Helping Today’s Family Thrive in the Modern Workforce
Jennifer Vena:
I am Jennifer Vena, Vice president of consulting services at Bright Horizons. I’m a long-tenured employee, having spent the past 35 years partnering with organizations across industries and across geographies to understand their employees, family care needs, and create response strategies to help employees and their organizations thrive. We have a few logistics before we get into the content today. First, we have a rich discussion planned, and we’ll try to answer a few audience questions at the end. So, if you have a question, you can click the Q&A button at the bottom and type in your question and we’ll get to as many as we can. Second, this session is being recorded and you’ll receive a link to the recording in the coming days. And third, if you have any issues with the sound or the video, please try refreshing your browser first. And if that doesn’t work, let us know through the Q&A box as well and a member of the technical team will respond to you. I am joined today by my colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Myers.
Elizabeth Myers: [00:01:00]
Thank you, Jennifer. As Jennifer mentioned, I’m Dr. Elizabeth Myers. My role is senior director of thought leadership on the consulting services team, where I partner with organizations on surveys, focus groups, and other research methods to understand the education and care benefits needs of employees. I also conduct some original research on topics of interest to human resources and benefits leaders, some of which we’ll talk about today. And my research and education background includes a Ph.D. in child development.
Jennifer:
Thank you, Elizabeth. Today we’re gonna share insights from our own research done here at Bright Horizons, research from the field, and learnings from Bright Horizons clients, including two speakers who we are excited to have join us to share their stories a little later in the webinar. Phyllis Stewart Pires from Stanford University and Angie Bissen from Hormel Foods. Employers and especially HR professionals have substantial goals, including recruiting new employees, [00:02:00] retaining top talent, creating an inclusive and caring culture, boosting productivity, and offering employees meaningful careers. That’s a lot. On top of that, they’re meeting the needs of the modern workforce, and meeting those needs at both the modern workforce and the modern family is more complicated as well today. And employers who are invested in benefits that support families throughout their life stages are seeing increased traction. And though the economy feels uncertain, competition for talent remains fierce, with current unemployment rates remaining low at 3.6%.
In addition, we’ve got the baby boomers retiring in high numbers and smaller cohorts to replace them. So, there’s no end in sight for the labor shortage. And as we’ll discuss a little later, the childcare shortage, which is impacting your talent needs. One positive that came out of the pandemic is a renewed discussion about the childcare economy and what caregivers and organizations need. [00:03:00] We are hoping you come out of this discussion today more informed about why there’s a lack of care, how the lack of care is impacting your talent, the benefits of childcare supports, and if you already have supports in place, which I know many of you do, how to celebrate and capitalize on this investment you have made within your organization.
So, to get started, we’re going to set the stage about what is of most importance to you for your organization to be successful. So, we have a quick poll, and we want to know just that, what is of most concern to you. Is it attracting talent? Is it preventing turnover? Perhaps it’s upskilling or rescaling your workforce for what’s needed today. A lot of talk about AI coming into the workplace. Recruiting more underrepresented identities to your organization, or improving productivity and reducing absenteeism. So, these may all be of concern to you. [00:04:00] But please pick your top one for both you and your organization. And after you’ve made your selection, please remember to hit the Submit button so we register your response because we’ll show the results here in just a few seconds.
So, the numbers are climbing. So, again, that was attracting talent, preventing turnover, upskilling, rescaling, recruiting more underrepresented identities, so really focusing on your diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, or improving productivity and reducing absenteeism. [00:05:00] Okay. I think we’re going to go to the results. Looks like the influx is slowing down. So, if we see, it’s spread. We got a lot of focus on turnover, a third, and then productivity is close behind at almost 29%. So, those seem to be the two biggest buckets there. So, really wanting to keep the talent you have in place. And when we talk about the need to attract and retain the best and the brightest talent, we need to be focused on millennials and Gen Z, who will be the largest portion of the workforce in just a few short years. And they’re also in or entering their prime family growing years. So, Elizabeth, can you share some details on this population for us?
