Family Friendly?

I had a recent discussion with a couple in their late twenties, both of whom work for the Church—one in a Catholic elementary school, and the other at a parish. They have two young children. They’re smart, talented and well-educated, with a real desire to serve the Lord, and they’re both vitally important to the institutions they serve. 

And our Church may lose both of them. They can’t make ends meet. 

This is, of course, a very familiar story. Though we are still blessed with talented people,  the talent we’ve lost along the way, or the talent we never were able to begin with, is staggering.  Mothers and fathers cannot afford to work for us, unless their spouse brings in the “real” money. 

Yes, I am aware that in some cases, there’s nothing we can do—neighborhoods have changed, enrollments have decreased, the revenues aren’t there to pay employees well. We’d like to pay more, but we just can’t, and so we do the best we can. 

But in many cases—too many in my judgment—the loss of talent is a self-inflicted wound, a result of simply not thinking more clearly about our priorities and an unwillingness to challenge long held assumptions. As a result, we’re not nearly as “family-friendly” to our employees as we think we are. 

 Let me flesh out some of these assumptions, and comment on them:

1) Our tuitions are already too high. If we begin to raise them aggressively higher to pay teachers more, we’ll lose our most vulnerable families. 

Too high relative to what? To our competition? Hardly! Private elementary schools charge on average 5 times what we charge in Catholic schools, and twice as much in Catholic high schools (I discuss this in greater detail here.). I am not advocating we price ourselves like private schools, but the comparison does suggest there’s more room to raise prices than we are prone to believe. 

I believe the “too high” is instead a function of what we’re used to, and part of what we’re “used to” is the legacy of the sisters, who worked (heroically!) for virtually nothing. We owe them a great debt, to be sure, but for the most part, they no longer staff our schools. Instead, we have parents, and as with this couple in their 20’s, their expenses will be increasing far faster than inflation, as their children move from being babies, to middle-schoolers, to teenagers and beyond. 

When we keep our tuitions too low, we subsidize families who can afford to pay much more, thereby making us incapable of paying our best employees more. We must be more willing to do what colleges do, setting tuitions aggressively, but then giving out financial aid liberally. Giving substantive aid is much more helpful to our most vulnerable families than keeping tuition increases at 3% instead of 5% anyway! 

2) All salary increases must be evenly distributed across all employees.

Why? I believe we carry within us, often unreflectively, that “fairness” demands we treat everyone the same. But I challenge that notion. Is it fair to our hardest working employees to treat them the same as those who work least hard? To treat those most vital to our institutions the same as the least vital? Many communities of professional employees base their raises on some sort of merit system, but for some reason, we cling to salary charts based on years and degrees, virtually guaranteeing we cannot give substantive raises to our best talent. We should give clear stretch goals for our employees and then reward those who achieve these goals handsomely. 

4) If we give particular benefits to families, it’s unfair to employees without families. 

I don’t buy that, but even if I did, that ship has sailed. It’s literally impossible to treat everyone the same. Only certain employees on the health insurance plan can become pregnant, but their claims increase premium costs for all. Healthy employees subsidize sicker ones.  Tuition remission for children is a benefit only for parents. 

So let’s go all in! Why do we insist on 50% remission for tuition? Why not 100%? Unless the spouse of our employee has a very lucrative job, it’s likely that even if we give 50% off, our employees will need additional financial aid! So why wouldn’t we want to “give away” what we’re unlikely to get anyway? And what about providing day care? I know of a Catholic parish that has day care for the general public, but it also offers this service to employees at their school for a fraction of the cost—a beautiful way of cementing that family’s loyalty and a huge draw for prospective new hires! Let’s look at our maternity and paternity policies as well—for the most part, we’re too chintzy. 

5) We shouldn’t have husband and wives on our faculties. 

A number of my colleagues believe that, but I’ve never understood it. I hired a wonderful husband and wife in our first year, and hired the spouse of a current employee for our second year. As long as they’re not in a line-staff relationship, I think having husband-wife teams create synchronicity of schedules, vacations, and a sense of mission that becomes a multiplier in their effectiveness, not a negative. 

Part of what makes for a great teacher is his or her willingness to be at ball games, attend concerts, support PTO efforts. If every time he or she is involved with us in these ventures is an “either-or” between the school and family, it creates tensions that diminish the teacher’s willingness to do these things and creates strains within the marriage.  But if both husband and wife are working for the same school, they can tag-team these responsibilities and feel like they’re both advancing the school’s mission together. It makes it easier for both to understand that the school as the context within which they can raise their children, bringing them to ball games and “hanging out” with their friends.

So let’s be creative. Let’s not be too stubborn about “policies” that are strictly enforced when Mom needs a couple of hours off to go to a child’s award ceremony or see her son play in an athletic event. Better to ask Mom to give those hours back in some way at a future time, and trust her to do so. Let’s make sure we are liberal in allowing Dad to visit his aging father out of state, but ask him to give it back in increments acting as the school admin for upcoming home athletic events. Let’s be a family friendly office if Mom needs to bring her infant to school for a few hours before Dad can get off work, or if we need to set up an employee’s 8 year old child in an office doing homework at 3:30 p.m. before the school receptionist gets off work at 5. 

Let’s be a place where families, spouses, children are welcomed! Happy families yield happy, balanced and hard working employees.