My Family Wants Me To Remain Available But They Are Cutting My Hours | Q&A

Hi everyone. Laura from Nanny Parent Connection here. Hope you are getting excited for Halloween!

I wanted to reach into the mailbag again and discuss another question that I hear regularly from nannies. This can be a bit of a complicated topic:

“I absolutely love working with my nanny family and I want to continue working with them. However, as we are transitioning to the school year, they are cutting my hours by wanting me to commit solely to them and remain available to work additional hours. How can I go about navigating this with them while keeping my income requirements in mind?”

Let’s discuss this! Click the button below to watch and I would love to hear your comments on this topic. Thanks in advance!

Click Here To Watch!

A transcript of the video can be found below: 

Hi everyone, Laura from Nanny Parent Connection here.

Today, let’s dig back into the mailbag and discuss a question I have heard from a few nannies recently:

“I absolutely love working with my nanny family, and I want to continue working with them. However, as we are transitioning to the school year, they are cutting my hours but want me to commit solely to them and remain available to work additional hours. How can I go about navigating this with them while keeping my income requirements in mind?”

This is a really great question because so many families and nannies have to figure out how to navigate this when they transition from summertime hours, which are often full-time hours, into fall hours, which typically include after-school hours only.

Most families still would love their nanny to be available to provide sick care coverage, coverage when schools are closed, or coverage for holiday breaks.

And while that might seem like a great deal for families, just having additional hours whenever they need them, that’s also really tough for a nanny to navigate financially and within their own schedule.

Nannies, I recommend considering these three solutions if your family wants to cut your hours but still have you remain available to provide coverage on random no-school, sick, or school holiday break days:

Solution #1: A family can pay their nanny for full-time, even if they don’t use all of those hours

This scenario allows a nanny to remain available and on call to their nanny family, and it prevents a nanny from needing to take a second job.

By taking a second job, of course, that would mean they would not be available to their family if they were scheduled for that job during those hours that the family needs.

Solution #2: A family can add family assistant or household manager duties to the nanny’s job responsibilities

This scenario allows a nanny to take tasks off of the plate of busy families while still meeting their weekly hourly requirements.

Examples of additional job duties could include: meal prep and planning, grocery shopping, cooking family meals, family laundry, pet care, children’s activity planning and managing sign-ups, vacation planning, organizing clothing and toy rotation and donation, clothes shopping for children, returning packages, managing vendors, birthday party planning, etc.

The nanny must, of course, be willing to take on these additional job duties.

Solution #3: A family can add in opportunities for additional working hours with their nanny

One popular way that families and nannies navigate this (of course, dependent on the nanny having that availability, and the exact day of the week might need a change from time to time based on everyone’s schedules) is to have a date night each week.

And as we’re discussing getting creative with how to navigate adding in additional hours, I want to take a moment to point out that banking hours is illegal.

That means if a nanny works 30 hours one week and 50 hours the next week, you cannot just average that out and say they worked 40 hours each week.

Some people run into this if their nanny is offered 40 guaranteed hours each week and families think that this is a great creative way to have a nanny make up for those hours they didn’t work in week one.

By law, a nanny must be paid for any hours worked during the week. That means if they work 30 hours one week and they’re guaranteed 40 hours, they must be paid for 40 hours.

If they work 50 hours that next week, they must be paid their regular pay rate for those first 40 hours and then time and a half for those additional 10 hours worked that week.

I point this out because many families and nannies do not know about this labor standard law.

How should a nanny navigate the conversation about reducing hours but maintaining their income requirement with their family?

When this subject is brought up, it will likely be in a verbal conversation.

I recommend not answering right away but telling your nanny family that you will need to do some thinking on how to make working fewer hours while still remaining available and on call to them work for your budget requirements.

During some downtime, I would recommend putting your thoughts down in a well-articulated email to the family.

This could be something like, “I’ve been doing some thinking about how to keep my schedule open to be available to your family while still meeting my income requirement needs. Here are some solutions I have come up with.”

Then you should go on to describe the three scenarios that I outlined above but tailor them to your family’s specific needs.

Remember, nannies, this is the time to really play up all of the value that you bring to your nanny family or that you could be bringing to your nanny family.

It’s important to come at this from a collaborative, positive, and proactive viewpoint that focuses on solutions and not the problems.

And for any families who have tuned in, really the only way to make this work for your nanny is going to be to offer full-time or close to full-time guaranteed hours.

It’s not fair to expect a nanny to keep mornings or other downtime open so that they can be available to you if you are not paying them for that time.

If they do need to go out and get a second job, that means they are not going to be available for your family to provide sick care coverage, school closure coverage, or holiday break coverage when you need it.

Not doing so will result in your nanny feeling stressed out and not valued.

The bottom line is that no nanny should keep their schedule open if they are not going to be paid for that time.

All right, nannies, those are my recommendations for remaining available while the family cuts your hours.

If you have any questions, make sure you send them my way. Get in touch via our website, nannyparentconnection.com.

I hope you like this video and found it helpful.

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Thanks, everyone. Bye!