6 Surprising Employee Policies To Attract And Retain Talent

Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash

As a parent, I know juggling work and family is hard. This is why you’ll want to check out this blog post for six baby-friendly policies your company can offer to show employees that you love kids! Some topics covered include maternity leave, breastfeeding, paternity leave, and flexible hours.

Having a work-life balance has become a priority in the UK. This means allowing your employees sufficient time away from work for weekends, national holidays, and annual leave to spend more time with their families, chill out, and travel to exotic places.

According to US News & World Report, flexible companies are likely to retain happy, enthusiastic workers for longer when it comes to variable work hours. So if successful companies, including Nestlé, Purina, Facebook, and MITRE Corporation, do so, we should follow their example.

Our Guide to the Top 6 Baby-Friendly Policies

We can plan how we spend time with family, chill out, and travel to exotic places. But, unfortunately, babies are not so willing. Instead, they can arrive unexpectedly, demand food when they want, catch all types of childhood illnesses, and go when they want to.

They need their mothers near them. So here are six baby-friendly policies to prove to your employees you love kids, so they, in turn, will think you are a tasty employer.

1. Flex Time — Putting a system in place that allows employees to work their hours when they want to — within agreed limits — is a beautiful way to help parents with babies meet both sides of their obligations. There are various options open.

• Freedom for employees to set their schedule
• Choosing how many days a week they want to work
• Switching from weekend breaks to mid-week breaks
• Working core hours with the freedom to flex outside

Flex-time is an excellent solution for expectant mothers who need to visit their gynae and young mums to go to ante-natal clinics.

2. Job Share — Allowing two employees with complementary skills to share a job works excellently with young parents because it gives them more time to bond with the baby during early, critical months. Again, both parties score because

• Employees can hold onto the position they want and come back to it
• Employers don’t lose out on their training investment in their talent

Job-sharing needs careful management to meet both parties’ aspirations. If not, we could end up with one-and-a-half employees — a difficult thing to explain to an accountant trying to balance a budget, not to mention a baby!

3. Part-Time Switch — In the third semester and during the first few years of life, the baby can demand so much of mum’s attention that a regular job is just too much for her on top of everything else. At the same time, she needs the money and the variety the job brings to her life.

She may also have a scarce combination of experience and skills you would not easily replace. Here are some options you might consider

• A temporary switch to part-time for, say, the critical first six months
• A longer-term arrangement working shorter hours than standard

These are great ways to help a mother — or both parents — find a perfect work-life balance between raising a family and affording it.

4. Work From Home — Any job done on a computer can be done anywhere in the world with an internet connection. This is the principle behind freelancing and the perfect solution for one or both parents if they want 24 / 7 access to their children.