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When a female employee at T. J. Snow Co., a Chattanooga-based manufacturer, asked to take a month off to tend to family matters, owner Tom Snow granted her leave with the assurance that her job would still be waiting for her when she returned. Sure, her absence was a slight inconvenience to the company, says Snow, and caused other employees to have to “work extra hard to do her work while she was gone.” But it was worth it. Not only was it “just the right thing to do,” according to Snow, but the potential for increased company loyalty in the end means that family-friendly practices such as allowing for flexibility in scheduling makes business sense as well.

Family-friendly business practices are important in Tennessee, says Doug Clarke, chairman of the Family Business Institute of East Tennessee. “Ninety percent of businesses in Tennessee are family-owned business,” he says. “Even if it’s a business where only one or two employees are family members, that business is very influential in that family’s dynamic.”

Because families are so important, creating a work environment that supports that balance between work and family is imperative, Clarke says, especially to small businesses that can’t afford to lose manpower. One obvious way for a small business to become more family-friendly is to institute some sort of day care facility on or near the premises of the business.

“A while ago, a few businesses in a Gordonsville, Tenn., industrial park got together and built a childcare facility on the access road to the facilities,” says Patrick Geho, state director of Middle Tennessee State University’s Business Development Center. That particular venture involved building an actual brick-and-mortar facility, but the same principle can be applied to other businesses with less financial means.

“We also worked with a home-school supply business who turned an unused training room into a make-shift after-school area for the employees’ kids,” Geho says. “It was convenient to everyone in the facility and it lessened tensions because parents weren’t worried about their children being home alone after school.”

Even if a small business doesn’t have the money for childcare services, or other child-related programs such as tuition reimbursement, there are family-friendly steps it can take to improve the level of job satisfaction among employees. “Many times, small businesses can be more malleable,” says Kevin Max- field, director of the Chattanooga office of the Tennessee Small Busi- ness Development Center.

In small businesses there are often fewer levels of management to go through than with large corporations, providing employees with the opportunity to form closer relationships with their employers, says Eugene Osekowsky, a senior business specialist for the Tennessee Small Business Development Center in Middle Tennessee. Closer relationships beget understanding whenever an employee needs to switch schedules or leave work early for a family-related event. A 2005 National Study of Employers done by the Families and Work Institute finds that small businesses are in fact more likely to offer flexibility to employees compared to those of other sizes, presumably out of “firsthand understanding of the effectiveness of doing so in order to make work ‘work’ for both the employer and the employees.”

According to the businesses surveyed, 37% of small businesses with 55-99 employees allowed employees to periodically alter starting and quitting times, while only 26% of larger companies with 1,000 or more employees allowed employees to do so. Fifteen percent of small businesses allowed job sharing (allowing two or more employees to perform the duties of what is traditionally one full-time position) as opposed to only 4% of the larger businesses. Other things such as allowing employees to work at home occasionally or have control over when they take their breaks are also ways that small business can create a family-friendly environment.

Before moving to Chattanooga and becoming chairman of the Family Business Institute, Clarke successfully operated his own information management company in Shreveport, La., (called Com Services) by using some of the same family-friendly tactics mentioned in the study. “We always focused on trying to create an environment for employees that permitted them to pay proper attention to their families,” he says.

He also instituted a few practices of his own. After noticing that his employees weren’t taking real vacations, due to the financial concerns of missing two week’s worth of pay, Clarke began to buy back one week’s vacation from his employees. “We found that people then took vacations and came back happy and refreshed,” Clarke says.

Com Services’ other family-friendly practices included monetarily rewarding those employees who didn’t use any of their sick days during the year and establishing a special emergency fund for employees that needed extra help with bills, such as missed utility payments.

“It’s important to keep in mind that you can’t be successful without your employees,” Clarke says. “So, it’s imperative that you keep them happy.”

Because of his efforts, the average life span of a Com Service employee was 7.5 years—much higher than the industry average of three years. And considering Com Services’ six- to nine- month training curve, the increased employee retention made a big difference in the company’s bottom line.

Along with increased employee retention, family-friendly business practices also help reduce tardiness and overall absenteeism, Geho says. Employees are also less stressed and happier.

“Happy workers always produce more than upset workers,” says Maxfield, indicating that taking family-friendly steps almost always translates into increased profitability. “Anything that increases morale and causes a sense of loyalty is going to get you a return on the output of your employees.”

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