Diane Crookham-Johnson didn’t need a Gallup Poll to tell her a top concern of working parents is balancing their family and work lives. All she had to do was listen to the alarm clocks going off in Musco Lighting Inc.’s Oskaloosa headquarters around 3 o’clock on any given afternoon and watch the employees heading out the door.

“People were leaving the building, there was no clerical staff and I wondered, ‘Where do you all go?’” she said.

They were going to pick up their children from school and take them to their piano lessons or sports practices or day care or whatever other activities filled their kids’ busy schedules. Crookham-Johnson decided there had to be a better way to ensure employee productivity, but also make sure workplace attendance rules weren’t limiting their children’s ability to participate in activities.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be better if one person got everyone’s kids?” she said. “It’s a juggling act if you have to provide transportation yourself. It’s a negative either way. You’re either running back and forth, or your parents aren’t able to participate, and then you have that whole guilt thing going. It’s not just the moms; we hear it from the dads, too.”

That was 16 years ago, and Crookham-Johnson, now the vice president of administration but at the time working her way up the ladder of the company her father, Joe Crookham, started in 1968, saw an opportunity to give Musco employees peace of mind and solve a productivity issue at the same time.

In 1989, the company purchased the first of four 15-passenger vans that would deliver employees’ young children at no charge to wherever they needed to go in either Oskaloosa or Muscatine, where Musco’s production facility is located, between the work hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Musco, a sports and events lighting company with a worldwide reach, employs 750 people at its two Iowa locations. About 100 children use the van service to get them from place to place.

Crookham-Johnson thinks the van service is one of the reasons for high employee-satisfaction ratings in the survey Right Management Consultants conducts annually for the company. In the last survey, 97 percent of employees indicated they hoped to be working at the company in five years, and turnover is less than 5 percent. Written comments reinforced employees’ belief that Musco “understands that my job is important, but so is my life,” Crookham-Johnson said.

Crookham-Johnson said that with 80 percent of elementary school students in Iowa living in households with two working parents, it’s imperative that their employers address work-life balance issues. “The reality for businesses is that we have to employ parents of young kids,” she said. “That’s our labor pool.”

She said executives from other companies have listened with enthusiasm as she explains the van program and the social statement it makes, but often note the benefit would be too expensive for them to implement. “The cost is minimal when you weigh the 15 to 20 minutes employees miss work,” she said. “But we weren’t trying to make this great social statement; we were just trying to keep people at work.”

As a privately owned family company, Musco had more latitude to implement the van program than some publicly traded companies that must report to investors, Crookham-Johnson said. But she believes even investor-owned companies could easily duplicate the program. “If they’re willing to take the risk of front-end expense, they will find it will pay for itself in loyalty and productivity,” she said.

Crookham-Johnson said Musco’s next challenge is to develop flexible programs that allow employees to care for aging parents, a particular concern in Iowa with a large population of elderly residents. “The kid thing was easy, because we saw lots of people leaving, but the parent issue is tougher,” she said. “It’s something the [human resources] team is constantly looking at.”