family friendly workplaces

Supporting Family-Friendly Employers in Colorado

By David Shapiro & Giorgianna Venetis

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3acda11Employers 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.

Supporting Future Generations of Coloradans through Family Friendly Workplaces

By Hanna Nichols, The Civic Canopy

img_3036Parenting can be the most rewarding experience of one’s life, and it is also likely the most challenging. Having a career devoted to collaborative efforts supporting the needs of children and families, I know the powerful impact parents and caregivers have on children and the importance of working together to ensure families can thrive. But this desire and understanding became a much bigger reality when I became pregnant with my daughter Nora, born earlier this year. With 64 percent of children under the age of 6 with both parents in the workforce[i] and the United States being the only advanced country not to mandate any paid leave for new parents[ii], we can do more to ensure families are supported and children can thrive.

Even as someone armed with an array of resources and copious amounts of support through family, friends, and colleagues, navigating the world of pregnancy and raising a child is harder than I ever could have imagined. Receiving pre- and post-natal care, organizing leave from work, finding child care, and how it all plays into scheduling and finances adds a large burden to the everyday experience of caring for a newborn.

Every family deserves the ability to make the choices they need for themselves, but not all families have the opportunity of choice afforded to them. Many are overextended and struggle to make ends meet. I work in an incredibly supportive workplace that provided me with three months of leave, lactation accommodations, and a part-time position to return to so I can spend valuable time with my daughter. I have family nearby, which means I have the choice to use consistent Family, Friend, and Neighbor child care without a financial burden and have the comfort of knowing Nora gets to build strong relationships with family members who have tools and resources to ensure she receives nurturing experiences every day. The reality is that most families in Colorado are not in the same position with flexible work policies and child care options. In fact, 14 percent of Coloradans reported child care issues affected their employment in 2011-2012 [iii].

It’s exciting to see issues around family friendly workplace policies gain support nationwide, and to see early childhood partners working together to identify ways we can better support families in Colorado. To learn more about how you can get involved, take a look at the Family Friendly Workplace toolkit on the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership website, and make sure to keep an eye out for the next blog post later this month from partners with Essentials for Childhood and EPIC, highlighting how partners can use this toolkit and engage in supporting workplaces to meet the needs of families to create a more prosperous future for Colorado.

[i] U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.

[ii] Livingston, G. Among 41 Nations, U.S. is the outlier when it comes to paid parental leave. (2016). Pew Research Center.

[iii] Child Trends analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2014, reported in KIDS COUNT Data Center. Annie E. Casey Foundation.

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