| Building Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Work/Life Initiative
By Nancy Montgomery, Manager, Work/Life Initiatives
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Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
New York City |
I joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) seven years ago to manage a new Work/Life Initiatives Department that began with a dual focus – addressing child care needs and implementing a telecommuting program. These were ambitious goals and they laid the groundwork for the fairly progressive work/life program we have today. I am told that we are somewhat unique among hospitals in providing a dedicated work/life function with two full-time professionals. This reflects MSKCC’s recognition that our employees are dedicated to a serious mission that creates work/life balance challenges. In order to continue to recruit and retain the highest quality staff to do the highest quality work – “the best cancer care anywhere” – we are committed to supporting our employees’ work/life balance.
Child Care
Before I was hired, MSKCC’s Director of Employee Relations conducted a needs assessment to determine if child care needs were significant enough to warrant an on-site child care center. The results indicated that not only was full-time child care a serious issue, backup child care was an even bigger concern. So we embarked on a plan to add on both types of care.
Backup Care
Backup care helps employees with day-to-day child and elder care emergencies when regularly scheduled dependent care is unavailable and an employee needs to work – for example, a babysitter quits, school is closed, or an elder’s caregiver is sick. We also use this program to help in more critical emergencies and, when appropriate, extend the normal parameters of use in order to meet those needs. For example, when a mother felt her child was in danger at his child care center and had to remove him without having alternative care in place, we allowed her to use back-up care for longer than the normally allotted usage. Although the back-up program has been in place for nearly seven years, until recently it provided care only for children at centers in and near Manhattan. But we knew that employees at our regional sites struggle with the same backup care issues, and that some employees who work in Manhattan live outside the city and want their children to be in care closer to home, or prefer in-home care to center-based care. So we expanded the program to include a nationwide network of backup centers as well as an in-home care option, which can be used not only for child care but also for elder care – that is, for emergency care for employees’ parents or other adult relatives. One employee needed to deal with the illnesses of both her parents. Being out on disability herself, she was
incredibly relieved to learn she could access emergency care for her parents through our back-up elder care program.
A recent back-up care program evaluation indicated that 83% of employees registered for the service would have missed work if back-up care had not been available – another hard measure of the value our Work/Life programs provide. We were also pleased to confirm that
 
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