A reader writes:
My situation is difficult. Our new business manager of one year for an office that requires office management (due to daily printing requirements) has come to upper management to tell them that their child care is no longer available. And with child care being so expensive, this manager has requested to work completely remotely until her young child is at least three years old, which will be in 2028.
Her direct manager offered the solution of working remotely a few days a week and asked if her partner could help on other days, but that’s not an option. We also offered a rent-free, larger office for the manager to hire a certified babysitter, but that also was not feasible. The employee says the only solution that is viable would be to work from home full time.
This position requires the manager to be in the office to manage the team and to stand in when the other manager is out of the office. There are other team members who have young children and have access to child care, and this office has always been flexible in terms of time off or hybrid work schedules due to family issues. What other solutions should I be looking at?
Say no, and that’s what you should do.
This employee is not simply asking to work full-time remote for a job that requires presence in the office, which in itself is impossible. They’re also openly telling you that they plan to take care of a child during that time, which is a full-time job. One reason that employers usually require people who work from home to make separate child care arrangements if they have small children, and that’s because if you try to do both at the same time, you won’t be able to do either of them well. (This is part of why parents of young children struggled so much in 2020 when so many people had to work from home without child care; it’s impossible to do both at the same time with any hope of being adequately attentive to your job.)
It’s also a recipe for destroying the morale of other employees who pay for child care (for whom it’s expensive, too!) – and doubly so if this employee becomes less responsive while they’re home, which they almost certainly will.
Explain to the employee that you are sympathetic to their situation, but the work requires being on-site and due to the nature of the work, you cannot be flexible with this. The only real way forward here is for them to figure out whether the situation still works for them. And if they decide they’d rather look for new child care than leave, you can certainly be flexible in the short term while they’re actively working to set it up.
