Plante & Moran Receives 2011 Huntington Pillar Award from Women's Resource Center

GRAND RAPIDS, MI, March 05, 2011 (Press-News.org) The Grand Rapids office of Plante & Moran, PLLC has been honored with a Huntington Pillar Award from the Women's Resource Center.

The award, which will be presented on March 16, annually honors West Michigan Employers who empower women in their workforce with progressive policies and practices. Plante & Moran was recognized for its decades-long focus on work-life balance and "intentionally creating policies and a culture that keeps their employees happy."

"We are extremely pleased to receive a Pillar Award from the Women's Resource Center in recognition of our workplace policies," said Rich Antonini, office managing partner. "As our firm co-founder Frank Moran was fond of saying, 'The whole person comes to work.' In the 1980s, as more women began entering the accounting profession - and then leaving as they started families - we began to develop initiatives that would address their needs.

"Today, half of our team in Grand Rapids are women - the majority of them women with families. We recognize the importance of programs that allow all our staff to achieve a true balance between work and home, and very much appreciate this recognition from the Women's Resource Center."

Plante & Moran offers a broad range of family-friendly tools, policies and programs available through the work of the firm-wide Personal Tightrope Action Committee, or PTA. These include:
• Generous parental leave of absence policy, which allows staff to take up to six months off after the birth of a child through a combination of paid/unpaid leave
• Liberal paid-time-off policy of up to five weeks each year, with an opportunity to "buy" up to two additional weeks at a discounted rate
• Free, on-site childcare on Saturdays during tax season at 11 offices to ease the family stress of the extra work hours required each year at this time
• Expanded part-time work opportunities, including job sharing, telecommuting, compresses work weeks and other tailored work arrangements - long before they were popular in the business world
• Non-traditional careers policy that guarantee staff members working a reduced or non-traditional schedule can still be on track for promotions and partnership
• PTA buddy program, which pairs expectant mothers with a staff member who has had a child at the firm and is familiar with its parenting policies and practices
• PTA Handbook, an online "cookbook" of information for expectant parents that deals with both firm policies and other important "how tos" - such as finding qualified child care, tax considerations for employing domestic help, adding a dependent to insurance and related issues.
• Adoption benefits that provide financial support to part- or full-time staff to cover the legal, medical, travel and related costs for adopting a child
• Partner sabbaticals, which call for up to a month off every seven years to allow time for rest, relaxation and renewal

About the Women's Resource Center
Since opening its doors in 1973, the Women's Resource Center strives to improve economic and workplace opportunities for women are working toward economic independence. The Grand Rapids non-profit provides mentoring services, resume-writing support, career planning, job search resources, skill-building classes and a clothing closet to assist women seeking employment.

About Plante & Moran, PLLC
Plante & Moran (www.plantemoran.com) is among the nation's largest certified public accounting and business advisory firms, providing clients with tax, audit, risk management, financial, technology, business consulting, and wealth management services. Plante & Moran has a staff of more than 1,600 professionals in 21 offices throughout Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois with international offices in Shanghai, China; Monterrey, Mexico; and Mumbai, India. Plante & Moran has been recognized by a number of organizations, including FORTUNE magazine, as one of the country's best places to work.