Parenting in the Workplace Submission to Google Contest
This is the 30-second YouTube video about Parenting in the Workplace that I submitted to Google's Project 10 to the 100.
Google's Project is a "call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible." Over the next few months, Google will be choosing the top 100 ideas from the submissions and then opening the contest up to worldwide voting on January 27, 2009, to select the top 20. A team of experts will choose the best 5 ideas from there, and Google will then devote
ten million dollars to funding the organizations that are best positioned to successfully implement the ideas.
My overall description of the concept (for the Google submission) is:
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Concept Idea:
Helping and encouraging businesses to set up sustainable, low-cost programs in which parents care for their children at work while doing their jobs.
There is growing evidence that millions of today's jobs can be done successfully while parents are simultaneously caring for children. At least 100 organizations in more than 35 states in the United States (and several in other countries) have established programs allowing employees to bring their pre-crawling babies to work every day, involving more than 1,300 babies to date. Baby-friendly businesses (which range from 3 to 3,000 employees in more than 20 different industries) have discovered that, within a well-structured program, allowing babies in the workplace costs an organization almost nothing and provides extensive business benefits, including employees voluntarily returning to work earlier after a baby's birth, higher workplace morale and long-term productivity, increased retention, better recruitment, and higher customer loyalty.
These businesses have demonstrated that babies thrive and are highly content in structured workplace programs and invariably end up creating a community parenting dynamic in which many coworkers bond with the babies and voluntarily assist in their care for brief periods. These programs have proven successful even though many people were highly skeptical of their viability prior to implementation (these same people often became staunch supporters of structured programs after seeing how well they worked in practice).
The keys to widespread implementation of these programs are (1) grassroots and media outreach to mitigate skepticism about program viability and to provide education about program benefits for businesses and (2) assessing and disseminating information and resources to businesses (on a worldwide scale) to enable effective program implementation. The first component is already happening considering that, just in 2008, baby programs have been discussed in Time Magazine, People Magazine, USA Today, and U.S. News and World Report, as well as in media pieces in Australia, Hungary, Denmark, Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, and Canada.
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Views of and comments on the video are appreciated, to help illustrate that this concept does have widespread interest!
