Helping Dads Helps the Bottom Line

Children have a tremendous need for fathers to nurture and guide them into adulthood. The key factor, however, is time. You only get 24 hours a day, and you have a job. Your company values a healthy bottom line, low absenteeism, high productivity, and employee loyalty. Both employee and company often see time very differently.  On the surface, company needs versus fathering needs appear incongruent. But if you look past the surface and peer into a day in the life of a typical dual-career, dual-earner couple in America, you will find involved, responsible and committed fathers are a key component in both a healthy family and a profitable and healthy workforce.

Healthy Bottom Line

When fathers consistently spend time with their children, companies maintain a healthy bottom line. Take Smucker’s as an example. In 2004, Fortune magazine’s “List of Best Places to Work” placed Smucker’s in the top spot. The company boasts a workplace culture that treats employees like family. In return, employees at Smucker’s have incredibly high worker satisfaction, and Smucker’s stock has shot up over the past five years. Fathers who care for their children’s intellectual development and their adolescents’ social development are also more likely to advance in their occupations. This, and the Smucker’s story, tell us that it is not a stretch to correlate responsible fatherhood with a healthy bottom line.

Lower Absenteeism

When fathers fail to regularly spend meaningful time with their children, or their employers demand too much of their time outside of the normal work schedule, family time is reduced, which is directly linked to absenteeism and poor marriages. Many fathers, particularly young fathers, falsely believe that working long hours equals success at work. The expectation of “long hours” leads to “face hours,” or “presenteeism” – being at work when you should be at home, either because you are sick, or because you are working such long hours you cease to be effective. Enabling fathers to have more fulfilling relationships with children helps reduce their overall stress, improves their effectiveness at work, and supports their relationships with their partners – leading to less employment disturbance from family disruption. It is critical that corporations see this subtle but hidden problem and address it with regular monthly trainings on key issues such as: the need for fathers to tend to children’s health needs, work/family balance issues, and general attributes of a healthy father.

Greater Productivity

But when addressing greater productivity in the workplace, why specifically address fathers? This is a question that often comes up when NFI prepares to train a new corporation in work/family balance. One answer: help your company’s fathers balance work and family, and you’ll help your entire company. As the typical married woman (with a 67 percent labor force participation rate in 2002) tries to raise her family’s earnings, she devotes more hours to market work, reducing her time allocation to home production. While statistics show that men are doing more home chores per workday in 2002 than in 1977 (2 hours vs. 1.3), men still do one hour less home chores per day than women do, putting unnecessary stress on women. The bottom line is that by supporting fathers’ need to balance work and family (giving them time to do their “home work”), companies free up more time for mothers to focus on their career, causing greater productivity and synergy across all divisions and gender lines!

Loyalty is a Two-Way Street

The Society for Human Resource Management reports that it costs employers an average of between $3,328 and $9,328 to hire and train a new employee. Obviously, employee turnover is costly. On the other side of the issue, working fathers and working mothers view work-family issues as equally important. Consequently, it is easy to realize why many dualearner couples look at a potential employer’s work/family friendliness as an indicator of management’s loyalty to its employees. To retain good talent, some companies may need to adjust. Both parties need to see the importance of balancing work and family for long-term loyalty to win out.

To learn more about NFI’s Work/Family Balance for Dads program, e-mail business@fatherhood.org or call (757) 353-4112.

To see all of the National Fatherhood Initiative's quarterly newsletters, go to https://www.fatherhood.org/ftnewsletter.asp.