An article published in The New York Times Last week about Family-Leave Values reassured me that my choice to become an entrepreneur was the right one. It detailed some very depressing cases where people have been let go from their jobs because they were parents. What has this world come to when people are penalized for doing what comes, uh, naturally? Apparently even those who don’t have kids are not safe, either. People have been fired for taking off work to care for a sick spouse or an ailing parent. Some businesses are starting to get it, but it may just be up to us small businesses and entrepreneurs to show them how we bring in profits while caring for our employees.

When I started my first company 12 years ago, my goal was to prove that you could build a (highly) profitable company and honor people’s needs for work/life balance, including my own. We were successful and won several state and national awards for our creative attention to our employee’s needs. I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t always easy. There were several lessons we learned along the way that other companies, even the very small ones, can learn from:

1. Work/life considerations must come from the top. Building a company that respects the fact that there is more to life than work requires top-level commitment. It has to trickle down through all ranks of managers from the highest to the lowest.
2. Measurements must reflect the company’s commitment to results, not “face time.” Where possible, we had to make sure we valued results, not time in the office. This was especially important for remote workers.
3. Managers must be trained to manage flexible work schedules. Not everyone knows instinctively how to manage for results or measure productivity instead of accounting for hours. We found that we had to train our manager in how to manager people remotely and how to develop work plans and goals that reflected what we really wanted in our business – a contribution to our bottom line – rather than just showing up.
4. You must be able to say ‘no.’ In our business, not every position was conducive to a flexible work schedule. Some jobs really did have to be present in the office and we had to be prepared to make that call. It can not be flexibility at all costs.
5. Policies must be formalized and administrated fairly. Finally, because we sometimes said no, we had to have our policies documented and monitor the implementation for fairness. Any flexible work schedule request that came in had to be reviewed by the employee’s manager’s manager to make sure we were staying consistent and fair.

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