Elizabeth:
Sure. So, the country is getting older. As a country, we’re pushing 40 as a median age as both the large generation [00:06:00] of boomers and their children, who are the millennials, get older. Some millennials born between the early 80s and mid-90s, as well as Gen Z’s born between the mid-90s and 2010s, currently make up half of our workforce, but they’ll be the majority of the workforce by 2025. Nearly half of Gen Z’s are from communities of color, joining 39% of millennials. And these groups recognize diversity includes more than just race and ethnicity. They are much more likely to be engaged in organizations when they have an inclusive culture and values, and they value multiple perspectives and identities. And they’re likely to be parents. They’re likely to be parents now or in the future. Based on CDC data, more than two-thirds of people will have a child by the time they’re 49. And as the median age of first first increases overall and increases even more so with education level, employees [00:07:00] in their prime childbearing years are also more likely to be more established in their careers, and a large portion of both the current and the future workforce.
So, organizations don’t want to lose the institutional knowledge, their rising stars they have, or excellent workers who are established in their roles. They don’t wanna lose them over a lack of childcare. Beyond the immediate impact, parents leaving the workforce also leads to a leaky pipeline to leadership. Women are still drastically underrepresented in leadership goals. And McKinsey reported that childcare is a top reason that women voluntarily leave the workforce. We also know that there are many diverse types of families. Grandparents are raising grandchildren, multiple generations are living together, adult children are still at home. And we know that working parents are struggling with childcare. Childcare shortages [00:08:00] left nearly half of parents saying that they don’t have the childcare they need and citing cost as a barrier.
Plus, nearly a quarter of children in the U.S. live with a single parent, and a majority, 80% of one-parent families are maintained by a mother. These single-parent households spend up to 75% of their income on childcare. And, of course, the lower your income, the higher proportion of income that childcare takes up. So, the current workforce, we can say many things about them, but I’m just gonna focus on that it’s full of caregivers, caregivers who are juggling both work and family within a less-than-ideal system for them.
Jennifer:
Thanks, Elizabeth. And we could talk about a lot of struggles the modern workforce is having. Today we’re gonna really focus on the families struggling with childcare and how the struggle is impacting your ability to attract and retain the workforce [00:09:00] you need. So, Elizabeth, you just mentioned a less-than-ideal system. Can you share with us some of the data around the modern family and the childcare system?
Elizabeth:
Sure. I’ll start with our 9th Annual Modern Family Index. This is a survey conducted by Bright Horizons annually in partnership with the Harris Poll, and it’s on working parents. And this year’s results show that parents are stressed about finding childcare. But 60% of them are even calling it a full-time job on top of their regular job. And we found similar reports from millennials and Gen Z’s in our millennial and Gen Z focus research. We found that half of parents of children under 6 reported missing work due to childcare in the past year. And that two-thirds of parents with children under 6 are stressed out about paying for childcare.
And notably, to focus on dads for a minute, they were more likely than working moms in the Modern Family Index to say that their organization supports [00:10:00] them. However, half still wish that their employer would do more to support child care. So, families with a parent or parents who work in a frontline role have an especially tough time finding care. Nearly a third of frontline working parents say they’re actually likely to leave their current job in the next year. And 18% reported to us that they were actively looking for a new job.
Jennifer:
Those are some great statistics, Elizabeth. So, what is it about the current childcare system that is leading to these survey results?
Elizabeth:
Yeah. So, we call it the trilemma, sometimes even the quadrimula [SP]. So, the trilemma stands for availability, quality, and affordability. And then we can also add reliability on top of there. I’ll break that down a bit. So availability or supply. So, there is already a shortage of child care before the pandemic, pandemic made it worse. And the need for child care [00:11:00] is not gonna go away. The need is actually gonna increase with a decrease in supply that I’ll get to in a second. But more than half of U.S. families actually live in a childcare desert, according to the Center for American Progress. And by a childcare desert, I mean communities where there are three or more children for every available licensed childcare slot or just no care at all. And when you’re a desert, you might think, “Oh, these are rural communities,” but they’re not. Deserts are actually situated almost equally within rural and urban communities. So, it’s a problem many communities face.
