Employers always are looking for ways to support their employees. This improves productivity, performance, and retention.
One key area of support is for working parents. Because most employees have families, they make up a significant part of the workforce.
Working parents often deal with issues that affect their professional performance. Examples include taking time off to care for a sick child and needing to finish work early to handle family responsibilities.
As a result, employers who provide accommodations for working parents are more attractive to employees and job seekers. Taking small steps can result in a substantial impact on your organization with little impact on the bottom line.
Choose among these methods to provide support for your working parents.
Talk About Working Parents’ Needs
Find out more about what your working parents want help with most. You may want to begin with a survey to understand their issues, concerns, and suggestions for help. Then, you can use this information to begin discussions between working parents and management about methods to increase support.
You may want to identify a specific issue that many working parents face. Then, you could encourage managers to speak with their employees for more details. The managers could meet with HR and leadership to share feedback and discuss implementation methods.
Create a Parents’ Network
Encourage working parents to share ideas, provide support, and organize family-friendly activities. This may include creating an email chain for parents to swap out gently used children’s clothing. Or, parents might provide tips to ease the stress of raising children while working full-time.
Having this network helps fill working parents’ wants and needs by connecting them with the right individuals at the right time. You may want to create a dedicated intranet page or Slack channel to encourage working parents to join the network.
Provide Flexibility
Offer employees a flexible schedule and options for how they work. Examples include working remotely, hybrid, flextime, part-time, or having a compressed workweek.
You may want to make accommodations for when working parents’ children start school or change their childcare routines. This reduces the stress of fitting in work around childcare. It also increases productivity and retention.
Looking for Additional Advice?
Working parents appreciate help supporting their personal and professional needs. Talking about and accommodating working parents’ needs, creating a working parents’ network, and providing flexibility are effective methods to provide this support. This increases employee engagement, productivity, and performance. It also increases employee attraction and retention.
For additional advice to better support your team’s working parents, reach out to the professionals at Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Contact us today.
