When I was a child, I was a major morning person.  I was almost always up before my parents.  It helped that I was incredibly independent too.  Before my mother even opened her eyes, I would have been up for a couple of hours - teeth brushed, hair combed, tummy full with Cheerios, and maybe even a little extra time watching Romper Room. 

In high school, I started to lose my early bird ways.  Having a part-time job that didn’t finish until after 10pm and a boyfriend who I just always had to call before I fell asleep translated into rushed mornings to get to school on time.  Don’t tell my mother, but my senior year in high school I was tardy to my first period class over twenty times in a single semester.

By college I had lost any notion of being an early bird.  Late night parties, hanging with friends, midnight movies, and all night raves made sleeping in until after 11am a standard occurence (ok and there was some studying in there too).  Whenever my dad would call around 9am on a Saturday morning, I tried my best to hide the fact that I only went to bed a mere three hours before.   

But it wasn’t until I became a mother that I became a bona fide night owl. 

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I’ve been a working mom for a mere four years; however, I think I’ve been doing this long enough to look around and see that … well … some large corporations could do a thing or two to ensure the undying love and loyalty of their working mom employees. Besides, I’m a firm believer that an happy and loyal employee is a productive employee. So, in an attempt to "help a corporation out" (and with apologies to David Letterman), I thought I’d list, in my opinion, the Top Five Things Companies Can Do to Make Their Employee-Moms* Love Them:

Number 5: No Time Clocks
I think there’s an argument which states that, in most instances, as long as the work gets completed on time, why should it matter what hours an employee performs her job? Often, being a stickler in requiring employees to punch a time clock is a classic example of form-over-substance: there is the implication that a company values full desks between the hours of eight and five more than it does maximizing the productivity of its employees. I guarantee that if a conscientious employee feels like her employer will be flexible with her working hours, she’ll likewise bend over backwards to ensure that her work is of the highest quality.

Number 4: Provide the tools to work away from home
Related to Number 5, a corporation that provides its employees with the tools to work remotely will — surprise! — end up with employees willing to work remotely. This means that instead of desktops, the company provides laptops. Mobile phones. BlackBerrys (or as I like to call them Crackberrys, because seriously, checking e-mail on those things can become obsessive). By giving an employee these types of gadgets, it’s unlikely she will get resentful about having to stay at the office until all hours of the night if she knows she can log off, go home and have a break with her family, and then log back on later when she’s refreshed, and ready to tackle her work anew. And while I don’t have any statistics to back it up, I’m willing to bet my next paycheck that in general, people who have laptops and PDAs for accessing email away from the office are far more likely to work more than 40 hours a week than those who don’t.

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