, what are the areas that are quick wins for organizations to fix really.
Rachael Jordan (20:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's a great point because as we were thinking about this, we made a series of really conscious choices. And one of the conscious choices was that the parent experience goes based ultimately on a survey, which is fully anonymous. And we felt very strongly that it should be anonymous to allow people to feel the safety in being completely honest in the answers to the questions, especially the open questions, which you've just mentioned, Krystal, there are quite a lot of those within the survey and it's really key that the people feel like they can speak honestly and without any fear of any repercussions. Another conscious choice was that it should be inclusive of all parents. So this is not a survey just for mothers. This is a survey for all parents.
And again, that's really, really important because, you know, relationships between parents are really interconnected.
let's be honest, the kind of treatment of people at work, you know, when they become parents can vary or people's experiences can vary depending on the gender that they are. yeah, we wanted to capture kind of full and transparent and really honest and raw responses, but then also to be able to look at that and look at variations in those themes and in those experiences, depending on kind of how you know your gender and how you identify so that was a really important choice for us as well. So if I just walk you very briefly through the PX process and if you want to see any more detail on this you can check out our website at www.theparentexperience.com. The process is very simple and as Krystal already mentioned this is a targeted piece of research with organizations to help them understand and to hear the voices of parents in their organization. So step one is a survey and it's a proprietary survey to us that is designed very carefully with a range of experts and that survey is released within your organisation for a period of time and then once the survey closes we work with the most amazing technical partner called Wholesum and again you can see more details about them on our website. Wholesum have been a partner of ours since the start and they are really excellent at analysing not just quantitative feedback, but qualitative feedback as well. We work with Wholesum on the analysis of the survey responses. From that analysis, we pull out a report. Each organization is given a score out of 10 for their overall PX score. But of course, the real meat on the bones is in the report and is in the insights, is in the translation of what people are saying.
And from that, know, Krystal and I will work with organizations to give recommendations and the beginnings of an action plan. So the organizations can really take what they've learned and what they've heard and think about how best to make meaningful changes that suit their organization. And we'll go more into kind of details of mechanics of that report in later episode but for now we just wanted to kind of loosely give you an idea of what the process is. Again it's targeted piece of research specifically for organisations wanting to become more family friendly, wanting to support people who are going through this early parenthood phase in life and to do it in a really kind of effective and targeted way. The whole process ideally wouldn't take more than three months but we can work and be flexible depending on the timelines of organizations. We have a couple of clients at the moment and we'll share more about that in due course and we're to have an episode with one of, or both of those clients actually, over the coming months to talk about the effect that it's had on their organization. So stay tuned to listen for that.
But yeah, it's a leap of faith, isn't it, Krystal? As all new ventures are. But we feel incredibly strongly about it. We think it's a simple concept, but we know that it will be effective. certainly Crystal's research has kind of proven the fact that when things are not known and understood at work, there are real human consequences of that carry that into their lives and people carry their lives into their work life as well. the two really are so interconnected that anything that a workplace can do to take away barriers and to not only take away barriers but to help and to support is not only going to help people at work, it's going to help people and in their personal lives as well in their family lives.
Krystal (25:21)
I think it's really, really useful for employers, know, for HR departments. It's a discrete piece of research that obviously saves them having to do all this themselves. But increasingly, you know, I teach HR professionals as part of my day job, so I'm a researcher, but I am also promoted from senior lecturer and I teach on post-graduates, there's a pressure on HR analytics.
you know, on, on, we need to prove the return on investment. And it's really, hard with people topics because so much of it is intangible. So you're talking about, you know, the parent experience ultimately for an employer is about retention. It's about performance. It's about reduced turnover. It's about reduced absenteeism. It's reduced present-dayism where people are turning up and they're not performing because cognitively or psychologically or physically, they're not well, they shouldn't really be there.
Rachael Jordan (25:46)
Yeah.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Krystal (26:09)
And it's really hard to demonstrate the return on investment sometimes for HR time on things or HR purchases. But when we've got this, as you said before, the metrics about your customer experience, your employee experience, it really does help justify why potentially we are paying enhanced parental leave and pay or why we're investing in a fertility treatment policy or why we're spending a lot of time supporting line managers.
So much is coming up in our research across various issues. So women's reproductive health, parental transitions, other EDI, other wellbeing topics is the manager burden, you know, the squeezed middle. We're expecting more and more of our managers and they are increasingly, they don't have the time, they don't have the authority, they don't have the confidence to really have some of these difficult decisions and invest time in things that can be hard and can be emotionally heavy, heavy topic. If HR can go back to the world and say, you know, look, we've got this score, we've got all this information, these qualitative comments on how our staff are really feeling. And particularly if you're going to track it over time, if your parent experience score's gone up because you've done X, Y and Z. It helps HR to have those conversations about, keep giving me money, keep letting me invest in this.
Rachael Jordan (27:15)
Yeah, yeah, know. Great, fine.
Krystal (27:23)
We don't just want employers who feel that they really want to improve their parent experience. We also want employers who are doing great for their working parents. We're able to market that externally. We're not just saying that we're good for working parents. Our working parents are saying that we're good for working parents. I think it's going to be great if we can get some of those really good employers is to look at those surveys and look at those scores and find out what exactly is it that they're doing so well that's making people happy? Because it might not be enhanced parental leave and pay. It might not be the stuff that costs a lot of money. It might be some of the stuff around psychological safety, around the fact that how does that feel that we can talk to our managers? And it's consistent. Because so often in our research, what's coming through is this line manager lottery. So what is it that organizations are doing where that's more consistent?
