Work. Family. Life.

RB Kids Child Care Blog

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Child Care has a wonderful blog full of information, pictures and resources related to their workplace child care program.  You can find it HERE.

On-site child care a plus for growing firm

Jane Boyd with a few little friends at the Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Child Care Program which opened in September 2009. 

Recent story from Burnaby Now below:

It's a rare perk that many employees hope for but few find.

On-site child care is occasionally offered by universities, colleges and federal government agencies, but it isn't common in the private sector.

But Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers has taken on the problem of sparse child-care options at its headquarters in Burnaby. The company relocated to Burnaby in 2009 and included plans for a child-care centre for employees' children in the design of its facilities.

"We researched what other companies offer employees," Vic Pospiech, vice-president of human resources, says.

Child-care was one of the top items on the wish list of employees, he adds.

"One of the things that came to light was the acute shortage of child-care in Burnaby," Pospiech says.

When designing the new facilities, representatives of Ritchie Bros. met with city officials. Mayor Derek Corrigan was very supportive of the plan to include child-care, he adds.

The centre has space for 45 full-time children, but there are about 60 kids in all that use it throughout the year - some part-time or just during the summer, according to Pospiech.

The company also offers many other amenities to employees, including the Kelowna Café.

The company hasn't offered anything like the café in the past, Pospiech says, but because of the location of the building, felt it was important to provide a subsidized place for employees to get good food.

"We've always bent over backwards to try to provide amenities to our employees," he adds.

Other perks include a beer garden on Friday afternoons (with juice and pop for non-drinkers), video games for employee breaks, and a social committee that organizes children's Christmas parties, provides muffins on Fridays and plans themed lunches for holidays and events, Pospiech says. There is also a workout area with treadmills, elliptical machines, stationary bikes, a stair climber, a rowing machine, and universal and free weights.

The headquarters in the Big Bend neighbourhood is a LEED Gold-certified facility, the first in Burnaby, with more than 300 employees.

via www.burnabynow.com

Happy to be on PEI for Launch of Caring Coast to Coast - May 6, 2010 - Do join us!

A new project, focused on supporting employees who juggle work and caregiving responsibilities, launches on May 6, 2010 in Charlottetown. The project entitled, “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace”, will be announced at the project’s first event, “Caring Coast to Coast”.  The event will be held at Confederation Centre of the Arts in Studio 1 from 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. and will be opened by Verna Bruce, Past Associate Deputy Minister of Veteran Affairs Canada and recipient of the 2008 PEI  Lieutenant Governor's Award for Excellence in Public Administration.  The half day session will be held in an “open space” format allowing opportunities for participants to engage in open dialogue about the realities of managing the issues related to work and caregiving. Last month, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility .  Using the perspective of not only supporting employees who have caregiving responsibilities outside of work but one of economic necessity, our neighbours to the south have placed a national priority around creating more flexibility within workplaces. John Berry, Director of Personnel Management for the federal government, said, “Flexibility is the new email.  There are those employers that have it, and there are those that will.”  The time has come to understand and address the realities of employees who are stressed and overloaded. The Canadian Caregiver Coalition estimates that 4-5 million Canadians struggle to balance work and caregiving for a family member who is in need of support because of age, disabling medical condition, chronic injury, long term illness or disability. “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace” will view these issues through both an economic and humanitarian lens. When employees and employers work together to resolve work and life issues, there are significant improvements to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and the bottom line.

Project Coordinator, Jane Boyd, couldn’t be more pleased with the team she has put in place for this project. She states that, “Collectively, our team has over 50 years of experience related to work life issues traversing across family, childcare, eldercare, health and human resources.”  Boyd has been actively involved in the early learning field and family related policy on the Island since 2007.  She is particularly pleased to have Rob Paterson, a leading advisor on social networks and on how human culture operates, serving as a project advisor. Based in PEI, his work flows between organizational design, research and the web 2.0 world. Paterson is pleased to be involved in this innovative project. He says, “The stage is set to utilize social networks and technology in gaining a national perspective around the issues and solutions for Canadian’s juggling work and caregiving responsibilities.” Paterson goes on to state, “Our hope is that we engage the hearts and minds of employers and employees as we venture on this journey of discovery. This journey will encompass the value of social media, collaborative stories and action.” In addition, the project's research partner, University of Guelph’s Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing, will be pivotal in ensuring that the discoveries are solid and useful in creating a less stressful experience for Canadian’s who provide care while employed. The Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing has already conducted extensive research in this area. In addition, they are very familiar with international best practice around this issue.

