Big firms are boosting child-care benefits

Whether your company is pushing employees to return to the office, a la JPMorgan, or letting them stay home, a la Google, Deutsche Bank and pretty much everyone else, the question remains: What the heck to do with the kids?
The US remains a confusing patchwork of partially open, partially closed schools. Children learning via screen need supervision to help them stay focussed. So far, that’s mostly meant parents. In the spring, 60% of working parents functioned with no outside child care, according to a BCG survey, spending an extra 27 hours each week taking care of the children, helping them with school and doing other household tasks. Half admitted it had hurt their work performance. This has left companies scrambling to figure out how to get the work done — and prevent employees from burning out.
It’s terra incognita for a lot of organisations. Many companies tend to think of children, when they think of them at all, as a kind of private hobby. Studies on working parents have confirmed again and again that bosses more readily give time off to employees for non-child reasons — like a bucket-list vacation or training for a marathon — than they do to those who ask for the same amount of time to raise children.
Change is long overdue. Pre-pandemic, offering family-friendly benefits was fairly rare — rare enough to prompt the Society for Human Resource Management to note, in its rather dry way, that “benefits in this area may represent an opportunity for employers as they are often among those that generate the most enthusiasm from employees, and many can be provided at low cost.”
One in four companies allow parents to bring kids to work in a child-care emergency, according to SHRM, but only 11% offer a child-care referral service, and just 4% offer a child-care program. Non-family benefits are much more common: 56% of firms offer tuition assistance, 39% acupuncture coverage and 15% pet health insurance. Yep, pet health insurance.
The pandemic has started to alter that calculus. Companies are starting to realise that they can’t leave working parents twisting in the wind, trying to figure this out individually with their supervisors — the problem is too big. “It is a business issue,” says Ellyn Shook, chief leadership and human resources officer at Accenture. This isn’t something you can fix by being the world’s most flexible boss, or most diligent employee.
So employers are starting to offer more tangible help, especially those in the finance, consulting and tech industries. This is no surprise — these sectors have more cash than most and compete ruthlessly on talent. “In February, unemployment was record-low,” says Shook. “We were truly in a war for talent. I believe we will be
back there again. And actions companies take today will be long remembered.”

—Bloomberg