This past summer I had to attend a class in Kansas to satisfy my PhD requirements. I got to meet Ellin, a cute 2-year-old. Anna, her mother is writing about motherhood and PhD work. Having met Ellin, I can understand her pull to discover how others have dealt with juggling work and motherhood and life, and also with her dedication toward making changes for herself and for future generations.
Having had two kiddos myself, missing out on activities of theirs due to work was always tough to rationalize, and now that I have academic demands as well as work demands, there are aspects of their lives that I invariably miss now too.
One thing that pops into mind more and more as I read these articles of hers, is that there is so little investment by schools and by organizations to support mothers and fathers in their day-to-day lives to make them more effective in their studies and in their work.
What I mean by this is that we’ve just had a young supervisor in our department have a new little daughter, Olivia. super cute, and delightfully healthy, this new supervisor took her 6 weeks off for maternity leave and is now struggling to get back to work. I say struggling because lately, the entire family has been dealing with the various infections, viruses, etc that normally crop up when babies enter the family and begin going to daycares.
I remember this same stage of life that my wife and I had to contend with when our two boys started daycare as well. Then there are the demands of picking up the children from daycare and pre-schools, the cost that feels like a huge anchor, the sick days my wife and I had to take, the missed meetings, the projects delayed etc etc. It’s a tug-of-war of emotions, and guilt and an advanced-level work-life balance game. Does anyone win? I would argue no. We have other ladies in our department who have the same struggle with sick kiddos, and more, so it’s almost a never-ending cycle.
Our organization is about 80-85% female and most of them are in the beginning of their careers and just starting families. What I’m getting at is that what I’ve described is not uncommon for our workforce. Yet, at no time has our organization looked into any type of out-of-the-box thinking regarding daycare, or time off, or maternity and paternity leave that might help our workforce. I’ve always wondered to what degree we might change our employees’ lives, loyalty, and dedication to the organization and career growth opportunities if we sponsored an onsite daycare.
We already have a clinic that supports our operations and work, but we don’t use it to help our workforce in the challenges I describe above. Several onsite doctors to help diagnose and treat work injuries for our clients, why not an onsite pediatrician to help our workforce? We already have a very loyal workforce for a multitude of reasons, I wonder how much more we could help that workforce in their family planning, family life, workforce retention goals, personal career goals and more if we stopped following what the rest of the country does and decided that not all organizations are the same, that not every company is a square peg, but maybe looked at our workforce as unique and our capabilities are unique and tried to find ways to meet the needs of our employees and their families in more supportive ways. Your work definitely makes for some interesting thoughts!
No comments:
Post a Comment