To insist my staff have childcare in place?

[willandgrace]

Several of the staff I manage have young kids, we've supported them all year to WFH with kids at home. We are still primarily working from home but as schools/childcare are now open I have said that people need to have appropriate childcare in place while working from home, the same as they would have if they were office based (as they all were previously) - some of the staff are not happy about this but AIBU?

I agree with whoever said base it round productivity.
I have zero childcare now due to covid- I work out of the home as does DH and have just had to adapt, slightly compressing my hours and catching up on evenings and weekends. Leaving the kids unattended more than I'm really happy with. My work is still getting done, in fact I'm probably doing more.

Also HR. You need to manage on productivity. You can't blanket ban kids because illness / shielding will be around for a while. You should also discount any sickness due to covid from an employees sickness record. If children are appearing in meetings with clients and causing lack of output, then that's what you can challenge. Atm it would be in the discriminatory area for you to blanket ban kids from being in the house.

@emilyfrost

YANBU. Give them two options: sort childcare (and proof, so you know they’re not just keeping them at home), or stop supporting their WFH and tell them they have to come into the office.

It really is that simple. They cannot work while caring for children.

Proof of childcare? Thats ridiculous

@willandgrace

Several of the staff I manage have young kids, we've supported them all year to WFH with kids at home. We are still primarily working from home but as schools/childcare are now open I have said that people need to have appropriate childcare in place while working from home, the same as they would have if they were office based (as they all were previously) - some of the staff are not happy about this but AIBU?

You might manage them, but unless you are also the employer, I don't understand how it's solely up to you

For what it’s worth, my children are in school/nursery and so far this year school has been closed from 5th Jan to 5th Mar, the school bubble has since gone once and so has nursery. We are only at the start of April. There is a breakfast club but no after school club or holiday clubs running.

I’m working school hours and then until 10:30 at night and I’m not that productive late in the evening either; this is after reducing my hours to be part time last year because of the pandemic and lack of childcare.

If you say parents can't WFH when they have children around, what do you expect them to do if a bubble bursts and the children have to be home for 10 days?

If you manage these staff only then you need to know what the wider policy is abs will be moving forwards.

Personally I don't have problems as my kids are 12&9. I haven't bothered with after school club for my youngest as we pick up and he spends down time at home. I don't want him being in a different bubble from school just now

If your staff have young children and are very disruptive then perhaps talk to them but I'd be ensuring you're doing the right thing according to your company Covid policy as you don't want to be going against their policy

I think you still need to be flexible this year. My kids school club for some reason opened during term time, but isn’t open during the holidays. Hopefully it will by summer time. Luckily I’m in an organisation that values their staff, and understands the impact caring of any kind has on work, and has valued productivity over “being present”. Basically, I can fit my work in when I can, and just to do the best I can. That continues to be their approach, and I imagine will be until later in the year.

Thank goodness as I am a single parent with no family, or child’s dad support.

@Touloser

Yanbu. Unless the children are largely self-sufficient teenagers (13/14 and up) for most people it's not possible to work and do childcare. Leniency was required when schools were shut, but it's reasonable now to say staff should be working in a distraction free environment.

I agree, although I think 13-14 is a bit too old. Kids of about 8 and above can entertain themselves quite easily once they get home from school. Depends on the kids and the job - if you need to do loads of calls you probably don't want younger kids around.

Also agree with the pp who says measure output. Is the work done to standard and on time? If so, how it gets done isn't really a factor.

It's a daft question anyway, because you can't enforce it. Say I work for OP, she says to me " you have to have childcare", I can just say sure, no problem, its done.
She has no idea if its done or not and has no way of finding out. So its rather a moot point.

Does it not depend on the nature of the work? For the staff I manage my policy is that they get their work done and nothing more; they don't have to be available every minute of the 'working' day.

Proof of childcare? Thats ridiculous

Why?

Many organisations insisted on this pre-Covid.

i think you need to be careful where you stand. i dont know why you should insist.

