Working from home with kids. How Taxfix parents are taking on homeschooling
By: Katrina Gnatek
Tags: Berlin, Madrid, Working From Home, Working Parents, Startup

Today millions of parents find themselves responsible for overseeing their children’s education from home and the struggle is real. Our working moms and dads share their experience with balancing work, life, and homeschooling in times of pandemic.

Under the best circumstances, working from home with children can be a challenge. Throw in lesson plans, lunch prep, and isolation activities, and suddenly you’re juggling several full-time jobs at once. We’ve compiled some ideas for parents and businesses to help ease the stress of this unprecedented balancing act.

Create a schedule together

Head of Customer Success, Kerstin von Blumröder, recommends breaking out the colorful markers and construction paper to plan a routine with your child:

“In addition to helping my team adapt to this new way of working, it was important to make sure my 12-year-old daughter still felt safe, happy, and engaged in her educational process. Creating a detailed, color-coded schedule really saved my life. Every evening we sit together and create the tasks for the next day and discuss the challenges and difficulties in the individual subjects. We set aside time for my daughter to teach me. This helps me to understand if she has gaps in her knowledge and, if so, in what size? It also helps both of us know what our goals are and why they’re important.”

Plan your time in advance

Head of Brand, Yazmina Cabrera, suggests setting up calendar events for parental duties in addition to your work schedule:

“My husband and I have divided our day in equal parts, so that we both can have at least five hours in a row of uninterrupted work time. I also try to squeeze some work in before my two-year-old gets up in the morning and after he goes to bed at night. This way I can really focus on the tasks on my agenda that do not require facetime with my team, rather than trying to do everything at once. I also set clearly defined events in my work calendar to let my team know when I’m on mommy-duty. I still find myself being super productive, but my working hours are distributed all over the place!”

[Also check out the Brand Team’s recent initiative, Taxfix Impact, for German speakers seeking financial advice during the COVID-19 crisis.]

Teamwork is key

Isee Buch, content marketing manager, tackles the current situation with his wife and children as a team — with some well-organized plays and a bit of improvisation:

“A mixture of improvisation and planning — this is how you could describe the strategy my wife and I use. We have two kindergarten-age kids and we are both in full-time jobs. We want our daughter and son to suffer as little as possible. That’s why we split the workdays into four-hour blocks. In the first four hours I take care of them — a lot of reading and building fantasy castles — and my wife goes to the office, which is just around the corner. Especially at lunchtime and in the evenings we dedicate our time exclusively to them. As soon as she takes over, I work from home and so on…the ideal case.

“But sometimes it happens that I join a call or answer emails — for instance with the children next to me on the sofa. As I said, it’s a mixture. But that’s what makes it so challenging, exciting, and not necessarily unproductive. Just different. And with all these circumstances, it’s great to have such an empathetic team on your side.”

Let creativity drive learning

Arielle Tucker, tax expert, tries to use this experience as an opportunity to let imagination steer the learning process:

“My husband and I ask the children about their interests and what they would like to learn. Based on that, we explore areas that generally they wouldn’t have time to. For example, our daughter — age seven — was interested in starting a soap company so we had her come up with a name, logo, soap designs and then ordered the materials for her to make her own soap. Turns out she no longer wants to start a soap company.”

What companies can do

Head of People, Marie Toby, emphasizes the need to listen to your employees and be realistic with your expectations:

“We were very lucky to already have an active parents-talk channel within the company on Slack. It’s a place where they exchange and ask for tips, vent out, share sweet moments. We realized fairly quickly that they were going to face many challenges as parents in home-office. We reached out to Nona.care, a child care service that quickly turned to innovative virtual care due to the lockdown, and worked out a trial subscription for Taxfix parents.

“It seemed to be just so important to approach this as empathetically as possible and to find solutions for them on an individual basis. We made sure to extend deadlines and allow parents to find the working hours that fit best for them. We also want to be realistic in terms of our expectations for what they can deliver. These are special circumstances and we really want them to get over any feeling of guilt. The key message is: ‘We know that you’re trying your best, don’t beat yourself up.’

“My biggest piece of advice for companies is to empathize with the stress and uncertainty your employees may be facing. It not only reassures them but also brings the team closer together.”