We were in a piece this morning on NPR's Morning Edition about babies in the workplace (Is The Workplace The New Babies R Us?). W.S. Badger, the company that was featured in the piece, is one of the companies we helped in recent months to start a babies-at-work program from scratch; their enthusiasm for the program and the benefits they saw for their business are discussed in the piece.
My books about babies in the workplace are now available directly from Amazon (Babies at Work: Bringing New Life to the Workplace and How to Start a Babies-at-Work Program. They are also available from Barnes & Noble's website (Babies at Work, How to Start (and a number of other distributors. They are also available for the Amazon Kindle (from the same Amazon pages).
On another topic, the babies-at-work seminar registration is closed. I'll announce when the next one is available.
Learn everything necessary to successfully propose and implement a baby program!
Registration is now open for a babies-at-work seminar in Massachusetts on March 14, 2009. Registration is limited to the first 25 paid participants. The seminar will feature a baby (with parent) for firsthand illustration of concepts. More details are on our Babies in the Workplace site.
PARENTS:
Save thousands of dollars on day care, bond with your baby, and make breastfeeding easier by learning how to successfully bring your baby to work for their first six to eight months of life.
EMPLOYERS:
Easily and inexpensively implement a successful baby program that will:
Get new parents back on the job sooner (and happier!).
Increase morale, teamwork, productivity, and retention.
Lower health care expenses by enabling mothers to breastfeed.
Attract new customers and build customer loyalty.
Result in highly-content and quiet babies.
LEARN:
How to overcome skepticism and convince management to start a program.
Why structured babies-at-work programs result in unusually happy and calm babies.
How to set up a sustainable program that will be enthusiastically supported.
Effective methods for keeping babies happy while efficiently getting work done.
All the benefits of babies-at-work programs for businesses, families, and society.
RECEIVE:
Template documents to streamline setting up a new program
Baby development resources for parents for happy babies and efficient work
Two Valuable Books: How to Start a Babies-at-Work Program and Babies at Work: Bringing New Life to the Workplace
Questions: Contact Carla Moquin at (801) 897-8702 or Email Me.
I'm moving forward with setting up seminars to provide HR people, parents, academics, and anyone else who's interested with a complete understanding of why baby programs work and how to set up sustainable ones. I'm focusing on the Boston area for the moment (until things take off financially with this work) but would love to do seminars on a nationwide basis. I'm going to have a baby present at each seminar (with a parent, of course) to illustrate relevant principles such as how happy babies tend to be when they're held in a carrier close to the parent, how happy babies tend to "soften" a room of people and create a feeling of community, and how babies tend to thrive (and remain highly content) with regular social interaction. I already have seven moms and babies eager to help out (as needed--only one will attend per seminar) in the Massachusetts area, and I'm confident I can find parents and babies around the country to fulfill this component of the seminars. I'm spending most of my available Institute time focusing on getting things set up in the very near future and am really excited to see where this might lead.
In other news, we're in an article in the January 4, 2008, edition of the New York Times, in the Business Section: Maternity-Leave Alternative: Bring the Baby to Work. I'm hoping that this article will help to jump-start the seminar effort and really bring this concept to the general public. Especially given the current economic situation, I think this is an idea that could dramatically, immediately benefit thousands of parents and businesses--particularly now that we have the liability insurance policy available to virtually eliminate that potential concern.
The babies-at-work liability insurance policy is done! The policy was created by the Lester Kalmanson Agency and it has been officially approved by Lloyd's of London--when a company decides they want coverage, Kalmanson can have a policy bound within about 24 hours from getting the necessary information and payment. The policy will cover babies up to 240 days of age or crawling, whichever comes first. I'm hoping to eventually work with Kalmanson to create policies to cover older children as well--we were focusing on getting a babies-at-work one done first, though.
A big thing that I am recommending to companies (especially given the current economic situation) is to consider asking participating parents to help out with the cost of the insurance. In many cases, the entire cost of the policy could be covered by what parents would otherwise be spending for a few weeks of day care for their baby (in larger companies, there are more participating parents to spread out the cost).
I hope to get the policy application form and details onto the babies-at-work website for download later this week. If you are interested in seeing the details in the meantime or have any questions about the policy, please contact me directly--(801) 897-8702 or email me.
I am heading to the San Francisco area this morning and will be there until late Wednesday--if anyone has suggestions of organizations or individuals that might be interested in meeting to talk about parenting in the workplace, I'd love to hear about it!
In between Thanksgiving festivities, I decided to channel my worries about getting long-term funding into creating more template documents and getting them online for people to use in successfully implementing babies-at-work programs. So, as of now, people can download the following editable Word documents from our Files area:
1. Complete template babies-at-work policy (as one document and as individual parts)
2. Detailed description of business benefits
3. Explanation to be distributed to other personnel upon starting a policy
4. Sign for parent-participants' desks (for bank tellers and others that interact with the public)
5. List of issues for HR to discuss with parents prior to a baby starting to come to work
6. Description of representative baby-friendly companies
Enjoy!
I need help.
For those who haven’t been following this movement, I’ve spent the past three years analyzing babies in the workplace--business programs in which parents can bring their babies to work with them every day and care for the babies while doing their jobs, generally until the babies are six to eight months of age. I founded the Parenting in the Workplace Institute in December of 2007, and we’ve had tremendous media and public interest in this work since then (Time Magazine, People Magazine, USA Today, and many others--and there are a couple of huge pieces to come in the near future). We now have a list of more than 115 companies that actively allow babies to come to work (affecting more than 1,300 babies to date)--and in every organization with even basic guidelines, these programs work incredibly well and provide extensive benefits for businesses (and for families, of course) with almost no costs for the organizations.
