Paige Jackson – a senior figure at Birmingham-based social enterprise Radical Childcare – told the BBC on 6 June: “I’d really like the incoming government to focus on offering more options for childcare within workplaces – so, having crèches and nurses available onsite. We don’t currently have that … and it should be a necessity. It’s a right, rather than a luxury.”

Her comments emerged just one day after a Financial Times piece highlighted the emergence of “workplace hybrids” for childcare, in which professionals can set themselves up to work in the same building in which their children are being supervised.

One of the case studies in the article is Singaporean IT manager Mischa Beitz, who remotely oversees the Malaysian arm of a Chinese IT firm from his location. Beitz explains that he uses local facility Trehaus – a co-working space with a crèche – adding: “You only get to have kids at this age once. I would feel like I was doing my kids and myself a disservice if I didn’t make some sort of effort to spend as much time with them as was reasonable.”

However, the article notes, “co-working spaces with integrated childcare are rare and typically run as social enterprises or as parent cooperatives”.

While we wait to see whether Theresa May’s new government will formulate a more imaginative approach to childcare in UK workplaces, what kind of steps should organisations implement themselves to improve this stressful area of their employees’ lives?

“This really does highlight the gradual blurring of boundaries between home and work,” says The Institute of Leadership and Management's CEO Phil James. “It makes perfect sense that if you want to maximise the time you spend with your children, then having them near you while you’re working – but in the care of professionals – is a productive solution. If we extend this model further, we could encompass care of older people – or, indeed, any other caring obligations that people have.

“Perhaps what we’ve done over the years is separate work and home too much, and now we’re coming back to a looser scenario, where we’re able to accommodate every aspect of our lives and not have to divide them so sharply.”

For James, there is “huge scope” for the public sector to lead the way on this new attitude to care. “For example,” he says, “in Sweden it’s quite common for universities in the middle of towns to open their refectories up to the general public – so there’s less of a sense that students are being filed away over here, while retired people stick together over there. There are opportunities to model caring services along those lines, so they are closer to the doorstep of where workers need to be, dramatically reducing employees’ commuting time.”

He adds: “There is so much to be done in this field – and I think this should encourage organisations to reconsider how they perceive their staff. You are employing the whole person, not just the physical article who turns up for work with the relevant skills. Acknowledge the holistic whole of the employee, and make every effort to accommodate all their various aspects. The rewards you will receive in terms of loyalty, talent retention and improved engagement make an enormously compelling business case.”

For further thoughts on how to look after your employees’ happiness, check out this previous Edge article