And for the decrease in supply I mentioned, there is the American Rescue Plan Act funding, is going to end in September. And that funding was propping up existing centers with additional funding to cover increases in labor costs and increased costs to the centers and the child care programs without [00:12:00] increasing tuition on parents. So, this funding ends in September and it’s predicted that 3.2 million children will lose child care and 70,000 programs will close. So, while we know that some of you on the call today have centers and have created your own supply and are very well-positioned to attract and retain talent as this supply shrinks even further, we also know that other communities, a lack of care is going to keep parents out of the workforce altogether, cause employees to reduce hours and prevent employees from returning from parental leave as this supply gets worse.
And for the supply that is out there, it’s not always high quality. States measure quality in a few different ways. The National Association for the Education of Young Children is a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early learning for young children. [00:13:00] Their accreditation is the gold standard and usually their standards are higher than state minimums. And the standards are nationally the same. However, there are only 10,000 ACA-accredited programs nationwide, which equates to less than 10% of all childcare programs. And while most states have a quality rating improvement system, or QRIS, there’s different names for different states. These systems help parents understand the level of quality in child care, preschool, and school-age programs and give them a comparison benchmark on programs within the state, but the standards vary by state. And there’s also just relatively low adoption among childcare programs in many states.
So, regardless of the system of rating as a benchmark, only 13% of 2-year-olds in the U.S. currently attend a childcare setting that would be deemed high quality [00:14:00] on either of these systems of measurement. And quality of education and care really matters. It drives the success of future generations in terms of academic achievement, health, socioeconomic status. Many of you have probably heard of the decades of research from Nobel Prize-winning
Economist James Heckman and his colleagues that has demonstrated time and time again that the U.S. receives a 7% and 10% return on investment for investments in early childhood education. And when parents can’t find or afford quality care, the country loses out on these huge gains. Plus, the children today are gonna be the workforce of tomorrow. And that includes your workforce of tomorrow as well. In fact, one of our clients has recently shared a story with us of hiring a child care center graduate as a full-time employee for them, which we love to hear.
And then, of course, affordability is the third component of this trilemma, and all components interact with [00:15:00] one another. A lack of supply impacts affordability, quality enhancements impact affordability. You know, quality care is expensive to provide. Low teacher-child ratios means more staff to pay. Higher quality curriculum materials, safety protocols, healthy meals, space for extracurriculars like STEM and art, those all cost money. So, while the Department of Health and Human Services has set a benchmark of affordability for child care at 7% of household income, prices actually wildly vary across the country and very few parents pay that little. The median price range for child care is actually somewhere between 18% and 19% of median family income for one child. So, the Bureau of Labor has stated that these prices are untenable for families, even in lower-priced areas.
And with increased costs in labor over the past two years, [00:16:00] child care is more expensive than parents can afford, which keeps them out of the workforce or using care that’s not up to their standards of quality, or trying to work from home with their children, or having a family member take care of their children. And some of these systems break down without a backup system. Parents are out of luck and out of work when family or friend provider gets sick, or has their own family obligations, or doctor’s appointments, or just can’t provide the hours of care needed to match someone’s work hours. So, this crisis of care is estimated to cost the nation $122 billion a year according to ReadyNation. And that amount has doubled since 2018. With concerns about economy, inflation, and the end of the ARPA funds I mentioned, it’s gonna impact affordability and supply. So, subsidies from other sources, [00:17:00] like employers, will be more critical to keeping centers open for working families.
