Working Dad's Employer Awards 2023

If you are seeking to apply for the Working Dads Employer Awards, you can find full information and guidance below.

About the awards

The Working Dads Employer Awards by the  the Equal Parenting Project and Music Football Fatherhood, in order to celebrate the great work many organisations are doing in supporting fathers in the workplace. The awards also encourage employers to think more about what they do in this space and how they can better support fathers in the future to aid working families, attract and retain top talent, help close the gender pay gap and promote gender equality in the workplace. Partner organisations who have also been instrumental in bringing these awards to you include CBI, Business in the Community, CIPD, Working Families, Global Equality Collective, Pregnant and Screwed, Fatherhood Institute, Future Men and the Medical Women's Federation.

For the awards we have developed four key areas of focus based on existing research and common activity, which either represent best practice or areas where there is a need to drive improvement across the economy. Because we are trying to encourage positive activity, an applying organisation does not have to be excellent in all areas in order to be recognised through these awards. Organisations can be recognised for excellence in one area, such as flexible working, or they can be recognised for outstanding work across all four areas.

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The key areas of focus are:

  • Parental Leave policies
  • Flexible working
  • Support for returning fathers
  • Leadership and Culture

Within each of these areas the submitting organisation will be asked to input some UK relevant quantitative data, where they have this available, and answer some open-ended questions. The quantitative questions include areas such as the total part-time working requests by men accepted (in the last financial year, in the Flexible Working category) and the qualitative questions include areas like how your culture and leadership in the organisations helps support fathers (in the Leadership and Culture category). The application is designed not to be overwhelming but also to encourage a degree of self-election into the process (ie: organisations can choose which of the four areas they wish to submit to). The responses to the open-ended questions will be graded by an expert panel which will be made up of third sector organisations and academics, who are expert in this area.

If your organisation submitted to the 2022 Working Dads Employer Awards, you will see some additional questions around this.

Entry Criteria

Any employer that pays their employees holiday pay and has a presence and activity in the UK is eligible to submit an entry. Only one entry may be made per employer. Entries from all sectors/industries are welcome. Please focus only on activity in the UK and UK data in your entry and make sure that you have senior management approval to complete the nomination form.

Timeline

  • Monday 20 March 2023 - launch of nominations process (open for 5 weeks)
  • Friday 21 April 2023 - close of nominations process (11:59pm)
  • Wednesday 21 June 2023 - Award ceremony in Parliament

Confidentiality and anonymisation

All aspects of your application will be treated as highly confidential. We will share anonymised answers with the judging panel (assessors) for the awards. Should we wish to cite material contained in your application in a public way, for example, we will be sure not to disclose information that you have stated should not be disclosed. Other than your organisation name at the beginning of the document, we ask that you endeavour to avoid explicitly mentioning the name of the organisation throughout your submission to ensure it will be judged anonymously. Please note that should your organisation win an award in any category, the identity of your organisation will be made public knowledge and a case study will be produced to reflect the efforts made by your organisation in the selected category. By submitting the nomination form, your organisation agrees to support and contribute to the development of a best practice case study.

Entry Guidance

The following information is intended to help you fill in the nomination form.

  • Be clear and concise in your answers, use plain English and avoid acronyms.
  • Explain the obvious - remember the assessors will not be familiar with your policies and procedures.
  • Be sure to include any evidence of impacts where possible, including quantitative evidence. Preferably, this should be publicly accessible evidence (if possible).

Please refer to this Question and Answer document should you have any questions.

Supporting Information

Please note you are not required to add any additional supporting information that is not requested in the application and any additional information will not be considered by the panel of judges (assessors). Although, if you have publicly available evidence (ie: publicly accessible webpages, press releases, blogs etc) these weblinks can be included in your nomination submission where requested.

Character count

There is a strict character count noted for each of the qualitative questions and you will not be able to go over this character count on Qualtrics (ie: the platform the nomination will be completed on). Character counts are not a word count and the character count does include spaces.

How to Enter

Entries will be made through the Qualtrics survey platform. Qualtrics is an easy-to-use web-based survey tool used by Businesses and Researchers across the globe. Qualtrics meets the industry best standards. No word document submissions via email will be permitted so do make sure to use the Qualtrics platform to complete the submission. A word document version of the nomination form is available at the link below for the convenience of preparing the nomination submission for submission via Qualtrics.

It is possible to save your nomination on Qualtrics and come back to it later, but the deadline for the submission for nominations is 11:59pm on 21 April. Please note that there is no back button so please make sure you are very sure you wish to proceed before clicking next on Qualtrics.

Submission Structure

Entry is via the online Qualtrics platform only. You can decide to either enter your organisation for individual categories or across all areas but you must answer all qualitative questions (or enter ‘no applicable’) and as many quantitative questions as you can for the categories you are entering. We have supplied a word document version of the application to help you decide whether you would like to enter your organisation and whether you would like to enter for one or all categories.

Case Studies

One of the objectives of these awards is to celebrate best practice and encourage continuous improvement in how organisations support fathers in the workplace. In order to further this objective, we will be developing a series of written and filmed best practice case studies from a selection of organisations who have won awards. By nominating your organisation for an award, your organisation is agreeing to be involved in developing a case study in the event that your organisation is selected for the development of a case study after winning an award.  Case study organisations will also be expected to say a few words about their organisational practice at the Awards ceremony.

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