Tag: flexible working

Manufacturing Companies Are Helping Employees With Child Care. Should Your Company Join Them?

Child care remains a constant concern for American workers, as costs soar and some companies insist on return-to-office mandates, backing away from some of the more childcare-friendly remote and hybrid working models that were adopted almost universally during the Covid pandemic. Now a new report says that, in response to changing child care demands from employees, some big manufacturers are directly investing in child care support for employees. It’s a shift that might prompt you to reconsider some of the workplace perks your company offers, in the hope of helping your staff and also attracting talented job applicants. 

The report, at industry news site HRDive, includes a story about a human resources worker at Iowa-based agricultural equipment maker Sukup Manufacturing Co. struggling to juggle work, commuting and child care — because the care facility was 45 miles away from her workplace. Emily Schmitt, chief administrative officer and general counsel at Sukup told HRDive that the struggle eventually became too much for her and she left. Schmitt also said that at the time the company was “having issues of people not being able to stay employed in our Sheffield location because there wasn’t child care availability” nearby, or at all — the report says about 23 percent of state residents live in “child care deserts.”

So Sukup formed an alliance with the local school district and bank, sought and won a matching grant from the state to complement the $1.25 million the group was injecting into creating a new child care center, and built their own facility, with space for 112 children.

The report notes that this small manufacturer is just one example of a slow-developing trend, with major companies like Toyota and Intel in the lead. These big name manufacturers are said to be “expanding their partnerships with child care providers,” partly to boost workplace culture (working parents are likely to be less stressed if they know their children are being looked after nearby during the working day) and also to retain workers. The report quotes a study from the Manufacturing Institute where almost half the respondents said working hours flexibility (friendly to ever-changing childcare needs) was an “important” reason for them to remain with their particular employer.

But it’s not just in the manufacturing industry that leaders are thinking about better support for working parents. In March this year, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser landed her financial services company in the spotlight for good reasons: Fraser had made a deliberate choice to shun the industry’s RTO trend and instead retain some flexible working rules that had been in place during the pandemic. It wasn’t merely a phase, Fraser said, and it was instead a “new way of working.” Fraser also said that she was using the policy as a way of attracting working parents to her company — it offers Citi a “competitive advantage” in the job market, Fraser says, because it’s appealing to talented working mothers who may not be keen to return to work under rival banks’ stricter in-office working rules.

In May an Associated Press report also noted numerous U.S. companies were offering on-site child care due to the “fraught” child care landscape.

All of this may prompt savvy company leaders to ponder if they’re supporting their staff with children properly. Because there are numerous benefits to be had. In April last year, a report from Small Business Majority, a small business advocacy group in Washington D.C., found that 59 percent of small business owners said that barriers to child care access were impacting their business, blunting growth opportunities.

A quarter of founders admitted they’d had to shut down their companies and return to working in more traditional employee roles because they couldn’t juggle child care and work. And in July an expert reported that some companies are seeing an effective return on investment of $4 for every $1 spent on supporting their working parent employees. 

In a tumultuous working world, rocked by stresses like layoffs, ever-encroaching AI and other social and political upheavals, supporting your working parent staff may be a very sound business policy—those workers are stressed enough without having to worry about who’s looking after their kids.