We have all the materials and resources ready for businesses to use to start successful programs. We’ve already helped several companies to start new, highly-effective policies. My books about babies in the workplace are finally done. We have the attention of the media. Put simply, we have an inexpensive, proven solution for core work and family issues that could make life dramatically better for millions of families and thousands of businesses--particularly in the current economic climate. Parenting in the workplace--and the fact that it works when structured well--could quite literally revolutionize work and family balance around the world.
The problem is that I have no idea how to get support for this work so that I can really make this take off. I stumbled onto the babies-at-work concept three years ago. It became my passion because of tremendously painful experiences in my own family that would have been avoided if I had had this option. I want to do whatever I can to prevent other families from experiencing the difficulties we did. Our Institute is in a position to help millions of people. And it’s driving me crazy that we have this tremendous opportunity to change the world--but I’m spending 90% of my time working on other things. I’m working as a legal secretary and doing freelance transcription--because those things pay the bills and enable me to support my two daughters.
I’ve been talking to major organizations around the country for months trying to find one that wants to partner with us (and that wants to share in the media interest that is almost certain to come once we help more companies to start babies-at-work programs) so we can launch our babies-at-work pilot initiative on a large scale. I’ve had lots of interest and made lots of great contacts, but they haven't been in a position to offer funding. I have a detailed proposal all written up and ready to go--I just don’t know who else might be interested in it and be in a position to get this going. If I could figure out how to effectively market my books, that would help solve the problem, since income from the books would free up more time to focus on this work. But I’m at a loss. I understand babies in the workplace and I understand how to help companies to start successful programs. But I apparently don’t understand how to raise money.
So, I’m kind of putting this out there. I don’t usually talk about problems--I tend to focus on the positive in life. But I am running out of time, for various reasons--as are millions of families and businesses that could benefit from adopting these programs.
I would be immensely grateful for any ideas.
It's been a very busy several weeks. I've been calling every work/family, women's, mother/father rights, and child development and well-being group I can find to try to establish partnerships and/or find potential funders to keep this work going. I have a number of great prospects and have been getting a very positive reaction from nearly everyone I've talked with. Nothing concrete yet but lots of great possibilities.
I also finally discovered a very reputable, nationwide insurance company that is interested in potentially setting up a liability policy specifically for babies-at-work programs--detailed discussions should start this week or next if all goes well.
I'm exhibiting tomorrow at the Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition's Annual Conference to disseminate information about our work--should be a very productive day (although I'm not looking forward to getting up at 4:30 a.m. to get there on time--Boston traffic is crazy).
I'm working on a script for a short YouTube video to attract attention to our work and to explain and illustrate the basics of these programs. Given comments to recent major blogs (by other people) about these programs, it's clear that many people still haven't even heard of these programs, much less understand how feasible they are for many organizations. I hope to get a video done and online by the end of this week.
By the way, we recently went live with a completely new Babies in the Workplace website--it's much more accessible than the old one. The baby-friendly company list is now all on one page, and the descriptive content is all new and a lot more focused.
Today's New York Times has a front-page article discussing Sarah Palin's combination of political career and motherhood, describing how she regularly carried her son Trig in a sling to hearings and nursed him while signing bills and performing other official tasks. Palin is hardly the first government official to bring her babies to work, though--the Democratic Governer of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who was reportedly on the short list for Barack Obama’s running mate, took her two infant sons to the office earlier in her career. Governor Sebelius was actually responsible for starting a babies-at-work program in a Kansas agency that has now been adopted by more than 20 other agencies.
This variation on integrating work and family has drawn heated discussion in recent days, particularly related to how bringing a baby to work isn't an option available to most Americans. But the Parenting in the Workplace Institute is working to change that. The Institute is launching a "pilot program" initiative to actively start more formal programs in which parents can bring their babies to work every day for approximately the first six months of life (or until crawling, whichever comes first). The first company we helped to set up a structured program, HometownQuotes, has been thrilled with the results--see their press release and the first article discussing their program (more media coverage is expected in the coming days).
The Institute's work is based on the experiences of more than 102 confirmed organizations that welcome babies in the workplace. More than 1,300 babies have successfully come to work with their parents in these businesses. Companies in more than 30 states and encompassing more than 20 different types of businesses have reaped huge benefits from offering parents this option. The fact is, when babies-at-work programs are set up just like any other business policy, they work--and they are enthusiastically supported by managers and coworkers (even many who were initially very skeptical of the concept).
The Institute has already enlisted two other companies to start baby programs in conjunction with our initiative and we are currently seeking many more large or small organizations. We will provide everything--for free--that a company will need to set up a successful babies-at-work program, including copies of my recently completed books and an award-winning lactation support program through LifeCare for the first 50 mothers that participate in a pilot program.
If you wish to help us to transform the integration of work and family and increase the options available for parents and babies, please consider donating to our efforts. We welcome referrals to companies that might wish to participate in the pilot or individuals that wish our assistance in proposing a program (the Institute phone number is (801) 897-8702). Regular updates on our efforts will be posted on this blog.
