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How to support parents’ Work-life Balance (Beyond just flexibility)

People hardly drop out of work solely due to circumstances at work. More often, it’s because of a combination of work and life factors. For example, women are more likely compared to men to drop out of work. One of the reasons is that they are often still in charge of taking care of kids and older family members in addition to their jobs.

Supporting parents during one of their busiest life stages is therefore important, and increasingly, brands are aware of that. At CommerzBank, for example, mothers and fathers benefit from a broad range of company facilities, like childcare facilities and more flexible working hours and schedules. But also virtual childcare for their children, including options like story time, age-specific group activities, and one-to-one childcare to help with homework. In addition, they look into how they can support parents in returning to work after parental leave. With their Keep in Touch program, they offer part-time options of 10%, 20%, and 30%, and a guarantee of returning to the previous position after parental leave.

Particularly people with children and ageing parents have trouble with maintaining a healthy work-life balance. How can you be relevant to them?

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Kim Pillen

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Kim Pillen

Consultant

Before Kim Pillen started as a trend consultant at TrendsActive, she worked for four years as a creative strategist at Dept. For brands such as Philips, bol.com, Beiersdorf, JBL, and the Consumers’ Association, she built (online) campaign, brand, and social media strategies. After four years, she decided that she wanted to better understand people and society in order to advise brands more effectively. That’s how she ended up at TrendsActive. Here, she can do what she loves most: digging into people’s needs and then working with brands to see how and where they can be relevant and meaningful.

Douwe Knijff

Researcher

Douwe is fascinated by how people work. With a background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (Bachelor) and Psychology (Master) and an analytical mind he tries figure out how societal shifts manifest themselves through social culture and human behaviour.

Aljan De Boer

Keynote speaker

Aljan has been widely recognized as an inspiring professional speaker on the critical trends that will shape society in the decades to come. He works as the Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, a trend consultancy from the Netherlands using social science to human-proof business decision for brands like

  • Disney
  • Vodafone
  • Hugo Boss
  • ASR
  • Rabobank

Next to his role at TrendsActive he is the Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth where he inspires and connects a global community of +400 CMOs.  

He has been on the board of the Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing for almost a decade. Regular speaker and moderator for the Dutch Marketing Awards and 3 times winner of the best of MIE. 

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees his purpose is to help ambitious leaders and brands to human-proof their business. In 2003 he founded TrendsActive, a trend consultancy enabling brands to become more human centric.

Kees consults global brands like

  • Disney
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • Asics
  • Discovery Channel
  • Swiss Life
  • Vodafone

and many more.

Next to being the founder of TrendsActive, he is also initiator of the first academic trend master for executives at the University of Utrecht and is initiator of various trend studies and white papers on subjects like trust, meaning, visual culture & generations.

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Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist