employers

By David Shapiro & Giorgianna Venetis

Employers play a critical role in the lives of their employees, after all, the average person in the United Sates spends 8.9 hours a day at work in comparison to 1.2 hours they spend caring for others.[1] Employees, in every stage of life, should feel supported in the workplace. It is for that reason that partners in Colorado are teaming up to better understand family-friendly workplace policies and practices.

EPIC (Executives Partnering to Invest in Children), Essentials for Childhood (EfC) and Health Links have formed a strategic alliance to lead Colorado’s conversation about family-friendly employers. In June 2016, this alliance launched two initiatives to understand and strengthen family-friendly employment practices:

• The Family-Friendly Workplace Toolkit highlights best practices and the components of a family-friendly workplace. We will continue to update the toolkit with relevant examples of corporate best practices as more and more employers are adding family-friendly policies.
• The Family-Friendly Workplace Assessment assists employers to assess and evaluate their culture and benefits. Businesses of any size can benefit from utilizing the assessment. Upon completion, organizations receive a family-friendly score (FF+) and are directed to resources and coaching.

Business engagement has been a mainstay at EPIC since 2013 when the organization launched Colorado Business Reads, a corporate book drive that delivers books to children and families for summer reading while promoting the importance of language development and early literacy to employers. The success of the book drive led to EPIC’s Lunch & Learn Series and even further to EPIC leading Colorado’s discussion around family-friendly workplace culture.

Safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are essential to prevent child abuse and neglect and to assure all children reach their full potential. Essentials for Childhood (EfC) proposes strategies to promote relationships and environments that help children grow up to be healthy and productive citizens. Family-friendly employers are one of four key strategies in Colorado’s EfC Framework.

Healthy and safe employees are the key to success for any business – and for the overall economy. Health Links mission is to simplify how worksite health and safety get done. By doing so, Health Links helps build healthy, vibrant businesses and a stronger local economy. Health Links is a nonprofit initiative spearheaded by health and safety experts at the Center for Health, Work and Environment within the Colorado School of Public Health.

The early childhood sector can also benefit from incorporating family-friendly workplace policies and practices. We encourage you to take the Family-Friendly Assessment and utilize the resources and coaching that come along with it. Additionally, you can read more about what other organizations are doing on the Family-Friendly Workplace Toolkit which is available on the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership website. Together we can work to reduce work-life stress and ensure that employees with young children feel supported.

[1] U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Time Use on Work Days, 2014.