How to Schedule and Help Your Workers Who are Stuck at Home with Kids

Current staffing is particularly difficult right now. If you are considered a necessary category of business, the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic poses tough challenges when your employees have children out of school. For single parents, the challenge is particularly difficult if they have less family help.

Medical professionals are especially needed in-person at work right now. Clinic personnel and others in the face of a medical crisis are stressed. Their family needs with children at home pose costly choices about whether both parents can work. And if there is a single parent, options may be limited.

Being flexible with parents can come in various ways. If you can provide assistance and flexibility, some or all of these options might work for you and them:

1. Concierge Services: Just like at a hotel, concierge services are meant to save time for those who use them. For employees (with kids or not), a concierge service saves time by scheduling car services, dry cleaning, babysitters or other things that an employee is not available to do. To increase retention, one-third of Fortune 500 companies offer this type of benefit, but it is not limited to large corporations. The cost to an employer is under $10 per month, so small to medium businesses might be able to offer this service. Employees pay for the babysitter, of course, but someone else organizes it for them. As a result, employers get more productivity because employees spend less time on non-work activities during the day.
2. Work from Home. When this current situation is over, we will face a different work world. If we can work from home successfully now, it may prove the benefits that come from it. Not every position is conducive to this, of course, but even doctors are conducting appointments via phone or video. If it makes us healthier, more efficient, or happier, the WFH trend may see a huge increase that simply doesn’t change very much.
3. Flexible Scheduling. One of the benefits of ScheduleBase is its ability to make changes in schedules no matter where people do their physical work. For anyone given a choice, there may be better hours to remain productive. The “morning people” may not have much left to offer an employer after 3 pm, whereas a “late riser” might produce nothing of value before lunch. Flexibility can benefit you, the employer and the employees who want to work around children’s school schedules and nap times.
4. Job-Sharing. Many business sectors, especially hospitality, will be rebuilding once this nasty virus goes back into hiding. Job-sharing splits a full-time job among two people, giving them a work partner and flexibility at the same time. For some organizations, part-time staffers are an advantage too, especially if they are start-ups or rebuilding after an economic downturn.

Scheduling our employees may look a bit different when we all get back to work. But it won’t be the same, and it might not even be at work. And as our economy rises, which it will, the demand for flexibility will increase, even if there are no more kids stuck at home.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007, and 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018.