Getting Started
Follow these steps to begin adopting family-friendly changes in your workplace.
Step 1. DETERMINE YOUR GOAL
Family-friendly practices will be more sustainable if they are grounded in your business strategy. Remember that family-friendly strategies are proven to contribute to employee recruitment, retention, and engagement when determining your goal.
Step 2. PULL TOGETHER YOUR TEAM
A representative team or task force will provide more complete information and will help create buy-in. The team should be representative of your workforce today and the workforce you seek to recruit. What does your team needs to know to move forward. Ask employees what their challenges are and what would help them.
step 3. Complete the best place for working parents® assessment
The Best Place for Working Parents® assessment evaluates 10 research-backed policies that are proven to benefit working parents and businesses’ bottom line.
Step 4. PRIORITIZE ISSUES AND RESEARCH POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Prioritize issues and research possible solutions. Use the resource guide in this toolkit as a starting point to explore options in more depth.
Step 5. CREATE A PLAN
Agree on what to implement and create a realistic timeline that focuses on high priorities and low-hanging fruit. Consider categorizing recommendations into a cost/impact grid. The low-cost high-impact recommendations are likely to come first, while high-cost low-impact ideas may be tabled as unattainable.
Step 6. COMMUNICATION and MARKETING
The implementation plan will need to include steps for communicating or marketing to employees and decisionmakers. A benefit or policy can only be utilized and enjoyed if your employees know about it.
step 7. EVALUATION
Build evaluation into your implementation plan. Monitoring and periodic evaluation provide an opportunity to tailor a policy or program and gives you the greatest chance for sustained success.
STEP 8. IMPLEMENT
Remember to use your communication plan and collect key data as you go, that way you’ll be able to evaluate and ground your policy/program with examples of success.