I loved going to work with my parents when I was a child.

They started a small construction company in our backyard in southeast Texas. My earliest memories are of the smell of hot sawdust, selling buildings alongside my mother and the lipstick red of the rotary phone in my father’s oh-so-1975 office. I loved “customers” almost as much as the snacks the guys in the shop gave me from their lunches.

Looking back now as an adult, a mom and a business owner, I realize my mother did something really wonderful for me in those days:  She let me. She let me greet potential customers. She let me talk about the product. She let me come to work with her instead of dropping me off with that lady from church who ran a daycare in her garage. She let me because she could. It was our business, and though my father did famously fire my mother once, no one could send my mom home for bringing me to work with her.

I learned the story of my parents as people and the value of working hard. I learned that the funny words dad uses in the office, the ones that make your lips tingle, are not to be used by a 5-year-old, at work or anywhere else. Most importantly, I came to appreciate coworkers as another kind of family that can care for you, please you and disappoint you almost as deeply as any blood-relative.

Eventually, my parents sold their business and went to work for other companies. As the decade turned and the economy flattened, I often felt our family was at the mercy of nameless, faceless employers who valued my working parents as a commodity only, and had no vested interest in them as human beings.

I have a friend who says “Everything is a choice. Everything. You don’t HAVE to do anything.” Existentially speaking I believe this to be true. But for working families, the choices we are forced to make between work and home life have profound, real implications. We’re not just talking about missing the odd soccer game or dance recital. Of working parents, 58 percent say they continue to go to work when their children are sick (Jodie Heyman, The Widening Gap). Children are left in the care of other children before and after school, and on school holidays, often with disastrous consequences.

Where do our responsibilities as employers begin and end? Where are our boundaries, professionally, morally, socially? What is the price we will eventually pay when parents are forced to exchange a paycheck for full engagement in their children’s education, health, daily care, general development?  

In today’s business environment, where we grow it to sell it, to “go IPO” or look for “PE” funds, investing so-called soft-dollars in our human capital can seem unreasonable. I would argue that it is a long-range investment strategy. It’s not part of a two-year business plan. It’s a life strategy.

At GDC, we work hard to ensure that our environment is not one which forces conditions of neglect onto families.  We recognize that life happens without regard or respect for the timecard.

This blog is about embracing the notion that life not only tends to two-step, happily, across our schedules, but that acknowledging and working within this reality can lead to a more highly-engaged workforce, greater productivity and a healthier bottom line. You almost cannot over-invest in people, in the right culture.

Small businesses do this sort of thing organically all the time, which may be why small businesses represent 99 percent of all American businesses, and employ more than 50 percent of the private workforce. Small biz contributes almost 41 percent of private sales in America. (The Bureau of International Information Programs of the U.S. Department of State, Economic Perspectives Journal, 2006) But we can do more, and better, as small businesses. Small firms can prove to big firms once and for all that happy, well-adjusted employees are good for business. And that will be good for America.