A new book was released this month called “The Custom Fit Workplace: Choose When, Where, and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line” has business owners thinking about employees and mothers in a new way. As Google and other startups paved the way to build happy work environments, the notion of being a “great place to work” has become a goal for many companies. Although the start up world has added pin ball machines, bean bags, bright colors, and martini Mondays, larger corporations are applying the concept in more applicable ways. Some companies like Yahoo, offer a shuttle bus that will pick you up from San Francisco and bring you directly to the Yahoo campus. Many other companies offer cafeterias with high quality, healthy food as well as recreation areas for exercise such as basketball and volleyball courts, gyms, and even provide bikes to get from one part of the complex to another. For the younger crowd, this may seem like an obvious ROI for employers to have healthy, happy employees, but it was wasn’t too long ago any of these efforts ever existed.
Going a step beyond having ergonomically correct chairs, organizations like MomsRising.org* (2010, Forbes.com named MomsRising’s web site as one of the “Top 100 Websites For Women.”) is pressing upon companies to incorporate more flexible work situations for mothers. This is a 24/7 work culture and leaving the office doesn’t necessarily mean leaving work. The question still haunts most of us; will we be good parents or successful businesswomen? Men and women are under pressure to balance work and life commitments: being a good husband/wife, raising children, caring for aging parents, or just trying to find time to take care of themselves. In many places, it is difficult to imagine going form dual income to single income and even more daunting the thought that if you leave your job, you will most assuredly be replaced or left with whatever role is waiting for you.
“The Custom-Fit Workplace” has important and far-reaching implications for the way we work and improving not only people’s lives but companies’ bottom lines. This research-based book presents flexible work tactics including work-from-home arrangements, results-only work environments, babies-at-work programs, and successful career lane changes, among others. Perhaps surprisingly, Jet Blue, Ernst & Young, Best Buy and the University of California are among the companies that have already positioned mother and family flexible policies, which are detailed in this book. A TIME Magazine article called “Brining Babies to Work” may have been the inspiration of Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas, founders of MomsRising and authors of “The Custom Fit Workplace”. It not only showed that babies are not any more of a distraction than the water cooler conversations or Fantasy Football, they have also shown to boost morale. “We have tended to have this myth of the separation between work and family,” Secret says. “In reality, that never existed.” Read More
by Terra Khachooni
*MomsRising.org <http://www.momsrising.org/> is an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to achieve economic security for all families in the United States.
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