Update your policy. Ours was done recently, 24 hours to sort out childcare child off school/has no carer, after that no pay. Obviously isolating due to covid is excluded from this.

@Rukaya

It's a daft question anyway, because you can't enforce it. Say I work for OP, she says to me " you have to have childcare", I can just say sure, no problem, its done. She has no idea if its done or not and has no way of finding out. So its rather a moot point.

Especially because anyone can say their partner, relative etc is their childcare so there isn’t a contract or financial transaction as evidence.

With the best will in the world you may be right but its naive management. In reality childcare is not the same as it was 1 year ago.

Technically by the letter you are right but most experienced successful managers would know better than to put a blanket rule like this in. You risk losing decent staff. It should be irrelevant what age your DC are because you should be looking at their circumstances not playing comparisons.

Honestly if you are looking at your staff as a homogeneous group which statements like "Productivity has dropped" then its not great management. Ultimately you can go ahead with this and on a soundbite it would look boundaried. In reality if you want to retain a good staff team and deal with performance issues where they occur then blanket rules like this do not end well.

It depends on the ages of the kids. My 7 and 9 year old are pretty self-sufficient. They know not to bother me when I am working. I make them a sandwich at dinner on my break and that is all the interaction I really have with them all day.

Many organisations insisted on this pre-Covid
So I hand you a letter saying I have childcare, that I wrote myself. How does that help you at all?

Change the home working policy so that 9am-2.30pm/3pm are the core hours and any children "not old enough to be home alone" are adequately supervised by someone else (be that school or childcare).

Then encourage client facing meetings to take place between these hours. Employees can then mop up their residual tasks after 3pm/before 9am whilst juggling their DC if they need.

@trilbydoll

I'm quite torn about this. On the face of it YANBU because it is hard working with dc around. However we are still not fully back to normal and as such I think you have to allow some flexibility.

I think wraparound care and holiday club provision is still a bit patchy for school aged kids. People who previously used grandparents may not want to or be able to at the moment. My two are in after school club in term time but this week we don't have any childcare.

Nursery age kids absolutely should be in childcare, not least because it's impossible to work with them around!

This

@KurtWilde

The problem here is that there's very little childcare available after school/outside term time at the moment. Things are very much not back to normal in that respect. Not everyone has a childcare bubbie/grandparents available. Also other posters have raised a good point on if a child is sent home to SI for 10 days. Childcare on short notice is like gold dust these days.

This exactly. Childcare places are really not back to normal and not everyone has grandparent available for childcare. Also with toddlers popping into zoom meetings, not everyone has a home office and sometimes people really have not a lot of space in flats and it's really hard to stop toddlers to be interrupting meeting sometimes especially when doors doesn't have locks! My DD goes to preschool but preschool finishes early and as much as try to stop her interrupting meetings, she still finds her way sometimes! It's really easy to say yes there shouldn't be kids interrupting and everything but not everyone is as privilaged

Proof of childcare? Thats ridiculous I agree. Why would you do that? In any event you're not even allowed to ask if someone has kids, so you can't exactly ask them if they have childcare (and I bet nobody would ask a man if he had kids and childcare in place for them).

Someone I know has ducks, hens, dogs and other various animals at home (I'm jealous) - if she was do to an 'office job' and WFH she'd probably be more frequently disrupted than me with my 2 oldest. Should we ban pets too?
What about people who get easily distracted? Or put a washing on? Or empty the dishwasher? Go answer the door? Put the Alexa on?

Frankly it doesn't matter what is going on at home - either they can do the work to the standard you expect or they can't and you need to manage them or even reconsider WFH as an option. Simple.

My kids are much better behaved than many people's pets or partners so I definitely wouldn't want to faff about organising holiday childcare if they're happy to be at home instead.

YANBU, but I think you need to have a transition period and some flexibility in place. It's just not as easy to get childcare as it used to be, and some people's former arrangements might not be legal at the moment.

If quality of work has dropped, I think you would be reasonable to raise that as a separate issue and work together with the employee on what they can do to improve their output.

I would say be prepared to lose staff if you have to clamp down on this.