Some companies help employees juggle work and family responsibilities in various ways, including:
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allowing employees to work part time or to share a job
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allowing employees to put in some of their work hours at home
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allowing flexible on-site work hours
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allocating dependent care spending accounts
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providing specific child care benefits, including emergency care programs, onsite care centers, employer-arranged discounts with local care providers, and
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providing additional assistance to employees, such as counseling and seminars on work and family issues.
If you feel that one of these options is feasible in your workplace and would make your life more manageable, talk with your employer. Better still, come to the talk armed with success stories of similar set-ups in local companies.
1. Work-at-Home Agreements
These days, many jobs use computers as essential tools. And computers can easily be transported or hooked up to communicate with the main worksite from various locales. Many other kinds of work are also portable and may lend themselves well to work-at-home arrangements for employees.
These arrangements often involve an agreement between the worker and the company—best if it is in writing—that spells out who is responsible for any legal liabilities that arise from the work-at-home arrangement and how worktime will be measured.
For example, a work-at-home agreement may specify that you are responsible for any damage that occurs to a company-owned laptop computer while it is being used in your home. Most homeowners’ and renters’ insurance policies do not automatically cover business equipment, so you may have to purchase additional coverage.
Also, check the agreement against the wage and hour laws to make sure that neither you nor your employer would be breaking the Fair Labor Standards Act through your work-at-home plan. In general, if you are not an exempt employee, the wages and hours provisions of the Act still apply even when you are working at home.
2. Flexible Workhours
In many urban workplaces, where rush hour commuting makes for immense amounts of downtime, 9 to 5 workdays are all but extinct. In fact, a growing number of employers everywhere are putting less credence in the rigid Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 workweek and allowing employees to adopt more flexible work schedules.
When this idea was newer, it was referred to by the high-tech appellation of flextime. Flextime is not a reduction in hours, but simply a shift in the times employees are required to clock in and out of work. An increasingly popular flextime option, for example, is the ten-hour/four-day workweek, as it gives employees at least the illusion of a three-day weekend. Since flextime employees usually maintain 40-hour workweeks, they lose no benefits—such as health care coverage or vacation time—in the bargain.
3. Counseling and Other Benefits
Many employers now make employee counseling an integral part of their discipline procedures. That is, fewer employees are surprised by being fired from a company, since more have had the option of getting some form of counseling first—to improve their work performances, to help them conquer drug or alcohol abuse problems, to help raise awareness about potential sexual harassment.
And more enlightened employers now also offer employees a number of seminars and workshops more indirectly related to the workplace—workshops on building self-esteem, dealing with long-term health care for aging parents, and First Aid and CPR certification. These educational workshops not only train employees in more valuable skills, they also have the more nebulous value of improving morale.
At some workplaces, employees have taken the initiative in setting up their own workshops during lunchtimes or after work hours. Volunteers from local special interest groups—the Red Cross, stress management groups, battered women’s shelters, self-defense trainers—are often available to present the training free or at a very low cost.
