A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about how her huge company has a pretty strict face time requirement at the office. As a parent she felt it really limited her upward mobility at the company, and she felt somewhat like she didn’t have a voice in the matter. So we began pondering: how do you start a special interest group at your office to give people in a similar situation a voice? Do you think starting such a group puts a target on your back (as in, you want to work on Easy Street, not Real Life)? Do you think it’s better to band together with other working parents — or couch such a group’s interests in terms of “women’s interests” — or a more general work/life committee?
(Some offices even have work/life committees, of course — which sometimes leads to pretty comical comparisons of things like “making it a priority to go to a Katy Perry concert” vs. general parenting, or “Katy Perry concert” vs. labor and delivery. I swear I am not making that up, that was actually a comparison used in a law firm memo.)
Some tips for starting your own affinity group, such as one for working parents:
- Look for the opportunity. Whether you call it a group for working parents vs. a women’s group vs. a work/life group may be based largely on who your biggest allies/co-founders might be.
- Note of course that the bigger your company, the more the presence of such a group is going to make a difference in recruiting/press. For example, if you can get your company recognized by Working Mother magazine as one of the best companies for women, or if you can differentiate your company from another fungible office environment (Big Law firms, for example, all look largely the same to many lawyers who don’t really know what their focus will be), that’s a good thing to play up when forming it.
- Realize that it may be more work — for no extra money. I think this is the biggest issue for most working mothers. Will it lead to advancement? Will it lead to an increase in salary? Or should you just shut up and play the game until you have the power to change things by yourself, without the aid of a group?
Ladies, are you members of such groups — what do you like or dislike about them? Have you formed your own group? How did/does it look, and what tips would you give to someone else?
Further reading:
- How to Launch a Women’s Affinity Group in Your Office [Career Girl Network]
- How to Start a Working Parents Group in Your Office [[email protected] / Care.com]
- How to Form a “Working Moms Posse” at Your Office [Mindful Return]
- Let’s Do Lunch [Fit Pregnancy]
Psst: we just covered professional organizations over at Corporette.
Pictured at top: Shutterstock / Anton Gvozdikov. Social media images via Stencil.
Not a full on club, but we started a “welcome back to the office and here’s how to work out the logistics of being a new mom” committee where we would do things like make sure the newly returning mom had everything she needed set up for the lactation room (and flexible access to it in the early days) if that was something she needed. Our head of HR also had a baby not long after my second was born, and from what I understand she also initiated an unofficial trainings for managers on topics like: “so your employee is having a baby, here is how to deal with it [and how not to get us sued]” and “your employees is planning to take FMLA for mat/pat leave, here’s how to make sure everyone is treated fairly” and “your employee is returning to work from maternity leave, here’s how to handle situations like if she needs the lactation room but is too embarrassed to tell you or how to handle frequent call offs due to sick kids without getting into the weeds of PIP paperwork”
Banded hem.
I am looking to do this at my office! As a newer employee expecting a child I feel it will be beneficial.