Members of the Project Team Include:

Jane Boyd - Project Co-ordinator

Dr. Carol Matusicky - Engagement Co-ordinator

   Wendy Creelman - Marketing Co-ordinator

   Robert Paterson - Social Media Advisor

Funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program, this three year project will aim to support employers in becoming best practice employers around the dual roles faced by many Canadian’s. By engaging employers, employees and service providers, the hope is that the resulting conversation will create innovative workplace supports, tools and resources that will assist employees who face the dual role of work and caring for their children, elders and other family members.

To register or for more information, please e-mail caringcoasttocoast@gmail.com. Space is limited.  You can also learn more at our Caring Coast to Coast Facebook Page.

Join us for Caring Coast to Coast on May 6, 2010 @ Confed Centre of the Arts

 
A new project, focused on supporting employees who juggle work and caregiving responsibilities, launches on May 6, 2010 in Charlottetown. The project entitled, “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace”, will be announced at the project’s first event, “Caring Coast to Coast”.  The event will be held at Confederation Centre of the Arts in Studio 1 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. and will be opened by Verna Bruce, Past Associate Deputy Minister of Veteran Affairs Canada and recipient of the 2008 PEI  Lieutenant Governor's Award for Excellence in Public Administration.  The half day session will be held in an “open space” format allowing opportunities for participants to engage in open dialogue about the realities of managing the issues related to work and caregiving.

Last month, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility .  Using the perspective of not only supporting employees who have caregiving responsibilities outside of work but one of economic necessity, our neighbours to the south have placed a national priority around creating more flexibility within workplaces. John Berry, Director of Personnel Management for the federal government, said, “Flexibility is the new email.  There are those employers that have it, and there are those that will.”  The time has come to understand and address the realities of employees who are stressed and overloaded. The Canadian Caregiver Coalition estimates that 4-5 million Canadians struggle to balance work and caregiving for a family member who is in need of support because of age, disabling medical condition, chronic injury, long term illness or disability. “Winning Strategies to Support Caregivers in the Workplace” will view these issues through both an economic and humanitarian lens. When employees and employers work together to resolve work and life issues, there are significant improvements to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and the bottom line.

Project Coordinator, Jane Boyd, couldn’t be more pleased with the team she has put in place for this project. She states that, “Collectively, our team has over 50 years of experience related to work life issues traversing across family, childcare, eldercare, health and human resources.”  Boyd has been actively involved in the early learning field and family related policy on the Island since 2007.  She is particularly pleased to have Rob Paterson, a leading advisor on social networks and on how human culture operates, serving as a project advisor. Based in PEI, his work flows between organizational design, research and the web 2.0 world. Paterson is pleased to be involved in this innovative project. He says, “The stage is set to utilize social networks and technology in gaining a national perspective around the issues and solutions for Canadian’s juggling work and caregiving responsibilities.” Paterson goes on to state, “Our hope is that we engage the hearts and minds of employers and employees as we venture on this journey of discovery. This journey will encompass the value of social media, collaborative stories and action.” In addition, the project's research partner, University of Guelph’s Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing, will be pivotal in ensuring that the discoveries are solid and useful in creating a less stressful experience for Canadian’s who provide care while employed. The Centre for Families Work and Wellbeing has already conducted extensive research in this area. In addition, they are very familiar with international best practice around this issue.

Members of the Project Team Include:

Jane Boyd - Project Co-ordinator

Dr. Carol Matusicky - Engagement Co-ordinator

   Wendy Creelman - Marketing Co-ordinator

   Robert Paterson - Social Media Advisor

Funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program, this three year project will aim to support employers in becoming best practice employers around the dual roles faced by many Canadian’s. By engaging employers, employees and service providers, the hope is that the resulting conversation will create innovative workplace supports, tools and resources that will assist employees who face the dual role of work and caring for their children, elders and other family members.

To register or for more information, please e-mail caringcoasttocoast@gmail.com by May 3, 2010. Space is limited.  You can also learn more at our Caring Coast to Coast Facebook Page.

Video of President Obama speaking at Flex Forum

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers' new Burnaby headquarters wins prestigious real estate award

Canada NewsWire

New 15,000+-square-metre global head office wins award at the 2009 NAIOP Real Estate Excellence Awards

BURNABY, BC, Nov. 20 /CNW/ - Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers (NYSE and TSX: RBA), the world's largest industrial auctioneer, received an award for its new global headquarters at last night's 2009 NAIOP (Vancouver Chapter) Real Estate Excellence Awards, which recognized excellence in commercial real estate in Greater Vancouver. The Company's new head office, located in Burnaby, B.C., won the award for the best Office Development.

"We are very proud to receive the 2009 NAIOP award for Office Development," said Jeremy Black, Vice President of Business Development, Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers. "We love our new building - it's not only a work of art, it's our home. We would like to thank GWL Realty Advisors, Bunting Coady Architects, Ventana Construction and MHPM Project Managers for their involvement in the design and construction of an office that takes care of both our employees and the environment in which they live."