Rachael Jordan (27:59)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (28:10)
And it's not just I was lucky to have a good manager. It's because all the managers are good because of something that we're doing. So I am just so excited as a researcher, I'm so excited to see the themes that come through, the areas that, where are people or organizations generally missing a trick? And what are they doing on the other hand that is really, really resonating with people across these journeys? And I expect it will be some of the same things for the people who want to be parents and are struggling to become parents, is it because the culture, the policies are just discouraging that? The ones that are struggling with fertility, the ones that are returning to work, it possibly is going to be the same things that are landing well for different parents at different stages of the journey, as well as there being particular things along the journeys that may be being missed.
Rachael Jordan (28:36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
They're all such great points, Krystal, and we're both excited about getting to a point where we have that kind of critical mass of clients where we can do the most amazing share and reapply and do the industry benchmark reports. yeah, I think that the more clients that we, you know, have involved with the parent experience, I think the more we can push kind of wider national change in the UK, it will be so good to see the UK to become, you know, a great place to be a working parent. And, you know, we very much like to play a small role in that. nothing without us about us is, you know, very core to how we like to work. We have lived experience and we always want to hear the voices of people who are the ones bearing the brunt of it on a day-to-day basis.
Is it translating to people? Is it actually helping people? It's such a key decision within the PX structure as well.
Krystal (29:55)
Hmm.
It can make really quite simple things as well from my experience working with organisations. Sometimes the HR is doing everything right. All the policies are great. They've consulted with staff in the development of policies and stuff. And then there's just something about where they're sitting online that people can't find. Or people are new people, don't know about them because there was one communication when it was launched five years ago. I that's going to be a real value to employees as well. There's just quick fixes.
We've got all this manager guidance and training but staff don't know the manager having the guidance and training. So the staff member doesn't raise this issue because they think no one's talking about this issue. Because the manager guidance is a process that only managers can see.
Rachael Jordan (30:32)
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, definitely. heard something really powerful at a conference a couple of years ago, and it was a conference led by an organization called This Can Happen. And it was a lady on the stage, and she was so incredibly brave. She had stage four cancer. And she, at the point that she was diagnosed, she went to her workplace intranet and searched for cancer support.
She couldn't find anything. And her immediate kind of reaction was, no, like this is a disaster. Beyond the shock of being diagnosed with cancer, she thought that because there was nothing there that she could find within policies that there was going to be no support for her at work. And actually there was, it turned out to be, but it took her some time to get to that point where she could find out and understand you know, what help will be available. But imagine trying to deal with that diagnosis and then having the extra stress of, no, my workplace is not going to do anything to support me. And that could just be such a simple fix, like you said, making it really clear on your internet or shared drive, whatever it is, where it is, the employee communications that kind of go along with that as well. It's such a simple fix. And yeah, you're right. Sometimes what we uncover with the PX research process.
Krystal (32:01)
That resonates so much, I've heard the same thing in our research about IVF, type IVF into the internet, nothing. Therefore, probably I can't talk about this here. There is a narrow slip around fertility treatment in some spaces, but it's like a lifestyle choice. It's something you're choosing to do in your spare time. It's not a well-being issue. I'm not sick. So they kind of think,
Rachael Jordan (32:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Krystal (32:22)
I mustn't be able to talk about it. Quite often there will be provisions, again, same with post-natal depression. Whatever it is, if you're typing it into the internet or you're looking at the obvious policy where this would work don't think it's anything to do with them, you know, I have to deal with this myself with my health visitor or something, with my GP. So yeah, I think that those simple things can be so effective and for any organisation, even small employers, you know, who haven't got a lot of resource, those kind of signals that yes, you can talk about something here, even if it's just acknowledging the issue and signposting externally to charities or whatever, you know, it's something that signals we can talk about this at work.
Rachael Jordan (32:59)
we acknowledge that it's a thing and we acknowledge its importance and you know, this is what we're doing about it. It's so powerful. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Krystal.
Krystal (33:00)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rachael Jordan (33:12)
And yeah, we'll keep bringing the many guests that we have lined up and just to give you a flavor of what we'll be talking about over the next several episodes. We will be talking about brain health, cognitive health, and how to kind of support and think about that in the workplace. We will be talking about perinatal mental health, fertility journeys. We'll be talking about dads specifically, really, really excited for that episode. We'll be talking about supporting the LGBTQ plus community and parents within that community at work. And we'll be talking about neurodiversity. We'll be talking about coaching and senior leadership and role modelling, know, behaviours that you want to see across the organisation as it comes to parenthood. We'll be talking about pelvic health, we're going to be talking about legal aspects of what employers offer to employees. So all sorts of different perspectives and if you are listening and have ideas for episodes or would like to be a guest on the show please reach out to us at hello at theparentexperience.com and connect with us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you Rachael Jordan and Dr. Krystal Wilkinson. So I think that's our first episode. Okay see you in the next episode guys. Bye!
Krystal (34:24)
Thank you.
Yay, thank you so much.
Bye.
