Amy Hilbrich Davis, founder/CEO of inspiring Moms contributed this post as a Featured Guest Blogger. Inspiring Moms helps leading companies increase employee engagement by providing working parents with the strategies and tools to achieve greater balance, success and happiness in their family life. Davis is also the mother of seven and author of the award-winning balance MAP.
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama shared a vision for how we can reinvigorate America’s competitiveness by out-innovating and out-educating the rest of the world. Specifically, he identified our collective accountability to invest in the future of our children.
“That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities.”
Increasing the success of our children is complex and there is no single solution to this issue, but one thing is certain: we will not achieve this goal without setting our mothers up for success.
As we look to increasing the health and success of our children, we need to recognize that it starts with the mental, emotional and physical wellness of our mothers. There is a large body of research demonstrating a positive relationship between maternal mental health and both more effective parenting and children’s cognitive and emotional adjustment. And while moms want to feel successful in work and their family life, the majority of moms don’t feel successful as mothers. According to internal research conducted by inspiring Moms, almost 2 out of 3 mothers in a survey sample of 1,000 feel like:
- They aren’t doing a great job as a mom;
- They aren’t effective at managing competing priorities;
- They aren’t in control;
- They aren’t thriving as a mom.
What may be surprising is that there is no significant difference between full-time employed, part-time employed or stay-at-home moms. This issue affects all kinds of mothers and their children.
In order to increase the success of our children, we must help our mothers achieve greater success in their family life. There are three practices that can be implemented today that will help achieve this goal: a flexible workplace, training and development for motherhood and supporting nursing mothers in the workplace.
Workplace flexibility has moved from an employee benefit or accommodation to a proven strategy to increase business performance and shareholder value. The report from Corporate Voices for Working Families titled “Business Impacts of Flexibility: An Imperative for Expansion” provides an evidence-based business case on how and why the flexible workplace positively impacts talent management and human capital, resulting in better business and financial outcomes. To a working mom, it allows her to proactively manage the schedule conflicts between work and family life with reduced guilt and stress. And while the flexible workplace provides a proven and sound foundation, it is necessary, but not sufficient.
The earlier findings on mothers’ feelings of success suggests a lack of knowledge and confidence in what it takes to be successful in this role – independent of employment status or the amount of time spent with kids. This clearly demonstrates the opportunity and need to provide formal learning and development for the job of motherhood. Despite its importance, motherhood is the only job with little to no training, yet we know training works. U.S. companies spend over $125 billion annually to increase the success of their employees in the workplace. As we look to out-educate other countries to maintain a competitive advantage, why wouldn’t we apply this proven best practice to the job of raising a family?
I founded my company, inspiring Moms, on the insight that professional development for motherhood would help mothers be and feel more successful. Our program uses the science of personal and family wellness and provides mothers with the strategies, tools and proven solutions to create greater health, happiness and success in their family life. Our award-winning online tool, the balance MAP, uses a 15-minute self-assessment to create an individualized action plan to help each mother reduce stress and solve her greatest challenges. When a mother feels happier and more successful in her family life, she is a more focused, engaged and productive employee.
Another practice that will help set mothers up for success is workplace support for nursing mothers. One of the most important decisions that a new mother is faced with after the birth of her baby is whether to breast or bottle-feed. While 75 percent of mothers start out nursing their babies, only 17 percent actually achieve the Surgeon General’s recommended goal of six months of exclusive breast-feeding. This is such a concern because breastfeeding provides significant and proven health benefits to both mother and child. While this decision is personal and hinges on a number of contributors, the inconvenience and awkwardness associated with pumping at the workplace is a huge barrier for mothers to overcome, both mentally and physically. Corporate Voices provides valuable insight and a toolkit to address this important opportunity.
Corporate Voices is also planning to release an updated and expanded version of its current workplace lactation toolkit to specifically address the barriers facing nursing mothers in hourly positions. The changes in the toolkit will reflect a new amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires employers to provide both time and space for nursing mothers to pump at work.
The success of our mothers cannot be underestimated in importance or value. As Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once observed:
“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters much.”
At the heart of innovation is seeing old problems in new ways. Since Sputnik, the lives of moms have become increasingly more complicated and demanding, yet we have provided them few resources or tools to help. Helping mothers succeed, not just at work, but in their family lives, is an approach that will strengthen our nation and our business community. The President summed it up with his challenge:
“And so the question is whether all of us – as citizens, and as parents – are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.”
