It's 11 on a Wednesday morning, and Denise Towne, production manager at Zutano, a children’s clothing company in Cabot, Vermont, is busy working at her desk. Alongside her, asleep in her crib, is Towne’s 7-month-old daughter, Morgan. When Morgan wakes up, Towne will nurse her, and then perhaps they’ll go to the cafeteria to grab lunch and chat with a few other mothers and their babies. After that, it’s back to the office where Towne works while Morgan plays in her exersaucer. When Morgan goes down for another nap at 1:30, Towne may go to a meeting or continue coordinating the company’s inventory.

Welcome to the new world of babies in the workplace. There are more than 120 organizations with baby-at-work programs, says Carla Moquin, president of the Parenting in the Workplace Institute (babiesatwork.org)—or more than 1,400 babies who’ve accompanied parents to their jobs. While most programs allow babies up to 6 or 8 months old—or until they’re mobile, whichever comes first—Zutano is unusual in that mothers (and fathers) have the option of taking their babies to the office every day for the first full year of their children’s lives.

And how does having your baby at work, well, work, exactly? “We don’t have any day care facilities here,” explains Michael Belenky, president of Zutano. “The parent is the day care. If you’re not already in a private office, you’re moved into a private office that is big enough to have a crib. You’re just expected to care for your baby and keep your job going.”

Towne has had three babies participate in Zutano’s babyat- work program. In fact, it was when Towne was pregnant with her first child eight years ago that the program was officially born. “The people we have on our team are really, really important to us,” says Belenky, who didn’t want to lose Towne for a year or maybe two. So, when she announced she was pregnant with her son, Belenky said, “Why don’t you just bring him in and we’ll see how it works?”

Unofficially, the first Zutano baby to come to work was Belenky’s own daughter Sofia. Twenty years ago, when Belenky and his wife, Uli, an art director and designer, conceived of the children’s clothing company, it was like most start-ups, he says, done at their kitchen table or in someone’s garage. Sofia would necessarily accompany Belenky to the bank or be strapped to his back while he packed boxes. “[She] was just always part of the early stages of our business,” Belenky recalls. “The dilemma that so many of us face between raising children and [doing] work is that one of them always seems to get compromised.” So, to avoid this compromise, eight years ago a formal babies-at-work policy was put in place.

Towne says she was nervous at first about how the program would work. “But everyone welcomed me back,” she says. “I was probably more self-conscious than anyone, which meant that I was even more focused. I just tried to make sure I got everything done that I needed to.”

To date, there have been 17 Zutano babies. “You can’t put a value on being able to be with your baby 24/7 that first year,” Belenky says. An added benefit to the company, according to Belenky, is that the company’s turnover rate—particularly for moms who’ve brought babies to work—is almost nil. And the moms who’ve used the program have come back to work faster, Belenky says, precisely because they’re able to bring their babies with them.

“It definitely makes my life easier,” Towne agrees. “For one, I don’t have to pay for day care—that’s a huge benefit. I’m able to nurse on demand; I don’t have to deal with pumping. I can’t complain. I can’t think of anyplace else I could work where I can live the way I do.”

Feeling Blue? Come Visit a Baby or Two

And what about the other employees, those who don’t have babies at work? How happy are they about seeing and hearing infants all day? “I think there’s a myth that babies are really fussy,” Belenky says. “We’ve had five babies at one time out of an office of 20 people, and you just would not have known it. Occasionally, you hear a little fuss, but for the most part it’s pretty quiet.”

There’s a reason babies are pretty content at work, explains Moquin, who’s also the author of Babies at Work: Bringing New Life to the Workplace. “Babies are incredibly social from birth,” she says. “Their favorite thing to do is look at human faces. And being in the workplace—within the context of these structured programs—the babies thrive. They become very comfortable with lots of different people and they love it.”

As for the other employees, though there are no formal studies on the impact of babies in the workplace, Moquin says that anecdotally, “morale skyrockets” in organizations that have such programs. What’s more, productivity and teamwork also increase. “People who normally wouldn’t interact, and thus might not collaborate, get to know each other—because they come to visit the babies,” Moquin says.

A healthy start to life

At the Arizona State Department of Health Services, Nicole Olmstead, heart disease and stroke prevention program manager, has had three babies come to work with her as part of the department’s infant program. And unlike Towne, Olmstead works in a standard cubicle, not her own separate office. How has she managed? “I was able to rig up a little bed system under my desk,” Olmstead explains. “I don’t have a closed desk, just a couple of filing cabinets. And I would put egg crate foam on the floor and then a blanket on top of that, and they would nap on that.” She also had folding swings and play mats that she could take out when her baby woke.

