How to Create a Family-Oriented Small Business

It’s widely known that diversity in the workplace brings a wide array of benefits, including a greater talent pool, new, fresher perspectives, and better employee performance, to name a few.

One good way you can improve diversity in the workplace is by having family-friendly benefits and becoming a family-oriented small business.

That’s especially true if we know that research shows that more than 94% percent of companies state that introducing family-friendly arrangements and greater flexibility increased overall employee satisfaction.

We decided to explore this topic, providing employers with tips and tricks on how they can make their company more family-oriented.

What is a family-oriented workplace?

To put it simply, a family-oriented workplace is one that allows employees to balance their families and work more easily, by crafting and implementing family-friendly policies. Usually, such workplaces have family-oriented incentives and benefits, including adoption benefits, parental leave, flexible leave, and childcare benefits to name a few.

How can you become a family-oriented business?

You can become a family-oriented business by creating and, more importantly, sticking to policies that are centered around employees’ well-being. We’ll show you what some of those policies are, and how can they help you become a family-focused business:

Offer paid parental leave perks

While most European make parental leave mandatory, this is not the case in the US. If you’re a business operating in the US, you should consider offering paid parental leave to your employees.

By doing this, you’ll support your working parents in the most important role of their life, but also ensure their retention. 

Hiring a new employee is much more costly than retaining one. So why not try to give the best you can do to keep your current employees?

Take tedious and time-consuming tasks off your employee’s list

Sometimes the best way to become a more family-centered employer is by taking tedious and time-consuming processes off your employee’s shoulders, allowing them to focus their energy and time on more important things.

By doing this, they’re more likely to improve their overall performance and productivity and save enough energy for after-work activities.

Luckily, there’s a wide array of tools that can help small businesses and their employees thrive, ranging from invoicing software to leave tracking, HR, website, and blog management tools.

Add flexibility to your workplace

Studies have shown that working in a more flexible workplace improves employee morale, reduces stress levels, and increases productivity. Flexibility in the workplace is especially important for working parents since they can arrange their responsibilities and chores in a way that’s most convenient for them. Furthermore, flexibility allows them to avoid feeling guilty because missed out on important events in their child’s life (school plays, doctor visits, and so on), or lied to their employer about why they called in sick.

There are many ways you can introduce flexibility in your workplace. Flexible schedules and telecommuting opportunities are among the most frequent perks companies offer. 

However, flexibility in the workplace poses another set of challenges, that can be bypassed easily, given all the tools we have available, ranging from project management and task tracking to employee time and leave tracking tools.

Lastly, an important thing to remember is to stay focused on the results, not the actual hours employees work.

Offer childcare perks

Let’s be honest: having kids is expensive! The best way you can support your working parents, and create a more family-oriented workplace, is to offer childcare perks and subsidies to alleviate the financial burden that came with the new family member.

Paying for child care services in full might be too much for small business owners. However, even a small incentive will help lift a huge weight of working parents’ shoulders.

Become a child-friendly workplace

If you want to become a more family-oriented business to allow working parents to bring them to work as needed. Many parents with older kids who go to school also experience organizational problems. For instance, kids might have one or two days off a month due to holidays, and parents who do work during these holidays might have a hard time finding a sitter or someone to watch the kids while they’re at work. Allowing them to bring kids to work during those days will alleviate some of their organizational problems, and help them focus on their daily work tasks in a better way. 

This, actually, doesn’t have to cost anything. You can use the meeting room when such days come, or kids can stay in their parents’ offices, in case they have one.

Provide supportive scheduling

According to the research, around 40% of parents said they left their jobs because their employer wasn’t flexible enough. Offering supportive scheduling such as compressed workweeks, part-time, and job-sharing opportunities will help employers become more family-oriented, decrease absenteeism, and increase productivity with minimal cost.

Make mental healthcare your business’ priority

Being a parent might be overwhelming at times. Working parents might struggle to tune their job-related commitments with their parenting duties, which can cause a wide range of emotions, and have an impact on their productivity and quality of work. 

You, as an employer who cares about the employees’ well-being, can offer mental health support perks that will help your employees avoid burnout and be their best selves year-round.

Final Words.

Successful businesses have a few things in common: they’re diverse, flexible, and put their employees first. One of the best ways to nurture and grow a high-performing team is to allow your employees to thrive by providing help and assistance for all aspects of their lives. Good employers make sure their employees grow professionally but, more importantly, they make sure they have the right conditions and environment to do so. Allowing employees to fine-tune their personal and professional lives by becoming a more family-oriented workplace is one way of doing it.