Caregiving benefits are now necessary for talent retention
Matthew Schulman, a senior communications manager at Crunchbase, is a new father returning from paternity leave this week. He recently moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey due to lower childcare costs, with friends still in the city saying they pay $4,000 or more a month.
He’ll pay about $2,000 a month when his son starts daycare, but on an abbreviated three-day-a-week schedule — the only arrangement available at a local daycare with one of the only spots available.
“We still don’t even really know what we’re ‘gonna do on Tuesdays and Thursdays for him when we’re both back at work,” Schulman said.
Workers are asking for — and increasingly expecting — more help from their employers to ease caregiving burdens they face outside of work that can impact their professional performance. Whether staff are caring for their own children, senior parents, both, or planning to do so in the future, getting needed financial and other support from their company is of growing importance across all generations, a new survey from Care.com found.
About 20% of workers said they left a job before because their employer didn’t provide family care benefits, according to the Care.com report, which surveyed 600 HR leaders and over 1,000 workers in the U.S. And a lack of caregiving benefits was the top reason workers gave, across all ages, for seeking another job, among 29% of those surveyed. Amid the true shift back to in-person work, HR leaders are recognizing how reducing caregiving burdens can help reach two key objectives — boosted productivity and talent retention — and how necessary it is to extend them.
Over half of employers are prioritizing child care benefits in 2024, up from 46% last year, and 50% also said they are prioritizing senior care benefits, up from 43% last year, according to the Care.com report. Top benefits to help cover the financial burden of caregiving cited by respondents include dependent care FSAs, cash subsidies for care, new parent support and on-site childcare.
“The one common thread is that the need for care is not going away for anybody,” said Wes Burke, Care.com CHRO.
Some companies are going “above and beyond,” like those recently highlighted in another report from Boston Consulting Group and advocacy group Moms First.
Fast Retailing, for example, provides staff with a $1,000 monthly stipend to use toward childcare costs for children under 7 years old that can be used for three years. Etsy offers staff backup care — up to $4,000 worth of credit toward it annually — and a $1,000 yearly stipend.
Other companies in that report include UPS, a Colorado ski resort, and Synchrony. Those companies have seen a massive return on investment on those benefits, up to 400%, as they’ve led to greatly reduced turnover, fewer missed days and increased productivity, according to that report.
“For a long time in our culture childcare was seen as a personal issue, and it’s really an economic issue, and the lack of quality, affordable childcare is becoming an even bigger crisis,” said Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Moms First. “What we proved in this report is that child care pays for itself,” Saujani said.
A lack of access to childcare driven by staffing shortages is another major problem beyond the cost that employers have helped address through backup care options, an area seeing major interest from employers and employees as they provide more flexibility and ultimately assurance for when care does fall through, Burke said.
Steamboat, the Colorado ski resort noted in the BCG and Moms First report, offers a near-site child care center for staff, where they get 20% off tuition and priority registration.
Bright Horizons, a child care services provider, has recently seen increased demand for on-site care as well as backup care offerings from employers. The pandemic and working from home helped normalize the conversation around caregiving, and that “childcare is a basic human need,” Priya Krishnan, chief digital and transformation officer at Bright Horizons, an operator of childcare services for employers.
When employers don’t provide adequate caregiving supports, “they’re really losing out on talent,” Krishnan said.