The Family-Friendly Workplace: Inside and Out

By Michelle and Sharon Hollander

If you’re a working parent, you are doing your best to be present for your family while managing, or perhaps growing, your career. That’s no small feat, so looking for family-friendly features at your current job or the next is likely a priority. But what really makes a workplace family-friendly? Job security, fair wages and affordable family health insurance are a great start, but there are other considerations and some potential trade-offs.

Flexing time and place
As every parent knows, family schedules can be erratic: school concerts, snow days, dental appointments and all of the other sorry-but-this-has-to-happen-on-a-Wednesday-morning kind of commitments that come up throughout the year. Fortunately, many businesses provide some flexibility and may also offer choices for work location and hours, such as partial or fully remote work environments or modified start and end times.

In some cases, employers may support specialized work arrangements, such as:

A compressed work week
Employees complete their full-time hours in fewer than the five typical days in this scenario. This is often four 10-hour days or nine days over two weeks. Another variation involves taking off or leaving early on Fridays during the summer.

Job sharing
With this arrangement, two or more employees share the responsibilities of one full-time position, yielding often desirable part-time roles. In this situation, workers’ schedules may be complementary or overlapping. Job sharing is most successful if there are well-defined roles and collaboration among partners and their managers.

Participation in an asynchronous workplace
In this type of setting, employees collaborate and complete tasks without the need for real-time or face-to-face interaction. They can stay informed and pick up work at nearly any time.

Look for key policies and benefits
If you are thinking family-friendly, one of the first benefits that often comes to mind is paid leave for new parents. The good news is that in many workplaces, “maternity leave” has been replaced by more inclusive parental or family leave policies that cover a variety of caregiving situations, including birth of a child, fostering, adopting and even eldercare.
Beyond those important benefits, be sure to ask about:

Paid time off (PTO)
PTO usually includes sick time, vacation, personal days and holidays. Ideally, paid time off should be both generous and flexible. However, employers in Maryland do not have to provide PTO or vacation. The Maryland Healthy Working Families Act requires employers with 15 or more employees to provide paid sick and safe leave (used to address issues related to domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking), and those with fewer on staff to provide at least unpaid sick and safe leave.

Onsite or other child care assistance
The typical onsite child care facility is sponsored by the employer and designed for the convenience of working parents. Any help of this type is of tremendous value because child care expenses can make work itself unaffordable.

An employee assistance program (EAP)
These programs provide supportive services for employees and their family members, such as assessments, coaching, referrals and short-term counseling. Accessible help with legal and financial matters can also be very valuable.

Question the culture
Workplace culture doesn’t just happen. Companies create it, not with cute slogans and colorful posters, but with clearly defined values and a meaningful set of policies and programs that promote those principles. Parents almost always prefer a workplace culture that supports families and, importantly, ensures that caregiving and career growth are not
mutually exclusive.

Culture is then bolstered by effective education and communication. After all, family-friendly policies mean little if they’re not well understood. Programs and activities for families like Take Your Child to Work Day, company picnics or family volunteering are good indicators that a workplace is welcoming to parents and caregivers.

Understand your family’s priorities
Parents may dream about a perfect workplace where they can do their best for their families, their employers and themselves all the time, but the reality may not meet that goal. For example, smaller companies often can’t afford benefits like onsite child care, while larger companies may resist specific requests outside of existing policies. And some jobs simply can’t offer flexible schedules or remote work—and that includes roles long considered family-friendly, like teaching and nursing.

Ultimately, every family must decide what is most important to them, and family members in the workforce should seek opportunities with those priorities in mind.

We’re all in this together
Employers should want you to thrive both in and out of the workplace. A genuinely family-friendly organization attracts and retains the best talent and boasts the highest employee satisfaction. With better worker engagement and morale, loyalty and productivity are bound to go up while stress and absenteeism diminish. In different ways, work and home duties can support each other—a true win-win for everyone.