Menopause policy in an SME ?

[Shinyandnew2022]

Am in a line management role in a small company of approx 100 staff.
Curious to know if other similar companies have any policies to support menopause?

In my experience of similar sized companies, unfortunately not. It is something that I've heard talked about in the sense we "should" think about a policy, but the male senior managers tended not to listen to female senior managers and as ever, the female senior managers didn't push the subject. This was my experience in both my current company and my previous company.

support in what way?

uk.indeed.com/lead/supporting-employees-going-through-menopause

Thanks for the replies and the link @Casilero
I am debating whether to suggest it to our head of HR but am not sure where to start .

Perhaps I needed to ask a broader question about how many companies actually do have some guidance and support in place .

My friend trains companies in how to deal with menopause lots of companies have policies now. Isn't is a protected characteristic now?

SMEs generally only write policies when someone asks for them. If you don't raise it, then unless there's already a policy it's unlikely to be considered until someone else raises it.

Lol no. Sex is a protected characteristic and disability is a protected characteristic so I guess you could argue menopause falls into one of those categories. I do agree with you by the way and I do agree with @DogInATent that it should be raised so there IS a policy put in place.

I think I am definitely going to raise it - the HR lead is female and in her 50's so I don't think it will be ill received by her it's just whether the mostly male SLT are interested

I work in a school and they have recently written and implemented a policy to support the menopause. Realistically how that's going to work I have no idea as it's full of 'going home to change' 'having an hour off when needed for well-being' etc. I would never be allowed to do that and I can't imagine it going down well at all. Leaving a class half way through? Yeah right.

Thanks @queenofthebongo I am going to do some research on what's typical in these policies and see how it might work. I think the key thing for me is that i worried for a while that I wasn't fully functional mentally and I was scared of being pulled up on performance - it would have been nice to be able to tell someone what was going on and have a tiny bit of breathing space to get my GP appts etc .
We all work remotely so actually there is quite a lot of freedom - but it's fast paced as well .

I’m middle management in an SME, and we have a menopause policy. However we only developed the policy at the request of a public sector client in order to join their supply chain.
I only discovered the policy document by accident, the company certainly haven’t told us, the handful of female staff aged 35+ who may be experiencing menopause! Or told team leaders who may want to support their team members going through the menopause.

This sort of stuff depresses me !

Sadly this is not unusual. I've written a variety of policies for SMEs to meet the requirements of specific tenders. They get approved and theoretically adopted, but I usually have a better memory than they do of what they already have when the next tender rolls around.

The problem generating policies like this is that they all end up far too specific and you end up with dozens of very narrow policies that no one has time to manage in an SME rather than a few generic policy documents with specific clauses.

I run an SME and we have a menopause policy, I think it's vital that it's backed up by training and awareness. The key arguments than can be used to justify a menopause policy are - examples in UK employment tribunals where the tribunal has found in favour of a woman bringing a case using protected characteristics of sex, age and disability (because meno/peri symptoms last so long); to attract and retain women in late 30's to mid 50's, to encourage more women into leadership positions and not drop out of the leadership pipeline or work all together - hiring replacement staff with the knowledge and experience of the women in this age group can be very expensive.

Thanks @squix this is really helpful !
I actually think we are in a good position to do this We have recently created a really good set of tools to support mental health . I will pull a paper together I think and see where it leads . Has to be worth a try!