On Thursday, February 11, 2011, Corporate Voices for Working Families’ Ready by 21 team facilitated a “peer learning” call with the Ready by 21 Southeast Communities on business engagement. Corporate Voices provided an overview of its series of business and community tools, and in particular the Supporting the Education Pipeline: Business Engagement Toolkit for Community-Based Organizations, focused on helping private and public leaders in communities build and sustain partnerships to strengthen the workforce readiness pipeline. The communities on the call: Northern Kentucky; Richmond, Va., and Nashville, Tenn., shared successes and current challenges with engaging businesses. The call spotlighted two issues these communities are facing that are not new or uncommon:
- how to identify business leaders in their community-wide efforts
- what role business partners may play
In terms of the best way to identify business leaders in community efforts, the Business Engagement Stakeholders Wheel: Identifying Business Leaders in Your Community proved to be particularly helpful during this call. The Stakeholders Wheel provides communities with a listing of different business organizations and business leaders as potential partners. Corporate Voices recommends reaching out through local business associations, such as the local chambers of commerce, Rotary Club, Lions Club and Kiwanis.
Corporate Voices’ Call to Action, Ready by 21 Business Engagement Menu: Increasing Communications Between Business and Community Leaders benefited the community leaders because some of them were looking to reengage business leaders in their efforts and they needed to brainstorm different roles and ways business leaders could contribute, beyond financial support. The business engagement menu provides different categories and ideas for engagement: provide employee supports, be an intern sponsor or mentor, be peer-to-peer business champion, be an advocate for workforce readiness policies and be engaged through your company’s corporate social responsibility/philanthropy departments. In particular, the idea that community leaders could leverage the participation of a current business champion to recruit his/her peers into the work was very well received.
Another idea that specifically resonated with the local leaders was asking a business leader to provide an in-kind donation as a first step in building a partnership, such as meeting space for a community-wide meeting.
Like many communities, those on the call wanted some real tips and tools to utilize when looking to further strengthen their partnerships with business leaders to ultimately improve outcomes for all youth, especially those who are disconnected. Through the Ready by 21 National Partnership, Corporate Voices continues to aide community leaders in ensuring that business is actively at the table helping to support the workforce readiness pipeline. Corporate Voices will soon be releasing a Community Engagement Toolkit for Business Leaders to assist business in cultivating relationships with community leaders, and a Survey Tool for community Leaders to assist them in surveying business leaders around their existing community engagement efforts.
Corporate Voices is a proud member of the Ready by 21 National Partnership, a group of national organizations working together to improve the odds that all youth will be ready for college, work and life. For more information on Corporate Voices’ tools, or for questions on upcoming trainings, please contact the Ready by 21 team.
Building on the momentum of last year’s White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor held a National Dialogue on Workplace Flexibility in Pasadena, CA on Thursday, February 17 focusing on the unique challenges and solutions of using flexibility with an hourly workforce.
This National Dialogue in Pasadena was followed by a Regional Dialogue in Seattle, WA the next day, which focused on workplace flexibility in the health care industry. Both highlighted best practices among local employers that have demonstrated their use of flexibility as a strategic recruitment, retention and management tool for work-life and business success.
Over 450 participants representing the business, research, advocacy, government and labor communities attended the Pasadena Dialogue, where Joan C. Williams of the Center for WorkLife Law described the challenges facing today’s businesses and working families:
“Today’s workplaces are designed for 1960s’ families. 70 percent of American families with children have all adults working… Americans are living longer today and hospitals release patients quicker and sicker, relying on relatives to nurse ill family members back to health… We need to modernize the workplace to meet the challenges of the 21st century workforce.”
Williams went on to outline the unique situation and challenges facing the one-third of Americans who hold low-wage hourly jobs, as detailed in her new report, “Improving Work-Life Fit in Hourly Jobs: An Underutilized Cost-Cutting Strategy in a Globalized World.” Williams’ report draws heavily from a report Corporate Voices for Working Families published in 2009, “Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers,” which was researched and written by WFD Consulting, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The thrust of Williams’ report emphasizes that both the schedule instability (last-minute scheduling changes at work) and excessive schedule rigidity (inability to change break times or shift schedules) common with low-wage hourly jobs is simply incompatible with the lives of low-income families and the realities they face. Many low-income families have to raise children, care for an ill family member, and often have to cope with frequent and serious health problems in the family. Scheduling instability and rigidity, then, create child care and elder care conflicts which often result in high rates of absenteeism– 500 percent for some businesses– and in a pattern of “serial quitting” among low-wage hourly workers.
