Bringing baby to work: Disrupting or not
Allowing employees to bring newborns to the office may sound crazy, but it helped my business thrive by Gay Gaddis at FSB.
When four of my top employees told me in one six-week period that they were pregnant, I realized that their good news could spell disaster for my advertising agency, T3.
We had fewer than 25 employees at the time, and the soon-to-be moms were our head of publicity, a media buyer, the manager of print production, and a senior account executive. Each had client and supplier relationships that were vital to our business. Plus, conducting four executive searches at the same time would be costly.
So I decided to try something radical. A few months before they left for maternity leave, I invited the women to bring their babies to work when they returned. From my own experience as a mother of three, I know what a horrible feeling it is to leave your very small baby in the hands of someone else.
While juggling work, you're also distracted by concerns for your child: Is she safe? Who is watching her? I also knew that several of these women didn't need the paycheck; faced with leaving a child, they would probably quit. Infants sleep for much of the day, and our office space at the time, a historic home in Austin, had a large office we could equip with cribs and baby swings.
My lawyer hated the idea. He worried that we would get sued if a child got hurt at the office. And the women–all first-time moms–had a hard time imagining how they would manage breast-feeding and changing diapers while doing their jobs. But they agreed to give it a try, and it worked out even better than I expected.
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