Jennifer:
Thanks, Elizabeth, for sharing all that information on the childcare system. And childcare challenges are also compounded by employees’ work schedules. So, during the pandemic, people had no choice but to try to work from home with their children if they were not a frontline employee. And now, even with schools and child care programs operating again, a number of employees are still trying to work from home while caring for their children due to either this lack of supply of care or inability to afford care. So, one of the hottest topics right now for workforces, and I get emails daily on this topic, is whether to keep remote or hybrid work schedules or require employees to come back to the office.
So, we’re gonna do a few quick polls here. First, we wanna know how are you currently handling this issue, what is your current policy in place? So, do you, one, either have all frontline jobs, in which case you can [00:18:00] pick that first option, or are you requiring all employees to be in the office every day? Are all of your employees remote? Can employees create their own schedule, do whatever they wanna do? Or are you doing some type of requirement, either one to two days in the office per week or requiring three to four days in the office per week? So, really curious to see where people are at because there are literally in all the HR emails and blogs that come out, talk about what company is doing what, and how it’s going, and how employees are feeling about it. And there’s a lot of discussion about, you know, the why. You know, employees asking why are you making us come back if they have been able to work from home until now.
Okay. [00:19:00] Responses are still coming in. I think we’re slowing down a tad. So, make sure it hit submit if you’ve picked a response and we will go in a few seconds here and see the answers. Okay, ready? Okay. So, it looks like our winner is three to four days in the office, followed closely by one to two days. So, people are back. Okay, with only a very few remote and about 15% getting to create their own schedules still. So, actually, if you add all in the office, we’ve got 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, over 70% in the office from one day to five days a week. [00:20:00] Okay. So, we have one more poll here. Same answer. So, hopefully, this will be quick for you. But I’m just really curious to see how this lines up. And so wondering what your leadership wants the long-term outcome to be. So, if you can answer the same questions, but is there a difference between what’s happening today and what they want to have happen in the near future? If they could have their druthers and not be worried about kind of employee backlash or feedback from employees, what is your leadership wanting to have happen for the future?
So, the possible answers are the same. And given we had so much in office, I might not have as big a discrepancy as I was thinking we might have. So, we’ll see.
[00:21:14]
Okay. Okay. Hoping we can get everyone to respond who responded to the first one so we can see the delta there. Okay. Last few seconds to click Submit. All right. So, [00:22:00] looks like we had movement. We got rid of… All the remote employees are gone. But it looks like we’ve got movement to getting everybody back in the office, those five days. And then looks like we probably had some one-to-two move into three-to-four, so increasing the number of days in the office. Okay. So, it looks like that is the direction that leadership is going.
And we have one last quick poll. Because as Elizabeth and I have been doing focus groups with employers, employees are sharing that some of them are still juggling young children when they work from home on their work-from-home days, whether that’s two days a week or all five days. And some are doing this, they say, because they can’t find care. And some of them are doing it because they are trying to save money because care is so expensive. But they also commented to us that this is impacting their productivity because you just can’t really [00:23:00] work with a 2-year-old underfoot all day long. So, for those of you who do have some type of hybrid remote employees currently, the last poll is, do you know what your employees are doing for care for their young children when they’re working from home for you? And by young children, we mean non-school age. So, children younger than 5, who really do need care during the day, all day long, and really are not capable of looking after themselves.
So, I’m just curious. It’s a quick yes or no answer? But it’s a question no one really had to broach before when people pretty much went to some type of work site to do their job. But now with this higher amount of work from home and what was seen as acceptance during the pandemic to do that juggle because people had no choice and employers were just thankful people were still working, I’m curious to see if this has now become a discussion that needs to happen. And it may come to light [00:24:00] when you move people to more days in the office, either come back into the office or have more days in the office. That might be when employers start to discover that employees say they can’t come in because they don’t have childcare. Okay. So, we’re gonna move to those answers. So, it’s about a quarter to three-quarters split between being aware and asking that question, having that dialogue, and three-quarters not having that dialogue yet. Elizabeth, any thoughts?
