Today, August 5, the Kosovo Womens Network (KWN) organised a workshop with KWN members who applied to the Kosovo Women’s Fund to work toward introducing and implementing the EU Work-Life Balance Directive in Kosovo.

Participants discussed the content of the EU Work-Life Balance Directive and strategies for working with employers to design family friendly policies that would enable employees to better balance life and work, as provided for in this EU Directive.

Indeed, evidence suggests that establishing family friendly policies at the workplace can contribute to increased employment of women, men having more time with their children and directly to a country’s economic development through the increased employment of women and more successful companies.

Activists plan to use these skills gleaned through this workshop to support employers in Kosovo to improve their internal policies and practices so that employees can better balance life and work.

Kaltrina Veliqi, a representative of NGO Drugëza, emphasised that local cooperation is very important to achieve a work-life balance and to create family-friendly jobs.

“We need to use the directorates in our municipalities and assembly members who can provide support in pushing forward these strategies to get employers engaged and to implement the EU Work-Life Balance Directive,” she said.

Participants discussed paternity leave, working from home, flexibility for breastfeeding mothers, employer incentives for fathers, and childcare spaces at work, among other potential policies that employers could introduce.

They discussed positive examples of companies that have created some such policies already.

“This workshop helped me learn more about what we can call Family-Friendly Workplaces and that we should incorporate these practices as soon as possible in our country as well,” said one of the representatives of the organizations.

This workshop is supported by UNFPA as part of a regional initiative funded by the Austrian Development Agency.