what fathers want: how workplaces can support families
I was inspecting my stats recently, and was intrigued to discover that someone had found their way to my blog after googling "fathers unsupportive breastfeeding". I googled the same phrase and discovered that the link to my dads can bond easily with breastfed babies, even if they are not using any bottles.
Then I looked down the list, and found some other really interesting links, including this one, to the results of a survey of over 1200 working fathers by the Equal Opportunity Trust in New Zealand. It includes a list of suggested work-life initiatives for employers to consider, tips on how to research what fathers in your workplace would find most beneficial, and even a sample survey and a checklist to use if focus groups or informal conversations are a better approach in your workplace than a formal survey.
This is a type of work that I would really enjoy -- working with employers to make their workplaces more flexible and more supportive of employees who wish to make space in their lives for important unpaid roles, alongside their fulfillment of professional responsibilities. I am planning to develop an open enrollment workshop through our executive education program at Dively, sometime in 2007, on the topic of retaining employees who value both family time and workplace productivity. If anyone has suggestions about local employers who are doing a good job at this, please let me know -- I would love to be able to benchmark some local best practices.
I also want to thank the dads and granddads who attended our latest NEOBEAN organizing dinner on Saturday night. Their quiet support for breastfeeding mothers, and their willingness to wrangle the kids while the moms talked about what needs to be done to get NEOBEAN off the ground as a nonprofit, was most appreciated. We will have a paypal button on the NEOBEAN website soon, and we hope to complete the process of registering as a 501c3 so that we can begin accepting proper charitable donations within the next month!
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