As Secretary Hilda Solis said during the opening remarks:
“It is very hard for someone who works in an hourly low-wage job to take time off– there is a fear on the part of the employee for retaliation [for caring for a family member]….As we work to out-educate and out-innovate the rest of the world, we need employers and employees to work together to create a better balance in work-life issues.”
Williams’ report frames “work-life fit” and the use of workplace flexibility as a strategy for businesses to adopt more effective schedule techniques to better retain their workers, lower their turnover rates, lower labor costs and therefore be more competitive in the global economy. As Williams said:
“Flexibility is about competitiveness, it’s about women’s economic empowerment and it’s about the global war for talent…If we apply human intelligence to scheduling, and to breaking old habits, we can use flexibility to harness the talent in our labor market and to increase economic self-sufficiency for the low-wage segment of the workforce.”
The employers on the panel at the Pasadena Dialogue gave clear examples of how flexibility helped improve their competitive edge. Rosalind Hudnell, Chief Diversity Officer and Global Director of Education and External Relations at Intel said that with 11,000 hourly workers in the U.S., the company’s “manufacturing technicians are the heart and soul of our businesses.” Intel offers flexible scheduling, a parenting re-integration program and reimbursements for back-up child care as ways to promote better work-life balance and lower turnover.
And Jennifer Piallat, Owner of Zazie Restaurant, showed how effective scheduling can lead to enhanced business performance in the small business and restaurant industry. Piallat offers her restaurant staff 401 (k) retirement accounts, a health plan and fixed, long-term schedules. Workers who need an extra day off or need to swap shifts arrange for a co-worker to cover their shift. Piallat says that in an industry with high turnover, she hasn’t had to hire new staff in five years. Why does she offer her hourly workers these benefits? She said:
“Before I owned Zazie, I worked at a restaurant for 20 years, and I was always one month away from being homeless.”
So although empathy plays a role in how Piallat manages her hourly workers, she also sees the direct payoff. Zazie has the highest labor costs compared to other local restaurants, but it also has the highest profitability and the highest retention of workers.
In Seattle the next day, Ellen Galinsky presented data from the Family and Work Institute’s 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, which showed that 75 percent of employers in the health care industry use flexibility as a strategy to meet organizational goals, compared to 65 percent of employers in other industries. In health services–an industry that is 75 percent female– therefore, flexibility is commonly seen as a business strategy, and not an “accommodation” for employees.
Maureen O’Keefe, Vice President of Human Resources and Strategic Planning for St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Boise, ID, described the flexible work options and supports the Center offers its workers, including: telework, shift work, job-sharing, on-site daycare and walk-in clinics for ill staff members. St. Luke’s also offers flexible schedules for students who are continuing their education. O’Keefe said:
“We approach flexibility as a business need– to change the delivery model of health care.”
Kimberly Giglio, Director of Talent Acquisition at Multi-Care Hospitals in Tacoma, WA, also described how her clinics use flexibility to offer workers a way to balance the dual demands of work and life, and to specifically complete on-site degrees and apprenticeship programs.
The common thread running through the discussions at the Pasadena and Seattle Flexibility Dialogues was that workplace flexibility is a business imperative that applies to many industries, to large businesses and small, and can be used to reduce labor costs with a low-wage, hourly workforce to give businesses a competitive advantage in the global economy.
Corporate Voices has long believed in the business imperative for flexibility, and has published research highlighting how it can effectively be used with an hourly workforce. Corporate Voices has also published useful implementation toolkits to help expand the use of flexibility within the wider business community. And, it launched a national workplace flexibility campaign after the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility to create a broader awareness of the positive business and employee benefits of flexibility. It is now showcasing best-practice employers as “Business Champions” in this national campaign.
As Secretary Solis said in Pasadena– as we work to out-educate and out-innovate the rest of the world, let’s also recognize how effective uses of flexibility can help modernize our workplaces to better meet the needs of 21st century families and businesses, so we can be prepared to “win the future.”
Amy Hilbrich Davis, founder/CEO of inspiring Moms contributed this post as a Featured Guest Blogger. Inspiring Moms helps leading companies increase employee engagement by providing working parents with the strategies and tools to achieve greater balance, success and happiness in their family life. Davis is also the mother of seven and author of the award-winning balance MAP.
