When you first get your little people (it probably will work better before you have children for the women because the women cannot work while carrying a baby.) anyways, you take your little person to the office, kitchen or workroom, depending on where they work. Then after their action is "Working on career," praise them three times. On the third time their action should be "Running away." Drag them back and repeat ten times. Now, even when you're not on, they will be almost always working. On my last generation I made 20 000 dollars in one day because she was a master (level 8) and her salary was over 300/hour + extra $10 every minute.
Honestly using this trick... I love this trick because I tried the trick where you skip ahead years, well it didn't work for me at all, I lost money because I didn't get anything from the trick, and they were all 10 years older and one of my triplets was gravley ill and it cost me $8000 to heal him, so that trick is just a bad idea.
Then I thought...if they worked a lot... Maybe they would level up faster to get more money. So I kept praising them and praising them, went off, two hours later one of my little people had gone from level one to level five and was now making over $200 as appears to $75 an hour.
I make a lot of freaking money doing this. All my rooms are renovated. I have 300k in my bank. As for the food thing, you can either make it fill up on its own by buying a 99 cent power up in the store that never let's your people starve, or you can buy it. If you have over 300k, you can easily buy your own! So try this trick. I've been doing it for 18 generations. There's no risk.