Finalist
Building Fertility-Friendly Workplaces
Summary of work
Infertility affects one in six people. Those undergoing treatment often face many challenges that extend into the workplace, with only 1/3 of employees feeling supported by their employer. Yet despite the scale and impact, most employers remain unaware of the challenges their employees face.
Ferring recognised a lack of evidence to help employers understand fertility as a workplace issue and limited cross-sector dialogue.
Together with Fertility Matters at Work (FWAW) and This Can Happen (TCH), we aimed to reframe fertility as a workplace priority and empower employer action. To do this, we partnered to create an evidence base and Ferring convened cross‑sector experts and translated insight into tools, guidance and communications.
The programme is catalysing organisational change, with partner organisation FMAW seeing a 25% rise in organisations seeking support to become fertility‑friendly. The programme is also elevating fertility support onto policy agendas, with the new evidence being cited in Alice Macdonald MP’s 10-minute rule bill calling for a legal right to paid time off work for fertility treatment.
The programme is helping ensure that people on fertility and family‑building journeys are met with understanding, flexibility and psychological safety at work during one of the most challenging periods of their lives.
Judges’ comments
The ‘Building Fertility-Friendly Workplaces’ programme went beyond communications to actually change policy. It had strong evidence first approach that provided credibility for execution and targeting HR leaders and policy makers was clever and bold. A robust, evidence-based campaign addressing a significant workplace issue. The strategy to build a global evidence base proved highly effective, leading to media cut-through and tangible influence on corporate behaviour and public policy. This was a well-executed programme with measurable long-term impact.
