Employees Bringing Children to Work

kflakus

My name is Karleen Flakus and I am the HR Manager at Winner Regional Healthcare Center in Winner, SD.

From time to time we have employees who bring their children to work -- either before school starts or after school until the employee gets off work. Examples: The employee comes to work at 7:00 AM but the child doesn't need to be at school until 8:15 AM, so the child waits here and then the employee clocks out and takes the child to school at the appropriate time; or -- the child gets out of school at 3:30 PM, the employee clocks out and picks up the child and instead of taking them to daycare, brings them here until the employee gets off work.

Usually these children hang out between our employee dining room (getting snacks and pop) and the main lobby/waiting area in our hospital. We have had instances where they have been loud and somewhat disruptive.

We'd like to address this and wondered if any of you have dealt with this same type of situation and how you handled it, or if you have a policy in place that you would be willing to share.

Thank you for any assistance/information you can provide.

System

We've dealth with this on a low scale. We have children in the workplace rarely. We've allowed youngsters who were old enough and behaved enough to watch a video while the parent finds other arrangement. We haven't had a problem with regular before-and-after day care. If I had to make a judgement call, I'd say you were heading for problems. Parents can't work and supervisor their youngsters at the same time so you'll have a loss of performance and you're allowing some liability issues. I'd probably talk to the parents and let them know that other arrangements had to be made. You may not need to draft a formal policy.

Welcome to the Forum!!

marc

We only allow the EEs children to wait around at work in emergency situations and even then, permission is required. Allowing it to become a regular occurence is asking for trouble. You have described some of the problems in your post. It is a place of business, not a before and after school program.

deniseE

For us it depends upon the child, the reason, the frequency....basically, there's really no policy.

However, if you're seeing a good bit of this...have you given any thought to developing a before/after school program either on site or nearby?

We have a daycare center on-site and it has been a great morale boost for ee's and solved many of the child care issues.

The arrangement we have costs the agency almost nothing...we have chain daycare that uses 2 rooms in our building. Because the day care provider isn't paying rent they can offer substantially reduced rates to our ee's which makes it much more affordable.

Maybe you could even work with your local YMCA...this may be a great opportunity to do add a low cost benefit to employees.

Crout

Hi Karleen. If you're allowing that kind of flexibility it must be for a good reason, and I'm guessing that nurses in Winner, SD might be kind of hard to come by. If I'm right, getting rid of the flexibility might cause you more problems than the kids do. You could simply draft a set of behavioral expectations you have for the kids and have the parents sign off on them. If they can't control their kids then they lose the flexibility.

dchr9203

I recently moved from HR Director in a hospital back into a more technical environment, THANK GOD! But while I was there, we had this issue. We didn't want to take too harsh of stand because we didn't want to give employees an "excuse" to not report to work, or come in late. We also wanted to recognize that many of them were single parents and we didn't want to add to their struggles. So, we wrote a formal policy that gave approval to occasionally bring children to work for a short period of time, defined occasional and allowable cirumstances with caveat "as determined by management", and specifically stated that they were not to be unsupervised, must be quiet and not roaming the hospital, and could not impede the work processes of the hospital. Fortunately for us, we had a Pediatrics unit with a children's play room that was very low census most of the time so we allowed the children to stay there. An added benefit was the nurses on the unit loved kids anyway and didn't mind keeping an eye on them. So it worked for us. We only had one office employee try to abuse the system; bringing her two children in daily for two hours in the afternoon. We had to address that one-on-one. Overall, it wasn't a big problem.

mdm

Karleen, I also work in a healthcare center. We have a policy regarding staff children in the workplace. The policy states that there are many problems with bringing your children to the workplace while you are on duty for the following reasons: 1. The organization is liable if something happens to your children while at the clinic. 2. It's disruptive to the workplace. 3. Who watches your children wile you carry out you duties? 4. It is distrating to the employee who is suppose to be working. 5. It may be distracting to other staff. The policy also states that your childcare issues become the employer's problem when children appear under these circumstances at the workplace. If you don't have a backup system now, please make arrangements. If there are any questions please discuss these with your supervisor.

Our clinic dosen't want to be responsible for the staff's children. We haven't had any issues with this policy.

You need to figure out the extent to which you will accommodate your staff and their children.

Sorry about the length, but I hope this helps.

Whirlwind

Welcome, Karleen ~ Sometime within the past year this topic came up on the forum and I emailed my policy on employees bringing their kids to work to several forumites who requested it. I would offer the same to you, but our intranet system (where all our policies live) is down. I can't even print it at the moment, but if you're interested, I'll be happy to send it to you when it's available again. Meanwhile, technologically-speaking, we've been reduced to stone and chisel, but that's another story. x:'(

kflakus

I would be interested in receiving your policy when your system is up and running. Thank you!