By Norton Rose Fulbright, supporting partners of Family Friendly Workplaces UK.

At Norton Rose Fulbright, we see family-friendly working not as a standalone initiative, but as a core part of how we build an inclusive, high-performing and sustainable business. For global employers, supporting parents and carers is increasingly a test of culture, leadership and long-term organisational performance. The question is no longer whether family-friendly working matters, but how it can be meaningfully integrated into the day-to-day experience of their people. The answer, for those whose businesses span the globe, is shared values while recognising and responding to local needs and contexts.

A strategic priority

As workplaces and wider society continue to evolve, we recognise the need to regularly review and strengthen our approach to ensure it remains relevant, effective and genuinely inclusive. Family-friendly working is not static, nor is it one-size-fits-all. However, through listening to our people, via our networks and conversations, we repeatedly heard that flexibility, trust, wellbeing and predictability are critical enablers for parents and carers. We decided, as a business to prioritise family-friendly working as part of our strategy to attract and retain talented people through all life stages.

As a global law firm, we are ambitious by nature – both for the business and for our people – and we aim to foster b high-performance, high-support culture. However, alongside intent, we also need accountability and the global standards demonstrate that we’re guided by the same values and commitment to family-friendly working, even when we operate across different legal, cultural and social contexts.

Globally consistent, locally relevant

This drive for consistency led to a deliberate and evidence-led approach to strengthening our family-friendly commitments across both the UK and Australia. In Australia, Norton Rose Fulbright became one of the founding supporting partners for the Family Friendly Workplaces certification, and we were proud to become the first law firm in Australia to be certified. In the UK, when the opportunity arose to support the scheme, we saw a valuable opportunity to deepen collaboration across our regions and further strengthen our collective approach to supporting parents and carers across the firm.

In our experience, the core needs of parents and carers are universal, but the way those needs are experienced, and the form effective support takes, is shaped by local circumstance. For global employers in particular, certification can offer a common framework and language that supports alignment across regions, while learning from each other and applying that approach in ways that are meaningful locally.

This is why we believe family-friendly working requires both global ambition and local action, which has shaped our approach across the UK and Australia. In Australia, our work has focused strongly on recognising all types of families and caring responsibilities, moving beyond traditional or gendered assumptions and ensuring our policies reflect the diversity of our workforce. In the UK, our approach has continued to evolve in response to growing recognition that caring responsibilities extend across many different life stages and circumstances.

Shared learning

In both regions, the most valuable lesson has been that a shared commitment can be strengthened by cross-regional learning, which we have seen first-hand. Experience in Australia helped inform the introduction of a cultural and religious swap policy in the UK, giving colleagues greater flexibility over how leave is used in recognition of religious observance, cultural practice or personal significance. More broadly, both regions have continued to strengthen their support for parents and carers through initiatives including enhanced parental leave, paid fertility leave, paid carers’ leave, support for pregnancy loss, return-to-work coaching, and childcare and eldercare support.

More than just policy

While these are important measures, policy alone can only ever be part of the picture. For us, genuinely family-friendly working is shaped as much by culture and everyday behaviour. Policies can create the framework, but they only have real impact when they are understood, applied consistently and actively supported in everyday working life. In practice, this means creating an environment built on trust, where flexibility is supported and enabled and colleagues are supported to manage their professional responsibilities alongside caring commitments, and where leaders set the tone by focusing on outcomes rather than visibility. Leadership in family-friendly working recognises, not just that an organisation has a policy, but that people experience can access support in practices in ways that help them progress and perform at their best.

An opportunity for reflection

Certification reaffirmed the strength of what was already in place and helped sharpen our focus on what could be enhanced or evolved to reflect changing needs and expectations. Being able to take a pause from day-to-day delivery and look holistically, one of the clearest insights has been the importance of visibility and storytelling in making support tangible. Colleagues need to see not only that policies exist, but that they can be used in practice. In the UK, our Because Family Matters campaign helped bring this to life, with colleagues from across the firm sharing their personal experiences as parents and carers. That visibility helped normalise conversations about care and flexibility and reinforced that family-friendly working is relevant across roles, business areas and career stages.

A catalyst for improvement

Working parents and carers are not one homogenous group limited to one life stage, they reflect a wide range of experiences, responsibilities and transitions. If organisations want to retain talented people over the long term, support needs to reflect that complexity. Certification has helped us test that more rigorously. While we had a strong foundation of family‑friendly policies and practices in place in both regions, aligning ourselves to independent, evidence‑based frameworks was critical to assess how effectively these commitments were working in practice. It has given us a framework for reflection, action and continuous improvement, and has reinforced our belief that high-performance culture and a supportive culture are not competing priorities but are in fact mutually reinforcing.

At Norton Rose Fulbright, we believe the organisations best placed for the future will be those that combine clear ambition with practical action, and who set a strong organisation-wide commitment to supporting parents and carers that is translated into locally relevant and consistently supported and embedded.. Because ultimately, the measure of a family-friendly workplace is not simply what is written in policy. It is whether people feel able to build a successful career while also meeting the responsibilities that matter most in their lives.

Alison Deitz, Australia Country Head (July 2025 – June 2026)

“Our Family Friendly Workplace certification , which we have held since 2021, together with our role as a founding partner of the Workplace Standards, reflects our strong and enduring commitment to supporting families and carers across our organisation in Australia. We are proud of our inclusive, family friendly policies and provisions, which recognise the diverse responsibilities our people carry and enable them to perform at their best while caring for those who matter most.”

Kate Evans, Chief People Officer – EMEAPAC

“Creating a high‑performing, high‑support culture requires deliberate, practical action. That includes listening to our people, role‑modelling supportive behaviours, and ensuring our policies and offerings genuinely enable flexibility and progression. As a multigenerational workforce navigates technological change and evolving ways of working, organisations need to be intentional about how support is designed and how it is experienced. This is where the certification has been truly valuable, as it has enabled us to assess, strengthen and evidence our approach both in the UK and Australia.”

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