My 1-year-old son often wriggles in my lap during work meetings, his curls peeking onto the bottom of my video screen. While I discuss the details of our company's latest project, my baby babbles and grabs at my keyboard, thoroughly believing he is an important part of my small business. In a way, he is.
One of my employees has a 7-month-old who frequently attends our company's video meetings. Sometimes, the baby needs a diaper change during a work call. His mother is adept at contributing to the meeting while attending to parental responsibilities. As a boss, I not only allow this; I encourage it.
Despite the occasional distractions, we get all of our work done with excellence. And we both get to be excellent parents while we work. This is a stark contrast to my previous experience with in-person work, where I didn't have enough time to be the parent and husband I wanted to be.
My startup company, with a team of 10 remote workers, is part of an unprecedented rise in remote work. It's expected that 22% of workers will be remote by 2025, according to Forbes. The popularity of working from home is relatively recent, but parents have been utilizing remote work for decades.
When I was born in the early 90s, my mother was among the first wave of people to work remotely in the way we think of remote work today — long-distance calls at odd hours, working on computer programs while my brother and I napped, and the like. She chose this path so that she could be a present mother without giving up her career.
My own roles as father and husband are vital to me, and with in-person work, I didn't have enough hours in the day to play these roles well. For this reason, and with my mother's example in mind, I went full-time with my small online business in 2023.
Very quickly, I recognized that the people who work for me want the same flexibility to fulfill the roles they play outside work. Some have children and spouses, others hold community organizing roles, others are active in religious communities, and all of them have jobs other than their work for my company. They started working from home because they wanted to live a more balanced life.
Another reason people choose remote work — especially in small businesses with friendly, familiar work environments — is for the freedom to show up for work as their full, authentic selves. I am a Black man who has worked and lived in majority-white spaces. To make workdays smoother, I have had to evaluate which parts of my culture, appearance, and personality to express and which parts to hide or augment. In my own company, however, I get to be myself.
As an employer, I intentionally set the tone for my team that they should prioritize their families and community roles. I also actively encourage my team to be authentic and express themselves through their work. My team appreciates this, and their work doesn't suffer for it. In fact, these freedoms improve the quality of my business's output. Out of appreciation for these freedoms, my team feels motivated to go above and beyond for the company.
For small business owners who offer remote work, it's OK to let our employees' babies babble during team meetings. If we intentionally create a work atmosphere that is family-friendly and encourages people to show up authentically, we will have a better rapport with the folks who work for us. We'll also get better work and more longevity from them. And, most importantly, working for us will contribute to — rather than detract from — our staff's holistic well-being.