Toward a More Family-Friendly Workplace

This post was submitted by Kaylie Astin who recently launched www.familyfriendlywork.org - a website aimed at improving family-friendly benefits in the workplace. I hope you'll visit her site and contribute your own story!

When I heard Quentin L. Cook’s conference talk in April 2011, I did something I don’t usually do when I’m listening to General Conference: I stood up and cheered. “I would hope that Latter-day Saints would be at the forefront in creating an environment in the workplace that is more receptive and accommodating to both women and men in their responsibilities as parents,” he said. Over the next couple of days, I couldn’t stop thinking about his words. This was an invitation for LDS people to actively get involved in the fight for family-friendly workplaces. That conference weekend, I suddenly knew that’s what I was supposed to do.

Before his talk, I’d been thinking about these issues for a while. Like many women, I quit my job when my first baby was born. Actually, I quit everything. I thought I wouldn’t need any of my interests anymore because I was going to dedicate my life to my children. I’d forgotten to calculate that beneath the loads of laundry and baby blankets, my personality was still buried in there.

I was ambitious and smart. I liked to try new things. Money was scarce.

But I was nursing my baby and wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. My previous job didn’t offer any kind of maternity leave, except for the accrued vacation time I’d already cashed out. If I worked again, how would I find part-time work when most part-time positions would barely cover child care? And speaking of child care, what would I do with the baby while I worked? Could I ever leave my baby without soul-crushing guilt?

I wasn’t ever able to answer these questions to my satisfaction, so I spent the next few years making my way through a variety of at-home endeavors while taking care of the three children that eventually became part of the family. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not, but never well enough to dispel the desperation constantly haunting my brain.

So when Elder Cook spoke those words, I was already passionate about change, but I didn’t know what to do to help workplaces become more family-friendly. I didn’t have a conventional job where I could make a difference within the organization. Write a book? Become a career coach? Buy a plane ticket to Washington, D.C. and lobby Congress? There were many possibilities, but I was unsure about what direction to go, especially since I knew very little about business and didn’t have the credentials for most people to take me seriously.

I started by gathering all the information I could. I lived in the library, looking for books and perusing magazine articles. I found newspaper articles, reports, and research online. By the time I went to BYU’s Women in Business Conference in 2011, I’d been studying family-friendly workplaces for six months. Our keynote speakers focused their remarks on work/life issues. They cited studies and talked about how women could ask for the balance they sought. Throughout the conference, many women spoke about making decisions, finding mentors, feeling guilt, being criticized, and fighting against inflexible workplaces.

I realized what the world was missing—a place online for LDS working women to get information and to talk about these issues. How do you deal with guilt when you have to work even though you’ve always believed you were supposed to stay home? How do you go back to work if you’ve been home for several years? How do you ask your workplace for maternity leave or a flexible schedule if they’ve never given it to anyone else before?

I poured my research into the website. I wrote about issues such as sick leave, parental leave, flexibility, child care, and elder care in the workplace. I also included some issues specifically important to women—single motherhood, breastfeeding, re-entry, discrimination, and culture. I included a section about how employees, citizens, and employers can make changes. I also added a blog, a forum, and stories from real women in the workplace.

Then, in February 2012, www.familyfriendlywork.org was born! And I’m far from finished. I hope this site can become a place for LDS working women to learn how to make family-friendly changes in their workplaces, and I also hope working women can talk to others about the issues they face every day. This is one dream I felt inspired to pursue, and I hope my site helps working families everywhere.