Don’t underestimate the value of working for a “Family Friendly” employer

This last week, my family had a slight medical emergency. I took off and took care of my family. Now any employer has a few reasonable choices here. Mine asked me if everything was alright, if there was anything that they could do. One of the project managers offered to watch my kid for me while. This was overall an overwhelmingly positive response and way more than I had expected.

Although this got me thinking, when I mention employer, I’m really talking about the environment the organizational culture supports and then the actions of the people I report to. I know that my time at my current employer is not infinite and it isn’t terminal either. This got me to wondering…..

If I were to go out and look for a job, how would I know whether the place would be “Family Friendly”? I figure that I’ll need a few things to make this happen. First I’ll need a boss who I can work well with. Perhaps this is even a boss I can trust. This has played out very well for me in the past, and sometimes rather detrimental, but every time this has set the tone for my experience in the organization.

The organization I work for right now is the poster child for family friendly organizational culture. They recognize that if you are at work all day worried about your health or the health of those around you, money issues and any one of life’s interesting detours that you are most likely not going to be as productive an employee as you could be. Now they are not going to hand you a big bag of money (in all fairness I’ve never asked), but they will do all they can to assist.

This is where I think it’s going to be tough to find this in another employer. In many ways I would move to a much more commercialized environment, with deadlines, and perhaps even back in to marketing where there are crazy deadlines and is instead the antithesis of family friendly. The competitive, fast paced nature of the work draws me to this type of corporate culture.

Perhaps there is a corporate culture that balances out awesome performance and family friendly. And let me be clear what I mean by family friendly. I’m not talking about taking a few days every month to watch sick kids at home. All I’m really talking about is being able to take off in a pinch and not have my department come crashing to a halt.

Finally there is one that my wife had me add, and I know that it’s true but I really hope I don’t rely on it. Something she mentioned that sounded a lot like know what you can influence. Her point was that I really don’t have to find an organization that is family friendly for all of its employees, but for my job at the company. There are lots of jobs within a company and they key for my success is that I negotiate the proper arrangement so that I create a culture around me and not be concerned about everyone’s interpretation of the culture.