Women empowerment in the workforce is increasing rapidly, in terms of higher roles that they assume early on in their career, while being able to juggle responsibilities to manage both work life and home fronts. Need for better lifestyle choices and greater desire to pursue a successful career with plentiful allowances, perks and benefits are some of the reasons women continue to work.
According to United State’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labour forces participation rate of mothers with children under 6 years old has reached up to 64.2% while the mothers with 6 to 17 years old dominates to 74.4%. This study was conducted in 2015 with projections to show increasing numbers in the near future.
Today’s statistics pops up a new paradigm towards duties that women partake – to include pregnancy, phase of maternity and child-care responsibilities. However, these increasing responsibilities do not make women flinch from the efforts and desires to continue working and pursue their careers.
See also : Can Woman Have It All? 5 Strategies For Work-Life Balance
To help working-moms fulfill their career aspirations, here are some simply creative ideas that HR professionals and the top management could implement to retain ladies in the workforce and avoid talent attrition:
With lactation awareness growing significantly, a lot of mothers prefer to breastfeed the babies rather than giving them readymade milk. As moms return to work after maternity leaves, an employer could support their needs to breastfeed by providing a proper lactation room.
The lactation room doesn’t have to be a super comfortable one but it should meet the mother and child care needs with chairs, tables, fridge (to keep the pumped breast milk temporarily) and the locked door.
By providing this room, the working mommies can do pumping whenever she wants without interrupting the workflows and tasks.
To meet the daily deadlines is vital, so HR professionals and the top management could offer more flexible work arrangement to the working mommies. Having babies or children is not easy and issues might happen anytime unexpectedly.
Rather than to strictly determine the arrival and exit time sheet, employers could offer permission for late arrival and earlier time to retire from day at work, as long as the tasks are successful accomplished in the working hours and work does not suffer.
It is critically important to provide a smoking room or specific areas where employees can smoke without impacting others health, especially working moms who are pregnant. The smoking room or an area is an exclusive room allocated for smokers, who cannot effectively resist the urge to smoke during work hours.
An office with a clean and hygienic standards of maintenance is vital to ensure employee well being, especially those working moms (and the pregnant mummy to-be’s). Scattered paper, dirty and messy desks, unhygienic bathrooms and shabby equipment could invite more bacteria and germs. This could endanger the mommies’ health, to impact employee’s concentration levels at work as well.
One specific way to enhance employee’s engagement at work, especially those of the working moms is to organise a fun family event. Every business has it’s own way of building teamwork. Activities such as group outing, lunches for team at work and more fun family events.
In the event, employers could also invite the members of employees’ families to participate in fun activities such as sports and light games. The bonding of the families with the company culture would support development and growth of each other. This further contributes to better engagement at work.
To sum it up, organisations should offer support systems for working moms and those to-be with a good work-life balance that could boost engagement, enhance productivity levels while retaining key talented women in the workforce as well.
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