Town & Country Resources Blog

Ask Mary Poppins (aka Mary Pat)

Mary Pat doesn’t fly around with a black umbrella, but she does have over 20 years of experience as a Child Development Expert. These post will answer questions about child development concerns & managing your employer/employee relationship.

Q. As my Nanny’s anniversary date nears, I want to give her an evaluation. How do I give her appropriate feedback and a fair compensation adjustment?

A. Managing a household employee is a very personal business. Your Nanny is, after all, caring for the most precious part of your life: your children. Regular, open communication is essential to creating a healthy, long-lasting relationship between employer and employee. We recommend giving your employee feedback and praise on a frequent on-going basis.

Conducting regular meetings with your employee creates a forum to discuss issues about the children, your family and job satisfaction. When you first hire someone, you may want to meet as often as once a week and then gradually extend it to once every month. At minimum, we recommend three to four informal meetings to “check-in” throughout the year, with a written evaluation on their anniversary date.

Prior to the meeting, review their work agreement, previous performance evaluations, and fill out the evaluation form. Meet with your Nanny in private and at a time when there will be minimal interruptions, such as while the children are at school. Begin the meeting with their strengths and offer specific examples. This is a great opportunity to acknowledge their contribution to the household and say “Thank you”. Next, discuss any previously identified areas needing improvement. Always ask them for their feedback about the job and for suggestions before introducing your ideas for improvement. At the end of the meeting make any revisions to the evaluation and provide the employee with a copy of this for their records.

While there is no clear industry standard for an annual salary increase for household employees, we have seen a range from 3 to 5% for an annual pay increase depending on whether the job (schedule & responsibilities) have changed over the last year, the employee’s performance, and their longevity in the position.

If you are a registered Town & Country Client, contact one of our Placement Counselors for more advice on employee anniversaries and to receive a sample evaluation form.

Ask Mary Poppins (aka Mary Pat)

Mary Pat doesn’t fly around with a black umbrella, but she does have over 20 years of experience as a Child Development Expert. These post will answer questions about child development concerns & managing your employer/employee relationship.

Q. Help! My Nanny is habitually late. She is a terrific Nanny for my son, however, she is typically ten or more minutes late everyday. How do I resolve this issue?

A. Managing a Nanny can be a delicate business. It can be challenging to maintain the balance between having her as a part of your family and being her employer.

If you haven’t already done so, I would recommend setting up a regular time for a meeting to discuss the children, household, and employment issues. Many Nannies find it hard to speak up and will appreciate the opportunity to communicate openly with you.  Having weekly meetings can help you manage situations pro-actively and develop a solid working relationship.

Meetings should always start with the positive aspects of your employment relationship.  This is a time for you to acknowledge your Nanny and thank her for specific contributions and work towards positive solutions to the challenges of family life. Rather than saying, “You do a nice job with Ethan,” she will appreciate more specific feedback like, “I like the way you take the time to let Ethan help you make breakfast in the morning. He seems to be learning a lot about taking turns, measuring, and following directions. And he’s having fun! Thank you.”

Next, identify the problem. In this case I would say something like, “I notice that you have been about ten minutes late to work lately. This causes challenges for my scheduling. I would like to talk with you about how we can get back on track. Are you having a scheduling problem in the mornings that I can help you figure out?”

It is possible that 1) the Nanny hadn’t noticed that she was late. 2) She does actually have a scheduling or transportation problem that can easily be resolved. Many times, a simple, honest talk with an employee will dissolve any employer/employee issue. Also remember to ask her if she has any issues to bring up and make a plan to follow-up and remember to schedule a meeting to check-in again soon.

Do your household employees think that their email address or the information on their MySpace or Facebook profile won’t impact their professional image or their ability to keep their job?

They need to think again.

While having an online profile is all the rage and everyone has an email account, the details of this information could be more important to your employee’s professional image and your family than you or they may realize.

(While this is based on a true story, the names and details have been changed.  The actual family and Nanny were not associated with Town & Country Resources.)

