Workplaces now evolve to retain mothers and Gen-Y employees

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore plays with children at the day care centre at Safaricom headquarters. Companies are going the extra mile in creating the best environment for employees to thrive. PHOTO | FILE 

By BONIFACE NGAHU

Posted  Monday, December 22  2014 at  18:01

A visit to any modern office indicates a trend where employers are going an extra mile to make the offices more livable.

A good example is Commercial Bank of Africa offices in Westlands. The office has a mother’s room for nursing mums and a crèche/day care centre with nanny-on-call facilities.

Safaricom’s Jambo Call Centre also has similar facilities, ensuring mothers can work while their young ones are taken care of within the office set-up.

In the past, a working mother would leave the office over lunch and return to work in time for the afternoon assignments. This is no longer feasible with the kind of traffic jams we experience in Nairobi and other big cities.

Thus since Moses cannot go to the mountain, the mountain comes to him.

Modern businesses are creating a homely environment at work, ensuring mothers can be productive without being distracted by the need to run home.

There is also a trend where people are getting married later in life meaning that a woman maybe at her career peak when she starts having children.

Instead of losing out on such talent, businesses are investing in creating an enabling environment within work.

The other driver of this is the generation Y employees who are often referred to as the young and the restless. They quit jobs without much thought and also believe in rising fast to the senior most levels. Also they seem to find a thin line between work and family life.

Organisations like Google are known to have innovated to capture the imagination of this generation by creating homely environment within the workplace.

Since we spend a significant part of life at work, it makes sense to make the work environment more interesting and homely. This also ensures that employees are inspired to dream big ideas for the company.

An inspired employee can deliver disproportionate return for the investment that the company put to make the work place interesting.

Think of the pharmaceutical company whose scientists develop a cure for the most stubborn disease or the IT guru who comes up with ground breaking software.

The future of the company is dependent on such employees and companies should go an extra mile in creating the best environment for clever employees to thrive.

Making the workplace friendlier to mothers is one of the practices that should be encouraged to ensure women do not miss work because of nanny problems or the need to stay with their young ones. This will also help address the problem of female workers attrition as you go up the corporate ladder.