What The Hell America!

If we build more humane workplaces, we’ll support parents and improve outcomes for everyone.

Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has placed special emphasis on increasing the birth rate and incentivizing people to have kids, all the while slashing funding for anything that could remotely ease parental burdens. 

As an executive, a mom of two kids under 3, and someone who’s spent my career helping elect pro-family leaders, I believe we need significant structural changes to better support anyone who wants to be a parent. 

But since none of this change will come from this White House, I have four suggestions, based on my upcoming book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership, for ways business leaders can build more family-friendly (and thus, more universally friendly) environments without sacrificing productivity.

Paid Family Leave

This is a no-brainer. Research has consistently demonstrated that offering paid leave—to men and women, biological parents and adoptive ones, and all other caregiving figures—is critically beneficial for companies. Paid leave policies reduce employee turnover, which can cost companies anywhere from one-half to twice that employee’s salary. These policies can also increase job performance, creating a more productive workplace.

Equally important, paid family leave is good for the family! Parents, mothers in particular, gain the necessary time to heal from birth and can care for their babies in a meaningful way.

Once paid leave is offered, leaders need to set an example and take it when the opportunity arises. One of many reasons why too many leaders have dragged their feet on taking leave is that many previous leaders—often men—did not take parental leave when they had their kids.

When I got pregnant for the first time in 2022, I searched desperately for guides on “How to take maternity leave as the boss,” only to find how-to manuals on asking your boss for the time off. Many of my peers in leadership roles told me they hadn’t stepped away when they had kids and regretted the choice. 

I had to come up with my own plan for handing off responsibilities while I logged off for three months to care for my infant and heal myself. It was hard, but the process ultimately made the workplace more resilient and developed more leaders across the org chart.

Four-Day Workweeks 

Being a working parent is like having multiple full-time jobs. A four-day workweek would give parents the time to better balance the competing demands of family and work. Imagine how you could show up for your kids on Saturday and your job on Monday if you had a few hours to yourself on Friday to do laundry, work out, or flop on the couch and binge-watch TV. This time to recharge and reset is critical. 

Four-day workweeks have been proven to increase job satisfaction, work-life balance and productivity, while also decreasing anxiety, burnout and stress. They are possible in more industries than you may think. Free yourself of the traditional yet constraining 9-5 schedule and 40-hour workweek, and consider how you could reconfigure your team’s schedules to give people more time back. It will require more work on behalf of leadership, but it will be well worth it.

Remote and Hybrid Work 

Return-to-office mandates are rampant as of late. But it’s not what workers want, and it’s especially not what working parents want. A 2022 poll found that 65 percent of respondents wanted to work remotely full-time, while another 32 percent preferred a hybrid work arrangement.

Certainly, many of the return-to-office mandates are about real estate costs. However, many others are a result of leaders who lack the skills to reconstitute their company culture around online communities. Building these communities takes time and intentionality, as well as more hands-on management training and support. But if done right, flexible work arrangements can be just as effective and even more sustainable in the long term.

Create the Space to Be People First, Employees Second

The mechanics of creating family-friendly work cultures involve policies far beyond the ones I’ve listed above. Among others are generous compensations, more expansive health care (especially those that cover fertility treatments), childcare benefits, flexible sick leave policies for employee’s kids, and more. 

Then there are the intangible factors. Is your workplace one where a mom can talk about her weekend with her kids without fear it’ll harm her professional image? Is your team one where a parent can openly say, “I’ve got to log off a half hour early tonight to attend my kid’s dance recital,” and as long as their work is done to a satisfactory extent, that choice is celebrated, not frowned upon? Are you, as the leader, modeling being a full person outside of work? 

If we do make these more implicit yet meaningful adjustments, our companies can become gentler and more forgiving for parents, who are struggling without a social safety net. They can also become better environments for all employees, whether they have kids or not.

When our work lives have more ease without sacrificing results, we’ll all gain more capacity to be more compassionate with each other and feel supported in getting the work done.