Calling all Mums in the workplace! Help me make my company more family friendly

[Woodstock69]

Hello! I am the sole HR manager in my company and one of my goals for 2013 was to make us more family friendly. I have a couple of questions for all the Mums out there who have to deal with us HR people:

1. If you could design your ideal family friendly workplace, what would it look like? What kinds of things would your employer do to help you get on as a Mum?

1. Childcare vouchers. Does your employer offer these and, if so, can you recommend your supplier? I would like to contact a few but there are so many. Ideally I would like it so that the parent has online control of the vouchers but also one that will help me with implementation.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions you can give me!

1 flexible working. Not necessarily agreeing term time or school hours or full time in lieu for hours over worked, but the chance to leave early to pick the kids up from school every once in a while.

I work all hours as i have a laptop but this is over and above the working day in the office, not instead of. It would be great to be flexible to work the hours needed but choose when to do them, if this works or your industry?

2 we do have childcare vouchers, the companies i know of are care 4, and accor.

How clever of you tho think to ask ! I'm self employed ... But if I worked for a company I'd be happy to do my hours flexibly ? Ie if I'm contracted to do 30 hours - and as long as I do them all - to be able to log in a work sheet for the following week would allow me to schedule in any sports day or dental with the children etc. if something like that could be incorporated that would help most parents - mums and dads !!!

Jinx !! Lol

Flexible working for sure, working at home on occasions. I don't know about childcare vouchers, my dcs are older now.

Childcare vouchers! My employer uses Edenred who give me online access which is pretty easy to use!
Flexible working as stated by above posts. Maybe even working from home one day a week (although that's not available where I work...)
Maternity pay on top of smp.

Flexible working! If I'm 15 minutes late because DD refused to get dressed or clean her teeth, it shouldn't matter as long as I work my contracted hours.

Crisis leave. My manager can authorise 2 days paid leave per year for emergencies. I've used this when DD was ill and when DP had an unexpected interview and we had no childcare.

Childcare vouchers, think we use kiddivouchers and they've been great. Very quick service and reliable.

As others said, flexible working without line managers sighing, tutting, or saying it won't work for their team. Childcare vouchers or deals. Authorised crisis leave - for everyone, not just parents, ditto the flexing.

Also making work more part-time friendly, trying to reduce admin burdens for everyone (a chore that takes an hour a week is a much higher proportion of a 2.5 day worker's time, and a badly designed spreadsheet for recording time used to take me 3x longer than for my colleagues who were simply in the office all week.)
Consider making part-time more senior roles - people say roles can't be done in under 5 days, but it must be magic how they fit in 5 rather than 6 days which 2 3-day workers could do...

Hi Everyone - thanks so much for your answers! I guess there is a general theme here and that's mainly flexi time. Legislation in 2015 will make it possible for ALL workers to request flexi time. I think with the strides made in technology it will become increasingly difficult for employers to turn down reasonable requests. We'll see how it goes. Thanks again, you're all great!