Dailycsr.com – 19 October 2017 – The “Working Mother” magazine has included Kimberly-Clark in its “100 Best Companies” of 2017, whereby recognising the latter’s “leadership in creating progressive programs” that helps the employees to maintain a balance between their “work and family”.
 
Kimber-Clark’s “flexible work arrangement” was cited by the magazine along with its “paid leave and child care programs”, while its advanced “opportunities for women” too didn’t go unnoticed by the journal. The Commodity Manager of Kimberly-Clark, Rose Van Himbergen said:
“As a working mom, I am proud to work for a company that enables people to build strong careers while caring for their families. Kimberly-Clark’s unique culture helps employees be their best and achieve their goals in their personal and professional lives.”
 
Moreover, Van Himbergen was also selected as “a Working Mother of the Year” by Working Mother for her initiatives in “Parents Interactive Network”, the latter is an “employee resource groups” of Kimberly-Clark. The function of this platform is to help guardians and parents alike to manage their home as well as work life, besides enhancing “their careers” and adding “value to the business”.
 
The inclusion of Kimberly-Clark’s in the “100 Best Companies” list of Working Mother forms part of the latest series of honours bagged by the company. While, Ethical Performance informs:
“Earlier this year, Kimberly-Clark was ranked #1 in the consumer packaged goods category on Forbes' 2017 list of America's Best Large Employers.”
 
 
 
References:
ethicalperformance.com

Dailycsr.com – 8 June 2017 – The “SXSW 2017” has found its place among the “premier venues for new ideas” in the nation, wherein Dee Dee Helfenstein, Executive of Booz Allen talked about the changing scenario of a workplace that relates to the “on-demand economy” along with the ways organisations could recruit and retain “top talent”.
 
Statistics show that forty percent of women in the America are family’s “primary breadwinners”, while the mothers are left behind as unemployed in comparison to fathers almost by “7.3%”. Thanks to the “on-demand” economic zone, workers can “contribute” their “professional value” and at the same time fulfil their parental duties at hand.
 
Grabbing up this flexible opportunity, more and more women are turning towards “on-demand jobs”. Moreover, a projects of Intuit, states that freelancers or independent contractors will cover as much forty percent of workforce by the year of 2020. Therefore, the discussion that took place “Innovating the Working Mom” were shaped around the question that:
“How can organizations that offer more traditional employment models adapt to recruit, retain, and empower talented women?”
 
The discussion panel was hosted by Dee Dee Helfenstein, while he added
“The working mom experience needs innovation—new modes of flexibility, services, and corporate norms. Research on the trends in the on-demand economy shows that moms are leaving corporate environments in favor of new forms of employment. To retain top talent, it’s essential for companies to find unique ways to hire and provide leadership paths for moms through flexible work arrangements.”
 
In fact, the “Society of Women Engineers” is leading the way in adapting its workplaces to retain women particularly from STEM background. A white paper called, “An Intervention Strategy to Re-engage Women Engineers in the Workforce”, was introduced in a joint venture by the “STEM Task Force” of iRelaunch and SWE, which provides a methodical outline to guide organisations to regain the “talented women engineers” who have quit their jobs. In the words of Natalie Givans, the Senior Vice President of Booz Allen:
“Often these are women who’ve left to raise a family and now aren’t sure if they can return as engineers”. 
 
Booz Allen has also come up with an “internship” programme called, “Return-to-Work Program”, that was launched in the year of 2016 and it attempts to get “women engineers back to the workforce”. As a result, “experienced engineers” who possess “high-demand skill sets” for example “electrical and systems engineers, and software developers/engineers”, are invited in “paid re-entry internships”. In the FY2018, the “Return-to-Work” programme of Booz Allen will target on helping “military spouses” to make their re-entry in the workforce.
 
Furthermore, Booz Allen also adds, as mentioned by Ethical Performace:
“If traditional employment models begin to adopt the flexibility associated with the on-demand economy to benefit working moms, will those organizations be ahead of the curve in anticipating the needs of not just moms but also millennials, gen-Xers with aging parents, and working dads? Our answer: Yes.”
 
 
References:
ethicalperformance.com 

Dailycsr.com – 26 August 2015 – The service providers, government bodies and enterprises who require more control cost of data centre and a shorter period to launch themselves in the market, can now receive “consumption-based pricing” from Aligned Data Centers, as announced by the company.
 
Data centres mostly designed “to support static power requirements and fixed densities”. Predicting the future trend of IT is a hard job as the variables depend on the availability of space and power, yet the customers of data centres have to enter in “long-term contracts” which may not be useful for them before the term expires. Consequently, the customers do not possess the control power which they require for their business. It is this very reason for which companies are now looking for “more flexibility and speed” concerning their data centre usage scale. In fact, the C.E.O of Aligned Data Centers, JakobCarnemark stated that:
“The current approach to the data center needs to evolve to keep pace with changing IT needs. Today, the cloud makes it possible to access compute and storage on-demand, scale quickly, and only pay for what you use. We are delivering the same approach to the data center and are able to help our clients cut their colocation contract commitments by up to 75%.”
 
The Aligned Data Centers has developed a “consumption-based pricing” which doesn’t depend on the changing IT demands as the service is customized to provide “flexibility and speed”, whereby the respective companies can “adjust data center capacity as their business needs change”. In the Grtner Analyst, Bob Gill’s words, the need of the hour requires:
“...a more transparent and usage-based model is sorely needed.”
 
The Aligned Data Centers took its shape under the experienced hands of a team of industry veterans who came from the largest building, designing, production operating and engineering data centre organisations which boasts a wide range of innovative “Internet, telecommunications, and financial services”. The said team members had gathered twenty five years of experiences in these fields before venturing out to create Aligned Data Centers.

The operational director at Aligned Data Centers, Paul Fox, the former IT infrastructure’s executive director at Morgan Stanley announced:
“We don’t believe in a tradeoff between reliability and cost. We are delivering enterprise grade data centers in a cost model that customers have been demanding for years.”
 
The Plano data center of the company, situated at Texas, will be ready for its inauguration, which will empower Aligned Data Centers with “30 megawatt data” setup, whereby enabling the customers to organise “multiple power densities within the same row and scale from 1-25kW per rack”. Moreover, the said center, or the “multi-tenant data center” as addressed by BusinessWire will feature latest technology of “energy efficient infrastructure” which will bring down the usage of water in air-coolers by eighty five percent.

Likewise, the clients can rest assure that they are not only accessing a faster generation of data center but also dealing with “industry leading Power Usage Effectiveness”. Fox also adds:
“We are excited to offer our clients the flexibility and efficiency they need to run the next-generation of IT”.
 
Besides building the data centre at Texas, the company has simultaneously initiated a “65 megawatt data center” construction at Arizona’s Pheonix, which will stand over an area of “550,000 square foot”. The executive vice-president of the company Ron Kolber informs:
“We have seen a tremendous amount of interest in our pay-for-use approach and are in advanced discussions with a number of large clients at both locations”.