Jan Dane has three young children, and after her youngest was born, she was hesitant to resume the 55-hour-a-week schedule she’d had before becoming a parent.
“I was reluctant to re-engage in the way I had been working before … with beepers for everybody,” she said. “That was the model for working I knew, and I knew I couldn’t do that and be a mother.”
For most working mothers this dilemma is familiar. And according to new research by Brown University sociologist Susan Short, it is compounded by the fact that working mothers are getting less and less of the traditional help at home from mothers, mothers-in-law and other females in the household.
“They’re just as likely to live with mothers and mothers-in-law, but these mothers and mothers-in-law are more likely to be working themselves,” Short said. In today’s work force, “women are more likely to be working in non-agricultural activities, both as young mothers and as older women.”
But many businesses – recognizing that the perfect balance of motherhood and career woman is increasingly difficult to achieve – are becoming proactive in an effort to retain employees.
Christine Heenan, founder and president of the Clarendon Group Inc., is one employer who has set out to make her business a desirable choice for mothers.
“I think the competition for good workers is not going away,” she said, “and to not recognize the competing demands of work and family is, ultimately, to lose your best people.
“The key is flexibility, and supporting new parents is a key element of it. Flexibility will be more of a hallmark of a successful workplace, going forward, for all jobs.”
Heenan came to this conclusion through her own experience. She had been working part-time at Brown, she said, when she decided to work from home, so she could take care of her newborn and 2-year-old.
“Everyone who has been a mother of young children knows that it comes with unpredictable demands in time,” she said. “I think a lot of women who take leave from the workplace do so not because they don’t want to contribute, but because there are too few employers that recognize that, inevitably, their most important job at the time is being a mother and getting that right.”
At Lifespan, where 75 percent of the employees are female, the company has found that flexible schedules are an important benefit.
“We sent out a survey to all Lifespan employees asking about work/life balance issues,” said Brandon Melton, senior vice president for human resources at Lifespan.
“The biggest issue was flexibility in their work schedules,” he said. “It was not so much the child care issues, but taking time to meet with teachers, to go to school concerts or to be a homeroom mother for a day. It was the hour here and the two hours there.
“So we’ve instituted a set of policies encouraging managers to be flexible with our employees.”
Heenan, meanwhile, has turned her own need for flexibility into a thriving business.
After leaving Brown, she worked from home as a consultant. Soon, she’d started working with neighbor Stacy Paterno, a mother of three who had also left her job to care for her children.
Eventually, the two moved from Heenan’s home into an office, where they now they have 11 employees, five of whom are mothers.
One of those mothers is Dane, who is now Clarendon’s managing director of public relations. The flexibility the job gives her is very appreciated, she said.
“The culture is result-oriented as opposed to ‘This is the time I spend at my desk.’ We have hours we have to be here, but we also have some flexibility,” she said. “This is an environment where if your kid is sick you’re definitely staying home.”
That doesn’t mean the responsibilities are lessened, Dane added.
“You find a way to work it out, where you’re still a functioning employee, but you don’t feel this yoke that you have to be tethered to your desk,” she said. “We all have laptops and we all have Sidekicks [a brand of cell phone]. Even though I work from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., if I’m at home and my Sidekick buzzes at 3:30, I have no problem taking that e-mail.”
At Lifespan, Melton said, the company’s flexibility is motivated by the desire to retain quality employees – and that effort starts with trying to understanding their needs.
“Over the years, I have found that the single best way I can keep a talented employee is to respect their lives as well as their work,” he said.
“If you respect people’s lives, they will do anything for you.”
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