Mr. Black accepted the award along with Don Harrison of GWL Realty Advisors, Paul Reynolds of MHPM Project Managers Inc., Teresa Coady of Bunting Coady Architects, John Sharp of Ventana Construction Corporation and Blair Quinn of CB Richard Ellis.

Ritchie Bros.' new global headquarters is a 15,200+-square-metre (164,000-ft(2)) office with a wealth of work-life features, including a cafeteria, workout facility and a new corporate child-care center. It currently houses more than 300 employees, and was designed with environmental building practices in mind. As such, Ritchie Bros. hopes the building will achieve LEED Gold certification status from the Canadian Green Building Council - it will be the first LEED Gold building in Burnaby.

via www.rttnews.com

BC forum on the development of a public child care system in Canada

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - Nov. 20, 2009) – Child care activists and experts will share information and plan for action at the B.C. stop on a cross-country tour promoting public delivery of child care through school boards or local governments.

Across Canada, parents struggle to find good child care in a patchwork of services that is privatized, fragmented and expensive. And the tour comes to B.C. just as staff, faculty and student groups at the University of Victoria have come together to stop the University from contracting with private multinational child care provider Kids n' Company.

Speakers at the Vancouver meeting will discuss the benefits to children, parents and the economy of moving to publicly-delivered early childhood care and education system.

WHAT:	Free public forum on building a public child care system
WHO:	CUPE BC president Barry O'Neill, Susan Prentice, co-author of a new book, About Canada: Childcare, Susan Harney from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC and the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, and Adrienne Montani, provincial coordinator for First Call Children and Youth Advocacy Coalition.

The event is open to all and will be of interest to parents, community youth and child care workers and activists, policy makers and others.

WHEN:	Tuesday, November 24, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
WHERE:	Alice MacKay room, Vancouver Public Library, Lower Level
	350 West Georgia St., Vancouver

On-site child care provided

The Canadian Union of Public Employees is organizing the tour, which brings together community activists, parents, academics, child care workers and union members, as part of its national anti-privatization work. Visit cupe.ca/child-care for a backgrounder on public child care, provincial child care profiles and more.

via www.marketwire.com

Big move to Burnaby for Ritchie Bros. - "We want our employees and their families to be happy...."

EXCERPTS from Burnaby Now Article

Dave Ritchie takes no credit for the gleaming new 164,000-square-foot headquarters of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers that officially opened on Oct. 29 in the Big Bend area of South Burnaby.

Ritchie, chairman emeritus of the heavy-equipment auction service, helped start the company in 1958 in Kelowna, but he's now content to let the new generation of Ritchie employees lead the company to heights not even he could imagine.

"It's a pretty cool building, and it's a pretty practical building," said Ritchie. "When we first came to Burnaby in 1963, we had a really small facility on the old Marine Drive. ... Who would have thought we'd end up back in Burnaby with a facility like this?"

Ritchie walks proudly in the building that currently houses 312 full-time and 30 part-time employees. The company, which had previously had its headquarters in Richmond, needed to find a place that could house up to 700 employees because, unlike most companies during the economic recession, Ritchie Bros. is thriving.

"We tend to do well in good times and bad times," said Ritchie Bros. chief executive officer Peter Blake. "In good times, companies are looking to upgrade, and in bad times, well, sometimes they have to sell off their machinery. ... And since we're a global company, we are selling product in Edmonton to bidders in Saudi Arabia, or we're selling product from Dubai to Australia."

.....For both Blake and Ritchie, their favourite place in the entire building is the child-care facility, which has room for 45 children."It kept on coming up in our surveys that child care was important," he said. "I've got two young children myself, so I heard what everybody was saying.""I think it really speaks to the family atmosphere we want to create," said Ritchie."We want our employees and their families to be happy, so having their children taken care of safely is important to us because it's important to our employees."

via www2.canada.com

The Mompreneur Articles - Kids & Company, Victoria Sopik

Q: What made you start Kids & Company?

As an entrepreneur,   I’m always looking for business opportunities and as a mother of eight, I was looking for something with flexible child care.  Our goal is to guarantee a space for your child at the location of your choice when given 6 months notice eliminating the stress for parents. 

via www.themompreneur.com

UVic mulls 'big box' childcare

Child-care groups are accusing the University of Victoria of trying to solve its daycare problems by bringing "big box" child care to B.C.

At a meeting Nov. 24, the UVic board of governors will mull over information about Kids and Company, a large for-profit firm with 25 centres in most other provinces in Canada, including several universities.

