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Any family friendly employers?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How important is your family life to your employer? Should they even bother to think of your family at all?
Happy employees translate to committed workers and can lead to actual increases in productivity rather than their feared losses in productivity related to “family-friendly” efforts. When scouting out potential employers, if your family is important to you, consider whether such benefits as flex time, telecommuting, dependent care options, accessible day care, substantially above average benefits for maternity or adoption leave are available.
For those who don’t have kids (and many that do), does the company acknowledge that flexibility related to the care of elderly parents is also important? Scoping this out early in the job search can help you avoid the less-than family friendly workplaces.
Consider your present work setting, is it family friendly? I’ve seen some excellent family friendly benefits associated with some great companies but they’re not cheap. Even if the bottom-line doesn’t cover the premium family-friendly benefits, there are ways that don’t impact earnings but do make the workplace more family-friendly.
How about flex-time, partial telecommuting, being able to schedule extended lunch breaks while making up the time by staying later? Other options might be partnering with local daycare centers or elderly daycare locations to offer discounts to employees or at the very least identifying daycare and elderly care locations that are easily accessible to the workplace.
Is your workplace paying any attention at all to the needs of your family and the fact that you might be pulled in one or more directions by family responsibilities? In some places, I’ve observed that the childless, the partner-less, the pet-less or the parent-less seem to be the only ones who get ahead.
Unrealistic employer expectations that show preference to workaholics and those who don’t have a life are stressful and damaging to the family. Certainly if you work in such a place, it’s your responsibility to your family to carve out time for them or find something else, but don’t you think employers should be cognizant of the stress placed on employees when work policies discourage a balanced family life?
How family friendly is your workplace? Have you worked with the people who get ahead because they can drop everything and cater to the boss’s every whim?
Comments
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By Andy
February 23, 2007 8:10 AM | Link to this
I have found that submitting resumes directly to employers is not the best route to go - I now believe strongly in submitting only to recruiting agencies - the reason - they want to place you and have an inside contact that they are in communication with already. I like ThinkEnergyGroup, and guys like that. Oh, and never try and go around a recruiter to get to the interviewer - it always will backfire on you