Why Caregiver Discrimination Is Bad for Business

This is an excerpt of a post by Rachael Ellison that originally appeared in Huffington Post. You can read the piece in its entirety here.

In order to create or sustain family friendly workplaces, you need buy-in from organizational leadership, effective manager training, and employee accountability. Most companies don’t have all three, and as a result they lose their top talent. And, it’s costing them a fortune.

A month ago, I wrote a piece about the challenges to implementing family friendly policies at work. I had heard stories about blatant discrimination in what were thought to be the best companies for working parents. I wanted to hear more. I requested stories from parents about their workplaces, companies that walked the talk and those that didn’t. The response was overwhelming; I was inundated by testimonials from dozens of industries. These stories came from accomplished, successful professionals in their thirties and forties with young children who were struggling to stay on course with their careers. They were lacking the support they needed to take care of their kids when at work. These high-performing employees were deemed less valuable in the workplace because of the commonly-held assumption that their family-oriented priorities replaced their drive to succeed.