There’s a new site in town called Comeback Moms. It’s a community for mothers who are returning to work after leaving careers for family reasons.
There are articles, forums, reviews, net working opportunities and more. Check it out if you are reentering the workforce or thinking about it.
via So Little Time
Tags: Comeback MomsYet another study that “shows” working women only spend 30 minutes with their children:
New Delhi: An Assocham study, based on a random survey in which over 3,000 working couples of various companies participated, says a working woman nearly spends 10-hours in office, over 2.5 hour in traveling, almost seven hours sleeping, three hours working in the household and thus has less than one hour of entertainment and can hardly spare 30 minutes for her children.
I love the way it says “can hardly spare” 30 minutes. It may be a language barrier of some sort, but it read pretty dramatically.
It also doesn’t take into account that you can spend time with kids in different ways.
No wonder working parents are stereotyped, sometimes.
Telecommuting is oft praised as a boon to the elusive balance of work and life and many companies have enthusiastically jumped on board.
But, is the honeymoon for telecommuters over?
Some studies suggest that the “myths” of telecommuting might be true:
Sixty-one percent of executives surveyed in January 2007 by Korn/Ferry International, a Los Angeles-based recruiting firm, said they saw career stagnancy among telecommuting workers.
Nearly half of CIOs felt that remote employees’ quality of work suffered due to reduced in-person contact with colleagues, and one-third said that these employees were less productive due to a lack of supervision, in a study released last July by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm in Menlo Park, Calif.
I think that the success of telecommuting depends on the person and the position as well as a certain level of trust between employee and employer.
I’m sure there are some cases where is just didn’t work out for an employee to work from home, and in other cases it turned out better than expected for everyone and it’s hard to speak in absolutes about it.
However, the current gas price situation may force employees and employers to look more intensely at making telecommuting work.
Tags: telecommutingIn order to be a working parent, you usually need a job, and the day of the week could affect your job search.
HR World points out that workers are most often looking for jobs on Monday and Tuesday.
They’re also doing it during work:
Job candidates are trolling for jobs during the weekdays, but not so much over the weekends, according to a recent survey by eQuest. That’s changed since the last survey in 2006, which revealed that workers were mostly looking for jobs on Tuesday and Wednesday during their lunch hours.
On the flip side, in my experience, it’s usually best not to fire someone on a Friday.
You may think you’re giving them the weekend to recover, but it tends to frustrate people when they can’t start searching for a job right away.
There are so many iterations of a mother’s decision (or non-decision) to work or stay home, but very little about working or staying home when when you have a life-threatening illness.
Susan, of Toddler Planet, an Inflammatory Breast Cancer survivor, speaks to this twist on the working mother debate very eloquently:
They are doing a morbid kind of calculus: if they have five years to live, they will need to keep working to provide for their family, particularly for needs after they are gone. If they have two months to live, they would want to stop working now to spend as much time as possible with their babies. But what of those with an estimate of two years? What of the vast majority of us with no definite prognosis but a late-stage cancer nonetheless?
What is the responsible thing to do?
Find out what she thinks is one important factor in making this wrenching decision.
Tags: inflammatory breast cancer, Toddler Planet, working mother and life threatening illness, working-motherWe’ve all had someone ask an inappropriate personal question at one time or another.
It even happens in the workplace, and when you’re a parent, the odds of receiving one seem to go up as people speculate endlessly on your reproductive status and your childcare plans.
So, what do you do when someone asks, “Who’s going to take care of the baby?” or “You just got married, do you plan to still be working here after you have children?”
The Washington Post’s On Balance has 10 Tips for Responding to Inappropriate Personal Questions at Work, and there’s some tips in the comments as well.
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As I read website and blogs, sometimes I read a post or an article that really reinforces the working parent stereotype.
This person here states that since they work, they have no idea what their kids do on a daily basis. That person over there has no idea who their children’s pediatrician is.
Other people thank their lucky stars for a good nanny who will attend all those pesky school events while they work and wonder if 2 hours a day is enough to spend with their kids.
Good grief.
I maintain that most, though certainly not all, working parents are not like that.
Most parents who work just do what they do and come home each day. They are involved with their kids lives, they know what size shoe their kids wear and what they are doing in school.
Those who are extremely uninvolved with their kids’ lives may just be that way, job or not. Even parents who must work brutal hours can find ways to be involved if they choose to be.
Most working parents don’t forget their kids birthday party because they were in a meeting, and, while they are always looking for support or for ways to do things better, they usually don’t actively fret over the “true meaning” of work-life balance, they just do it.
Most of us are parents just living life and life happens to have a job with it and, like any other parent, some days are better than others.
When I read some of what is written out there, no wonder people have the idea that all working parents ignore their kids and make a job a higher priority than family.
It’s giving the rest of us regular working parents a bad name, and I don’t like it, sometimes.
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