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I have a few honest and open questions as a US-based small business with a handful of women who have recently had children or who are pregnant. Do you guys hav

I have a few honest and open questions as a US-based small business with a handful of women who have recently had children or who are pregnant. Do you guys have any advice for how to balance the impact to the results that we receive from those having children prior to vs after pregnancy and/or having children? Example: One individual is a phenomenal front-end website engineer. Her input has been critical in helping us solve a lot of engineering challenges and more forward in significant ways. When she became pregnant she had debilitating morning sickness so much so she could hardly function on a personal level. This morning sickness persisted for the last 5 months through the present day to the point where she's only be able to come to work (or even work from home/remotely) for perhaps 15 days sprinkled throughout the 5 months. We all value her opinion and expertise highly. We try to schedule meetings around when she might available (to the point of even having spontaneous "she's available" meetings) but even she doesn't know when she'll be able to work or operate productively. Further, her ability to code/design/be productive has plummeted to perhaps 5% of her original capacity. Do you guys have any tips on how to handle this situation? We thought about starting her maternity leave early (during pregnancy), but she'll definitely need that leave AFTER she has the baby. Perhaps we start the paid maternity leave during her pregnancy and then a leave-of-absence (unpaid) after the child is born? Is that fair to her? Is that fair to us? In many regards, we have a paid member of the team but without any of the capacity. Another example: We have another woman who is very detail-oriented. For years, her projects always came out flawlessly. She has an amazing talent to see all the different ways a project could go wrong and then she would plan accordingly to keep things on track. However, since her first child was born move than a year ago, she's been a completely different person. Her child still isn't sleeping through the night. She's sleep deprived in a big way. On many days, she's almost a zombie. Previously she was punctual, reliable, and focused. We're not sure what to do. We have offered to pay for sleep training for her baby which she has refused (and that's her right as a mother of her child), but we would like to have some form of productivity capacity from her. We don't want to let her go because we know what she is capable of. For the last 18 months, we've been struggling to balance what we can reasonably expect from her vs the demands/results that her role requires. Letting her go sounds like horrible, insensitive, and possibly illegal. Is reducing her compensation a fair trade? Ultimately, we're paying value to be delivered and that has been slashed to a fraction of her previous state. Are there any tips, tricks, ideas, or ways of thinking that can help us be fair and equitable with these individuals in their unique circumstances while at the same time allowing ourselves to expect a reasonable amount of value from them in exchange for the compensation they receive? A few other notes: 1. We offer 4+ months of paid maternity leave for having/adopting children. 2. We also offer paid paternity leave for male employees for having/adopting children.

jacquesm 8y ago
The tips and tricks that I can give you as a former employer (and present employer as well but not on the same scale) is that you're just going to have to suck it up. Yep, that's right. The burden you perceive is people no longer performing above normal, this is normal. So you're going to have to learn how to deal with that, be loyal to your employees and then when things in their lives are more manageable again they will pay you back in spades, or, alternatively you could see the past as them having built up credit. Every employer is in this boat, except for the ones that do illegal stuff. So take it as a fact of life that not every employee is able to give you 100% 100% of the time. If you want to extract the last bit of something you might want to go into the lemon juice business, people aren't lemons and it is perfectly normal for them to occasionally have periods of lower productivity, and for some those periods can last quite long. I've been there myself - even as the employer - and it is always a great feeling to see the rest of the company around you pick up the slack and to know that things will end well. On another note, it sounds as though you have very little in terms of redundancy built into your company, you may want to look at that in some more detail, it may be that you are one disease or a car-accident away from a real problem. Thank you for trying to do the right thing, I hope some experience and a few more years will show you these things are not nearly as hard to deal with as they seem to be right now, there is a certain size company (> 10 and < 40 or so) where these problems can hit harder because there are enough people that synchronous events can happen but not enough of them to take up the slack.

jacquesm 8y ago

The tips and tricks that I can give you as a former employer (and present employer as well but not on the same scale) is that you're just going to have to suck it up. Yep, that's right. The burden you perceive is people no longer performing above normal, this is normal. So you're going to have to learn how to deal with that, be loyal to your employees and then when things in their lives are more manageable again they will pay you back in spades, or, alternatively you could see the past as them having built up credit. Every employer is in this boat, except for the ones that do illegal stuff. So take it as a fact of life that not every employee is able to give you 100% 100% of the time. If you want to extract the last bit of something you might want to go into the lemon juice business, people aren't lemons and it is perfectly normal for them to occasionally have periods of lower productivity, and for some those periods can last quite long. I've been there myself - even as the employer - and it is always a great feeling to see the rest of the company around you pick up the slack and to know that things will end well. On another note, it sounds as though you have very little in terms of redundancy built into your company, you may want to look at that in some more detail, it may be that you are one disease or a car-accident away from a real problem. Thank you for trying to do the right thing, I hope some experience and a few more years will show you these things are not nearly as hard to deal with as they seem to be right now, there is a certain size company (> 10 and < 40 or so) where these problems can hit harder because there are enough people that synchronous events can happen but not enough of them to take up the slack.