Quiet Please: Babies at Work

Caitlyn Aguiar has always loved working at the $1.3 billion Jeanne D’Arc Credit Union, and now she loves it even more.

Aguiar, who is the assistant member service center manager for the Lowell, Mass.-based credit union’s call center, was the first mom to participate in the credit union’s new Infant at Work program.

So how does a new mom or dad possibly work and care for their baby at the same time?

“It didn’t take too long for us to kind of slide into the groove of things at work, but initially I thought, ‘How is this even going to work?’” Aguiar said, who brought her son to the workplace for four months. “I didn’t really think about the logistics until I came back to work here with a car seat and a portable bassinet, and diapers and bottles and all of that stuff I needed. He would sleep very nicely and peacefully, and it allowed me to do what I needed to get done here at work. So, it didn’t take too long for us to adjust.”

Because of Aguiar’s successful experience, the credit union’s Infant at Work program is now available to all expecting moms. But will the program work over the long run, and in different settings such as branches and back offices?

For several years, at least three credit unions have been offering babies at work programs. According to the Parenting in the Workplace Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, the credit unions are the $39 million Hawaii First Federal Credit Union in Kameula, the $112 million Pacific Cascade Federal Credit Union in Eugene, Ore., and the $1.9 billion Schools Financial Credit Union in Sacramento, Calif.

Schools Financial launched its Babies in the Workplace program in 2001. As part of the program, infants can come to work every day with mom or dad until the babies turn six months old or start to crawl, Cathy Grimes, Schools Financial’s vice president of marketing, said.

Since that time, more than 140 babies have “retired” from the program, including 13 in 2017. While mothers are more likely to be the primary caretaker for newborns, nearly 20% of participants in the Schools Financial program have been fathers.

The credit union has found one of the major benefits of the program is employee retention. For example, the first baby to participate in the program is now 17 and attending high school. Her father still works for the credit union in the information services department, Grimes said.

After reading a magazine article about another company’s babies at work program, Mark Cochran, president/CEO of Jeanne D’Arc, thought it would be a great program to offer because 80% of his 237 employees are female, and at any given time, several are pregnant.

“I shared the magazine article with some of our HR people and of course every red flag was raised about the liability, and how this program is going to work and not affect staff productivity,” Cochran said. “But I just encouraged them to try to find a way to say yes to this. I just think they were looking at it from a more practical point of view and I was looking at it from a strategic point of view.”

Cochran believed it would be a benefit that would position the credit union as a progressive employer and help retain staff and recruit new employees in a strong economy when it becomes increasingly challenging to find new workers.

“We really started from the point of view of, it’d be great for the mom to not have to separate from the child, because one of the things we found in HR is that when moms have a child and they’re on maternity leave and then have to come back, they’re pretty much depressed,” he explained. “So we also saw this as an opportunity for our moms to continue that bonding experience as the baby continues to grow.”

Another side benefit of the program is cost.

“As we started thinking about it more, what really hit home was the cost of childcare for a baby under one year old. I didn’t realize how much it cost to put a baby in childcare,” Cochran said.  “Just the cost savings that a young mother can experience by bringing their baby to work, whether that’s every day or part-time, is significant.”

Indeed, according to 2016 Care.com member data, the average cost for center-based day care for infants is about $10,000, but prices can range from as low as $6,605 to $20,209, depending on where you live. Care.com Inc., a publicly-traded Massachusetts company, is an online marketplace for finding and managing family care and marketing family products.

The Parenting in the Workplace Institute, which promotes and supports babies at work programs, reports there are more than 200 companies and organizations throughout all industries that allow their employees to care for their newborns in the workplace.

According to PIWI, the four steps to developing a successful program include having clear policy guidelines for parents and coworkers, limiting the program to babies who are not yet mobile, restricting the program to babies who can be content in the work environment and limiting the program to parents who are able to simultaneously complete job tasks while caring for their babies.

Jean D’Arc hired an employment attorney to help the executive team develop what Cochran described as a “pretty intense policy.”

“The mom has certain responsibilities and the baby has to behave, because you can’t have a baby who is colicky, and the credit union has the right to rescind it if we feel it’s interfering with work,” he noted.

Moms are also required to have one or two back-up “moms” who are willing to take care of the baby when she has to go to the bathroom, meet or talk to a member, or perform other tasks that would require her to leave her desk.

“We implemented the program with Caitlyn, but we weren’t sure if other employees would embrace it,” Cochran said. “At least in her department, which is the call center, they were lined up asking to be the substitute mom. It worked out well. We’ll see how well it works in the branches.”

Based on the experience of Schools Financial employees Eric and Kristine Hernandez, a babies at work program can work fine in a branch or back-office environment. The couple, who both worked at a branch, shared the responsibility of taking care of their first two sons on different days.

When the couple’s third son arrived, Kristine, a member services representative, brought him to the branch on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Eric, who is working in a back office as a consumer credit analyst, took care of his son on Thursdays and Fridays.

When Eric used to work in a branch, he sometimes held his son in a baby carrier, and surprised members smiled and said, “Oh, you have a baby.”

“It was a great way for employees to talk about the babies at work program with our members,” he said, adding members were not only pleasantly surprised, but also interested in learning about how the program worked.

Eric said the support from employees, however, made the program run easily and smoothly.

For the first couple of weeks, Eric said it was challenging to shift his focus from work to taking care of the baby. After adjusting to balancing his work duties with baby care, including learning how to do things with one hand when he had to hold his son, Eric had a lot of support from his colleagues and acknowledged he would not have been able to do it without them.

“On those days when he was fuzzy, everyone would know it,” Eric said. “I would walk around with him in the stroller to try to get him to calm down. My coworkers would come over and soothe him as well. On those days it was a collective effort. Even when he was having a good day, everyone would come over and talk to him and play with him a little bit, hold him and walk him around the department as well. He got a lot of interaction with people here as well, which I found to be great.  He brought so much joy not just to me but to everyone else, and that was the added benefit.”