Employers have recognized the value that providing child care benefits to employees can have, not only for their workforce, but for their business as well, as these programs become table stakes for organizations that want to provide holistic support and retain talent.
Currently, just 6% of employers offer child care benefits, despite both parents working full-time in 63% of American households with children, according to a report by data research services firm Clutch. However, the pandemic forced employers to see firsthand what happens when a parent does have access to adequate child care and how that can impact their ability to do their jobs well. That’s why 42% of employers plan to expand or add care as part of their employee benefits going forward, according to research by Kinside, a child care benefits provider.
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“Child care has always been a need for anybody to do their job and the pandemic really just put that into very stark relief,” says Brittney Barrett, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Kinside. “The difference now is that we're moving to this more hybrid workforce, so there's a need for a more flexible child care benefit that allows your employee base to find care wherever they are, and in whatever budget they need.”
Barrett recently connected with Employee Benefit News to discuss the need for child care benefits and ways employers can step up and provide better support.
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What makes child care benefits critical in comparison to other benefits?
During the pandemic, 28% of women with a child under 18 left the workforce. Employers are really feeling that, and they're interested in preventing further attrition and attracting back women who left during the pandemic. The expense of the attrition and retraining some of your most qualified employees is part of the reason why it's so important — also, the move away from physical offices has reduced the overhead for a lot of employers. So the funds that may have previously been spent on things like office snacks, happy hours or events can now be put toward things that are more elemental to the lives of their staff, like a child care benefit.
What does a well-rounded child care benefit look like?
There’s no one-size-fit- all. Every family is going to have a different child caregiving need. It’s about care the employees trust: safe care is the most important element of finding child care, then reliable care. Those two elements are going to reduce that attrition for employers. Kinside has created a vetting system where we work directly with state licensing experts to create a state-by-state proprietary vetting system, where we look at license history, incident reports and things like that on an ongoing basis to evaluate the safety of the facilities we connect employees with.
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Most people leave the workforce because of the cost of child care. So if an employer was really looking to maximize the number of people that stay in the workforce, it would make financial sense to offer dependent care accounts, which some employers do, but it is still rare.
Do you think employers in general have done a good job managing caregiver needs?
Historically, no. Historically, child care benefits were looked at as more of a cost center than something that was essential to saving their employees and keeping them engaged in the workforce. There’s a real shift now because so many people dropped out of the workforce, and people saw the incredible expense. And now there's more affordable child care options on the market. The approach is really changing and more people are recognizing their employees as the whole people that they really are. We’re moving in the right direction.