Allyssa thought she’d found her dream Nanny job.  In her first meeting with the family there was an immediate connection and sense of comfort.  The three days she did as a working trial went perfectly.  The salary was great, it was a 15-minute commute from her house and the five-year-old boy shared Allyssa’s love of soccer.

The family also thought they’d found their dream Nanny and were just pulling together the details of the offer when they decided to do a little Internet searching on her.  Sure enough, they found a MySpace account open to the public.  Not only did Allyssa describe crazy all-night parties on a recent trip to Mexico with her friends, she also talked at length about the family she used to work for and specifically about the list of things that bugged her about the job.

For the family, it was a rude awakening.  They were shocked by the new information they now had about Allyssa’s personal life.  Worse, the lack of discretion and good judgment she had shown in violating her previous employers’ privacy was inexcusable.  They now knew two things, that Allyssa wasn’t getting the job offer and that Internet research would now be part of what they would do on each potential hire.

Your employee might think they are okay because they don’t happen to have a MySpace or FaceBook profile, but don’t forget about the rest of their public image.  A simple search on Google or Yahoo! may reveal things they didn’t even know were there and would prefer to keep private.

• Is their email address suggestive or otherwise unprofessional?

• Does their voice mail greeting have music or anything other than a brief, professional and short voice message?

• If they do have a profile on MySpace or FaceBook, they should make it private by requiring pre-approved viewers to log in.  (This is a simple setting they can do on their account.)  As an employer, you may want to add checking candidates’ online information into your due diligence process, and also ask that all information about your family be kept strictly private by your employee.

Here at Town & Country, we always do an online search of each of our candidates, as well as provide helpful tips and awareness to both our client s and candidates in regards to a candidate’s online public image.

When looking to hire a household employee, it is worth the extra effort to do some research online.  Especially when searching for a job, employees need to take the time to make sure their public image is something they, and the family that they will be working for, can be proud of. 

In general, a “share care” is any arrangement where two or more families cooperate to hire one nanny to care for the children of all the families.  Typically, a nanny will require only a slightly higher hourly wage for more children.  However, the cooperating families are able to split all the costs among the entire group, so all things being equal, if two families hire a single nanny, the on-going costs to each family can be cut just about in half.

In these uncertain economic times, that makes a lot of sense.  The best child care providers are seasoned, experienced professionals with an established earning history, and a share care holds some potential to allow caring families to stretch their child care budgets.  But these arrangements also present a number of unique issues that the participating families are wise to consider up front.

Over the next several blog entries, we will talk about some of the issues inherent in share care arrangements.  For those who decide the arrangement is right for them, we will try to provide some tips and resources to help you make the arrangement work.

If there is one theme that will come through loud and clear, it is that communication is key – communication among the families, communication with the nanny, communication up front, and communication at every step along the way.  So it’s no surprise that the first key to a successful share care is to make sure that all the participating families are able and comfortable talking through all the issues, some of which may end up being awkward or even contentious.  At Town & Country, we are very happy to work with families who have decided to do a share care to help them find just the right caregiver.  However, we have not been successful trying to match up the participating families – that is, the participating families should organize together first, and start working with an agency or otherwise finding their nanny second.  We suspect that most agencies that are able to successfully find caregivers for share care families take a similar approach.

For Carrie and me, some of the issues we’ll talk about here come from personal experience.  We did a share care for our first nanny, mostly for the cost savings, but also because we partnered with families that were literally “family.”  This meant that our kids spent a good portion of each day with their cousins.  Of course, everything changes, our needs changed, participating families came and went, and we learned a lot in the process.  Hopefully we can share some of our experience with you here.

So with that introduction, to close our first post in this series, here are the main issues that we plan to discuss in upcoming posts:

-The Partnership: Choosing the families in the share care – costs, savings, complexity, how many kids?
-Making the big decisions
-Practical day-to-day issues

• Full and part-time schedules – sharing the costs fairly
• Taxed position or cash?  Some practical considerations
• Whose house?  Where will the Nanny take care of the kids?
• Establishing “Rules of the Road” – driving, mobility, activities and other questions

-Leaving the group, adding new members
-Giving references

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for our next Town & Country Blog entry.

Jens Hillen, Co-President Carrie Hillen, Co-President