Employee benefits have always played a significant role in recruiting and retaining top talent and driving employee productivity, but today, designing benefits to meet the needs of working parents is more important than ever. Child care is unaffordable for the majority of U.S. families—and caregiving shortages are making it harder for many families to find child care.
Fortunately, employers can help. 96% of employers are recalibrating their benefits and nearly half (46%) are prioritizing child care benefits as a way to improve productivity and retention. Here are 5 easy steps to help you design an employee benefits program that supports the needs of your working parents while also supporting your company’s bottom line.
Step 1: Survey your workforce
When designing your benefits strategy, it’s critical that you take into consideration the needs of your employees. An easy way to do this is to survey your workforce. This employee survey template provides sample survey questions as well as best-practices for driving participation. Analyze the survey results to see if your employers’ objectives are aligned with employees’ needs, and use these insights to inform your benefits strategy.
Step 2: Research caregiving benefits
Research all of the caregiving options available today, including support for children at every life stage, infants to college students. Programs such as a marketplace to help employees find background-checked child caregivers, subsidized Backup Care programs to help employees fill gaps in routines, tutoring and college-planning programs are all examples of employer-sponsored caregiving benefits. Other top caregiving benefits include flexible and remote work arrangements, paid parental leave, lactation support, mental health benefits, and employee discounts.
Step 3: Evaluate benefits vendors
Once you understand the caregiving benefits available, it’s time to evaluate vendors. You can partner with your consultant or use this guide for best practices and a standardized RFP template that can be customized to help you evaluate vendors who best meet your needs and business objectives.
Step 4: Justify the investment in caregiving benefits
As with any benefit, you will need to determine your budget, and justify the cost to your stakeholders. To help you make the case for caregiving benefits to your C-suite, use this business impact calculator to estimate the potential savings for your organization. Even a small investment in caregiving benefits can have a big impact on recruitment, retention, and productivity.
Step 5: Implement and promote your employee benefits program
Now comes the fun part…launching and promoting the benefits to your employees. Any good implementation process will include the creation of an effective marketing campaign to help you build excitement for the benefits and encourage employee engagement throughout the year. Use a multi-channel media approach that can include email, mobile, direct mail, chat, on-site assets and in-person or remote benefits fairs. Do you have a company channel for employee benefits? Use that or create a new channel for working parents. It also helps to identify benefits champions and ask them to share stories of how they’ve used the benefits. Word of mouth is a powerful tool to help raise awareness about your benefits and show your employees and working parents that you care about them–and their families.