One of the few points of agreement in the debate is that more child care is needed at UVic. With 300 children on the waiting list for an acclaimed campus child-care program, many children are kindergarten age before they are offered a place, said Gayle Gorrill, UVic vice-president of finance and operations.

"I know we are not alone and this is challenging for parents everywhere, but we are hearing from faculty and students who are concerned about the waiting list," she said. "They said we need to increase capacity and we said what are the options?"

UVic provides an annual subsidy of $3,200 per child, and parents then pay slightly below the market rate, with infant care costing $958 to $1,037 a month.

Under the Kids and Company model, the university would pay a fee and the company would guarantee the waiting list is cleared within six months.

The care would be in addition to the centres already run by UVic. "We are not considering closing or reducing, in any way, our capacity on campus," Gorrill said.

But Lynne Marks, co-chairwoman of the UVic Childcare Action Group, said there is growing concern on campus and in the community that private, corporate child care will lower standards.

"Studies done across Canada and internationally show that privatized childcare leads to lower quality because they need to make a profit," she said.

Major concerns are that there will be less staff who are qualified early childhood educators, a higher ratio of children to staff and high staff turnover, Marks said. A letter from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C. being circulated on campus says the child-care community is "shocked" that UVic is considering the "false fix of big-box, corporate child-care chains."

Victoria-Swan Lake MLA Rob Fleming is also speaking out against the proposal. "Why would the University of Victoria even consider it when we have many early childhood educators in our community?" he asked.

There is a child-care crisis in B.C. because the provincial government has cut child-care subsidies and chipped away at other funding, Fleming said.

Victoria Sopik, president of Kids and Company, said the critics know little about how the company operates.

"We provide very high quality child care in centres across the country," said Sopik, a mother of eight, who said she founded the business because she knows the importance of flexible child care.

All staff are highly qualified and parents can watch their children on webcams, Sopik said. The corporate model evolved to enable the company to provide high-quality care without charging sky-high fees, she said. Companies pay a fee and, in return, their staff have access to child-care spaces.

via www.timescolonist.com

Video of new family friendly headquarters - Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers

From Vancouver Sun article

Ritchie Bros. auctioneers move into spacious new home - which includes workplace child care program

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Inc.’s first Lower Mainland headquarters was a house on Bridgeport Road in Richmond — homey, but it would be a bit cramped for today’s home-base operation of 312 employees overseeing the operations of 39 auction sites around the world.

In fact, the company has twice outgrown Richmond locations, which eventually sprawled to three corners of the municipality.

To that end, the company has just moved into an expansive, 160,000-square-foot global headquarters replete with fitness centre, cafeteria and in-house daycare centre more fitting for the world’s largest industrial auctioneer.

The gleaming glass and steel structure is still on the banks of the Fraser River, but upstream in Burnaby in the Glenlyon business park — at the bucolic end, bordered by trees and riverside park trails. It is officially opening this Thursday.

“We just want to make a nice place for people to come to work and enjoy their time here, and maintain the culture that we have at Ritchie Bros.,” president Rob MacKay said in an interview, adding that he hopes the company will be in the new location for a long time.

via www.vancouversun.com

I have previously written about the Ritchie Bros.child care program here and here.  We are continuing to recruit staff to work in the program.  For further information on careers with RBA click here.

Child care costs economy 'millions' - Scotland

A BBC Radio Scotland investigation has found that Scotland could be earning millions of pounds more a year if parents were given additional support.

Experts have told the programme that spending on child care needs to become an urgent priority.

via news.bbc.co.uk

The Korea Herald - workplace child care lagging

Except for certain conglomerates and state-run companies, a majority of companies do little to meet the childcare needs of their female workers.

Under the current law, companies with more than 300 full-time female employees or more than 500 total employees are required to establish an employer-supported childcare facility, which can accommodate children aged between one and six.

However, according to the data by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Labor, 51 percent of the companies out of the 533 companies, whose number of female workers exceeds 300 or that of total workers exceeds 500, failed to establish an employer-supported childcare facility, as of the end of 2008.

While child-care centers including public, private and family day-care centers totaled 33,499, the number of employer-supported childcare centers was a fraction at 350, as of the end of 2008, the government data showed.

via www.koreaherald.co.kr

Businesses in Hawaii impacted by school closures - some pitch in to make things easier for parents

From Honolu Advertiser

Across Hawaii yesterday, business productivity may have dipped a bit as some working parents stayed home or put in fewer hours on the job because they had to care for their children on the first day of public school teacher furloughs.

The productivity loss, even if stretched over all the state's 17 planned teacher furlough days through May, probably won't amount to any discernable drop in the state's gross domestic product, because parents will mostly be using time off work they otherwise would have taken at another time.

Still, the relatively short notice of the first "furlough Friday" challenged numerous companies to maintain services and production.