Investing in our IFM team: We pay to pump!

It's World Breastfeeding Week. We have a wonderful week of personal stories and evidence based tips for new moms. But most importantly, I get to share our office philosophy that we pay our working team moms to pump upon their return from maternity leave.

​The return on investment in our own team members has always paid off. This is such a small part that we can do as an employer that it makes me happy and proud that we offer it to all of our team members. The window for breastfeeding and that newborn life is so transient and short-lived. We will briefly remember it through droopy eyelids, how exhausting it can be, and the stress surrounding the infancy period. My hope is that someday, our team members can look back and never have a thought about the impact that their place of employment had on their decisions to raise their child in the manner in which they wanted. ​

We pay our team members for their time to pump at work upon their return from maternity leave.

Yep I said it. We pay for every minute of it.

It's World Breastfeeding Week, this first week of August. This year the topic is focused on increasing awareness and knowledge on how to support breastfeeding initiatives. The lack of support for mothers, let alone a breastfeeding woman who works, continues to weaken as evidence of the generalized lack of support for new moms.

We work hard to create an environment at Integrative Family Medicine that our team members want to be a part of every day. Our genuine desire is that our team members want to be at work. They want that sense of belonging to the profession and what they are called to do. They also deeply desire to be mothers and to not miss a thing when it comes to their little one’s growth and development. This is where that impossible feeling of being both a mother and a working professional seem to coincide. It seems like you can never be fully present in either role because of so many competing factors. It creates an impossible push and pull dynamic.

So, while we know this dynamic well, we also aim to support it in the best way we can as their employer. We do this in multiple ways in our office such as mandating a work-life balance for all of us. We have a system we all use to start and end our day so we know we can go home and disengage from the office and the workload that will always exist. We are no strangers to kids and new babies on this team and one of the simplest ways this company can support our team members is in the back to work transition after maternity leave. This starts with allowing as much time for maternity leave as needed without fear of their loss of a position because they want some extra time at home beyond what the Iowa labor law says is acceptable for maternity leave. Upon their return, we pay them for their time to pump so that they aren’t worried about that loss of income when at work. 

This isn’t earth shattering to the business. Honestly, it was a simple change in mindset and what we always thought was the ‘norm'... to decide what our ‘norm’ looked like as a team; we embraced it and we enforce the mindset day in and day out.  

The reality is that as a small business owner, you budget for the cost of a full-time position or whatever position the working mother may be in for your business. The loss of an hour per day on one’s salary is extensive, but really, it has minimal impact on our operations. We have found that the moms who pump in our office are more efficient and effective in their work because they have to use time management skills to complete their daily tasks around the time they take away from their workload to pump. 

It’s easy for them to manage their workload here too, because we use a system where we know EVERY. SINGLE. THING that needs to be done in the schema of day to day operations. Out for a pump session at 10am? Great, the rest of the team knows how to cover because you can easily reassign your workload or responsibilities for the moment to break away and easily resume the responsibilities upon your return.


And let me be clear, while supporting this endeavor may create changes in the workload of the team, the most important thing we wish for all of our team members is that they are happy, grounded, and feel fulfilled with whatever they are doing. Who would we be to inhibit that in someone’s personal journey? Doesn’t it feel better to support and empower someone rather than shame or guilt them into decisions? (like…in every aspect of life…not just breastfeeding…)

The return on investment in our own team members has always paid off. This is such a small part that we can do as an employer that it makes me happy and proud that we offer it to all of our team members. The window for breastfeeding and that newborn life is so transient and short-lived. We will briefly remember it through droopy eyelids, how exhausting it can be, and the stress surrounding the infancy period. My hope is that someday, our team members can look back and never have a thought about the impact that their place of employment had on their decisions to raise their child in the manner in which they wanted. 

I frequently say to our patients at Integrative Family Medicine: “Healthy women create healthy babies” and we mean that whole heartedly. The support we give to our team in their personal lives is our best investment. In the short term, this is what allows us to meet the needs of our patients on a consistent basis. In the long term, investing in people will always meet the needs of humanity.

Just another way we're disrupting the corporate healthcare model.

Kara
CEO, CoFounder of IFM
​Mom of 2