Cartoon coffee break: How to make childcare work with work
Wouldn't it be nice if all it took to provide your employees with quality childcare was burning a few job descriptions in a fireplace and then just waiting for umbrella-wielding nannies to come floating in on the breeze? But as much as we all can dream, there isn't a Mary Poppins solution to the current working parents/childcare issues impacting the workforce. Prepare for some harrowing statistics: To try to assuage these rising costs, more and more people have had to pull themselves out of the workforce (mainly women, and even more mainly, women of color) because the cost and time requirements weren't feasible with their full-time jobs. This has had an enormous negative impact on the fight for gender and pay equality too. All of this is bad, and there isn't a spoon big enough to hold the amount of sugar it would take to help that medicine go down. So if you want your working parents to keep adding value to your organization instead of telling you to "go fly a kite," it's on you to do something. And if you're lacking in ideas, here are two. There are currently a few bills in congressional debate to address the childcare crisis. But if you're waiting on Congress to act with anything resembling speed, you haven't been paying much attention to the U.S. Congress. But your organization can try to solve it and do so in the most U.S. American way possible, throw money at the problem! Adding a childcare subsidy into all your employment contracts is a good start. A few hundred dollars every paycheck specifically allocated for childcare can go a long way to help relieve the burden on parents. And it shows your organization cares about your employees' lives, not just their work. Paid family leave is also a great addition to support your employees and their families. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey in March 2021 found that only 23% of workers had access to paid family leave. Parents, kids and organizations benefit when the parents have appropriate parental leave options. The sound of increased employee engagement thanks to your childcare subsidy and paid family leave is something your people won't find quite atrocious. According to a worldwide Catalyst survey, parents with childcare responsibilities were 32% less likely to report an intention to leave their jobs when they had remote options. And if the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything positive (because 99% of what it's shown us has been top-to-bottom sad), it's that soooo many jobs can be done just as effectively remotely. The pandemic didn't negatively impact productivity when it forced us into remote and flexible work schedules. Productivity went up! Strict adherence to archaic 9-to-5 schedules proved to just be an arbitrary holdover of a bygone era, like, say, 1910 London. Letting your people work when they can work and have the freedom to handle their lives produces better work and happier people. Chim Chim Cher-ee. There's also a third way to support your working parents and the rest of your workforce that would solve many of these issues, but we didn't think it needed an entire section because it's pretty obvious: Just pay everyone more money. Don't be like the bankers in Mary Poppins. They and their oppressive working conditions were the bad guys. So if you want to do right by your people, you need to build a workplace that gives them the support and benefits they need to provide for their families. That's how you can make work a place that works for everyone.
How your organization can support working families
1) Provide some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious benefits
2) Chim Chim Chimprove your remote and flex schedules
Don't be a Mr. Dawes; work with your working parents
