Could your staff policies be more family-friendly?

In your business, how much family support do you offer your staff? If you employ working parents, chances are that your answer to this question makes a significant difference in how they perceive their employment with you. Restaurant Hospitality reports that in 2021, Best Places for Working Parents surveyed over 850 working parents and asked what it would take to get them to rejoin the workforce after the pandemic. For 80 percent of respondents, better family support would motivate them to leave their current job for another. (Family support includes such offerings as scheduling flexibility, paid time off, financial assistance, remote work, parental leave, and childcare.) During the pandemic, challenges with scheduling flexibility and managing childcare came front and center – whether these stresses were visible on zoom calls or (in the case of the restaurant industry) prevented employees from being able to come to work altogether. Now that life and work have fallen back into more normal patterns, it can be easy for employers to overlook these issues – even though now could be a critical opportunity for restaurants to deal with them and strengthen their policies to weather future strains. That’s what motivated the Texas Restaurant Association to form the Employers for Childcare Task Force recently. The Restaurant Hospitality report said the group aims to educate employers about options at regional and federal government levels, as well as within businesses themselves. While restaurants may not be able to provide a full range of family-friendly benefits simply because of the nature of restaurant work, they may be able to offer some of them – and that may make a significant difference in their ability to hire and retain their best workers.