In 2018, 71.5 percent of women with a child or children were either looking for work or currently employed. That number goes up to 93.9 percent for fathers with a child or children. Those numbers translate to an incredibly large amount of employees who are juggling the responsibilities of both work and parenting. One of those responsibilities? The high cost of child care. The average American couple spends 25.6 percent of their net income on child care. For a single-parent household, that number more than doubles.
Still wondering whether you should give your employees with a child or children a hand with affordable child care? Here are four reasons why child-care benefits are imperative for your company to offer!
Why You Should Offer Child Care Benefits
Improve Recruitment Efforts
Are you a human resources professional, a recruiter, or simply a manager trying to fill a role on your team? Then you probably know about the difficulty of finding great talent in today’s workforce. With unemployment at uncommonly low rates, the search for the right candidate is growing increasingly competitive. So, how can your company stay in the mix? Offer child-care benefits. A recent report by SHRM found that only 2 percent of American organizations help their employees pay for their child-care costs. Separate yourself from the competition that is hoping to recruit the high-talent candidates you have your eye on by providing them with a meaningful benefit like child care.
Support Your Female Employees
According to a report on motherhood in America, in 2017 there were 25.1 million mothers in today’s workplace. But after having a child, one in every three women chose not to return to work. That means a significant loss in your company’s gender diversity, especially as you look to more senior and executive roles. Yet, we’ve long understood the importance of having women in leadership: a Morgan Stanley report found that it can translate to increased productivity, greater innovation, better products, better decision-making, and higher employee retention and satisfaction. All of that simply means that your bottom line improves when you have gender diversity, especially in leadership. While the modern family dynamic, like two employed parents or a stay-at-home father, is growing in popularity, women are still more likely than their male counterparts to stop working so they can assist with child care. Support them by offering another route for child care that doesn’t lead to them leaving their careers if they don’t voluntarily choose to do so.
Prepare for Millennial Parents
The average age of motherhood is increasing and parents are choosing to delay having children. That means the percentage of Millennial parents, which sat at 48 percent in 2016, will likely increase exponentially in years to come. Even if your current workforce doesn’t consist of multiple parents, that doesn’t mean it won’t. It also doesn’t mean that parenthood isn’t top of mind for many of them. Millennials are aware of their futures and are ready to begin planning for parenthood if they aren’t already doing so. Show them you have an investment in their future, and you want to be an integral part of it! How can you do so? By providing a child-care benefit that they can use in the future.
So, how can you offer child-care benefits without breaking the bank?
According to two separate reports issued by the pro-business US Chamber of Commerce, research shows that when companies provide support for child care, employee absences decrease, job satisfaction increases, and job turnover declines by as much as 60 percent. Clearly, child-care benefits are not only beneficial to the employee, but the employer.
But we understand the difficulty in creating and implementing a child-care benefit program that parents want and your budget can afford. That’s why PerkSpot has added exclusive child-care discounts to the thousands of discounts already offered on our Discount Portal! We know that as new parents return to work and expecting parents begin to prepare, not just child care, but support by their workplace, are at the top of the list of things they look for in an employer. With discounts to top, nationwide child-care providers, you can give discounted tuition for your employees’ children, plus discounts on things like toys, clothes, and other important baby gear.
To learn more about how you can offer exclusive discounts on child care and other categories, click here.