When her youngest daughter started crawling early, Olmstead says, “I would set her down in my cube and I’d do some work, and she’d crawl to the end of the aisle, and I’d go get her and bring her back, and we’d just do that all day.” And though initially she worried about her daughter making noise and bothering her cubicle-mates, Olmstead says they never really noticed. Indeed, far from her babies being a bother, sometimes, she says, “I would have to hunt down the kids because I didn’t know who had come and taken them. They had so many grandmothers and aunts and people that loved to come and hold the baby.”

But wasn’t it difficult to do double duty—to look after her child and work full-time? “I never had any problem getting any work done,” explains Olmstead, whose children are now 6, 4, and 1 year. “They just kind of got used to being toted to meetings, or going on conference calls, or going to meetings off-site,” she says. “It takes the ability to juggle both things. I think maybe the first week, with Emily, my oldest, [it] was hard because I didn’t know what to expect. But once you get used to having the baby with you, it’s really easy to do.”

The Arizona State Department of Health Services Infant-at-Work program began as a pilot breast-feeding policy, says Carol Vack, director of the Employee Wellness Program, designed so that breast-feeding mothers could continue nursing longer. It has since evolved to include fathers (and thus dropped the lactation requirement), and Vack estimates they’ve had 60 babies in eight years. Employees need written permission from a supervisor before they can return to work with a child, and they have meetings to go over keeping a satisfactory work schedule.

But Vack says they’ve found few, if any, downsides. “It’s just been a wonderful morale booster,” she says. “Our whole Department of Public Health is out there to do just what we are doing with our own kids—to make sure that every child has a healthy beginning in life. So we have a chance to really practice what we preach.”

Olmstead agrees: “Part of the reason that I stayed with the department—besides the fact that I love my job—[is] the benefit of being able to bring my kids with me. You can’t replace that time.”

A winning combination

What if you’d like your baby close but don’t want to have to chase her up and down the office while you work? Enter Cubes&Crayons, a full-time child care and office space site in Menlo Park, California, the brainchild of M. Felicity Chapman (cubesandcrayons.com). When Chapman had her first child four years ago, she thought she’d find a nanny and return to work full-time running her design company. But then she fell in love with her daughter, and her plans changed. “[I] could control the level of work,” says Chapman about choosing which design projects she wanted. “But I couldn’t control the level of child care. I couldn’t find a nanny who wanted to work two hours one week, three the next and 40 hours the following week. And I thought there should be something like that out there.”

So in January 2008, Chapman opened Cubes&Crayons, just in time for her second daughter, then 5 months, to take advantage of the high-quality child care while Chapman takes meetings or works in the office space right down the hall.

Today, Cubes&Crayons has 90 members, 30 percent of whom are fathers, Chapman says. Each week, 15 to 20 people use the space regularly. Emily Marciniak is one of them. “Once I get to child care,” says Marciniak, a software designer, “my commute is about 30 seconds.” After getting her daughter settled in the day care room, Marciniak just walks out the door to the communal workspace tables where she has free Wi-Fi, a printer, and anything else she needs. Separate offices can be used for meetings or private phone calls.

When asked about the benefits of this novel office/child-care space, Marciniak says, “It’s cheaper, for one. I pay about $10.35 an hour, and all the nannies I found were at least $18 to $20 an hour plus benefits and vacation. And the flexibility of hours was helpful. I’m able to go in four hours today and eight hours tomorrow, as long as there’s space. If you can telecommute, it’s a really great deal.” Plus, Marciniak says, her daughter loves it. “She gets bored with only me,” she says, laughing, “so she really likes seeing and playing and learning with the other kids.”

Chapman has plans to open Cubes&Crayons this year in San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Portland, with an additional 10 cities slated over the next 3 years. She’d also like to expand internationally—well, at least to Canada, she says. “I truly believe that everybody should have their cake and eat it too,” Chapman says. “Everybody should be able to balance life and work, and we’re just excited if we can be part of the solution to [finding] that balance.”

But behind these creative solutions to balancing work and life lies a larger societal issue. While Zutano’s baby-at-work program, born of “instinct and necessity,” has helped the babies and the company, Belenky says, “Women are such an important part of the workforce, and I think as a society we have not really thought enough about what the needs of children are and who takes care of them. It’s really a problem, especially in these early years.” He hopes that his program can help spur a national conversation and create real policies that address the needs of children and their parents. Now that might mean really having our cake and eating it too.

Christina Boufis is a San Francisco Bay Area freelance writer who specializes in health, career, education, parenting, and women’s issues. She lives with her husband, their 6-year-old son, Gus and a handful of curious creatures.