Making your workplace family-friendly and more equitable

A few months ago, a colleague and I had been working on finalizing a travel expense policy for our organization, and I asked him to add in a caregiver travel policy (helping to make it more possible for staff with young children to travel for work when needed) and a policy for reimbursing the cost of shipping breastmilk home when traveling for work.

I'm a recently-nursing mom of two young kids (ages 2 and 1 at the time we were writing this policy), so these ideas were on my mind. But I knew that there were so many others who have other needs in the workplace given their particular experience - experiences that I haven't or won't ever have myself. So I wanted to attempt to clear up some of my blind spots and seek other perspectives. I started by asking in a few Facebook groups for ideas and policy language that make a workplace more family-friendly and/or equitable.

Ideas began coming fast and furious - ideas I had heard of or implemented before, and ones that had never crossed my mind. There was everything from policies that define "family" broadly (so that employees without a traditional family unit have access to sick leave for their chosen family) to cash-in-lieu of healthcare benefits to adoption leave to "ramp up" return from parental leave (where parents come back from leave part-time but get paid full-time for the first few weeks) to credit cards for any staff who need them (since covering the costs for company expenses while waiting for reimbursement can be a hardship for some).

There were so many amazing ideas shared that it inspired me to pull together a resource bank of policy language and practice ideas into one place that could be shared broadly. One Sunday during my kids' nap, I opened up a Google Doc and started pulling it all together - the ideas shared there, as well as many of the policies already in place at my organization. 

If you are in a position to help directly influence the policies at your organization, use this resource to help you save time. If you are not in that position, pass this along to your leadership with a note encouraging them to take a look and see if any of the policy language here is helpful. Let's share widely and build upon these ideas together.

http://bit.ly/FamilyPolicies

What other policies have you experienced or heard about that make a workplace great? Comment here.

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