Elizabeth:
Yes, it’s really interesting to see those results because we have lots of conversations with employees about the difficulty of balancing care while working from home. Regardless of your work setup, working from home while trying to take care of young children, just doesn’t work so well. Many [00:25:00] of you on this call have also had your own personal experiences trying to juggle that over the past few years. And while hybrid and remote is a hot topic, the reality is, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70% of organizations have little to no work-from-home option, as we saw many of you are back in the office. Many organizations have to be on-site, like hospitals, and schools, and retail, and hospitality. And there’s implications for breakdown in care that we hear about for on-site work. For example, we hear from manufacturing that absences related to family issues create impacts beyond just the parents who are missing work. It impacts lines being open, production goals at least requiring overtime, and then burning out other team members who may not be parents of young children themselves. But they’re also feeling the stress and fallout of their colleagues’ breakdowns in care.
Similarly, in healthcare, we see care breakdowns can lead to inconsistency [00:26:00] of care, lack of adequate staffing that impacts patient health, and patient satisfaction, and patient outcomes. Childcare is just so important for a present productive and happy workforce wherever they’re working. So, really insightful to see how little we know about what people are doing when they’re working from home for their childcare needs. But brand new research highlights the importance of care. Our family satisfaction survey of nearly 7,000 parents found that more than 9 in 10 parents say childcare centers allow them to work necessary hours, concentrate on their job and be productive and reduce the stress. And then 85%, 86% said centers enable them to be employed and likely to stay with their current employer. And for a specific example, Wellstar has reported a 1.5% turnover rate for nurses who use their childcare center [00:27:00] when the average hospital turnover rate nationally is 26%. So, that’s enough data for me. I’m excited, and I’m sure many of you are as well, to hear from our guest speakers who can personalize a lot of the data I’ve shared.
Jennifer:
Thanks, Elizabeth. Many organizations, including many of you attending today, are supporting employees’ family care needs with safe, reliable, high-quality, on-site child care centers with backup care for when regular care arrangements are not available and with tuition subsidies. So, we are thrilled to have two guest speakers with us today to discuss their experiences. First, I would like to introduce Phyllis Stewart Pires, associate vice president, employee support programs and services at Stanford University. She is a longtime Bright Horizons partner, and she oversees multiple centers as one part of her extensive role for the university. So, welcome, Phyllis.
Phyllis Pires:
Thank you, Jennifer. So, great to be here with you.
Jennifer:
So, Stanford has been investing in child care for decades. So, hoping you can [00:28:00] share a few details about how Stanford views its childcare supports.
Phyllis:
Absolutely. So, Stanford’s childcare journey actually dates back to the late 1960s, early 1970s. So, our journey started long before I joined Stanford, but over my decade-plus of having been at Stanford and leading this particular aspect of our work, we have significantly expanded our programs as the demand has grown and as some of these external forces that we were just talking about have really just grown even more challenging. So, we now operate one of the largest childcare systems in higher education and for employers, in general. We have 6 centers and more than 900 children are served across those centers. I would say child care is really firmly embedded in our [00:29:00] university community. It’s a critically important part of our ability to attract and retain faculty, who are looking often to move to what is potentially a more expensive area for them to live in. It also is important to our graduate students and postdocs, who often are coming to here from other parts of the world without their families close by, and they’re usually coming in the prime of their childbearing years during that really demanding time in their careers. And we also compete for staff with a lot of companies in the Bay Area.
And so having this as a part of what our employees can expect as part of the value proposition at Stanford has become very important. But we’re not without our challenges. I mean, it’s great, as I said, that we have this great system. We also have a very long waiting list. So, we are very aware that our [00:30:00] ability to meet all the demand is not complete, particularly when it comes to infant care. That tends to be the biggest challenge. And we sit in the midst of a very expensive part of the country, a very expensive place to live. And childcare supply here, although we don’t qualify as a desert, the childcare supply has been impacted here in the Bay Area by the pandemic. And so we continually work to get input from the various communities that we work with to continue to assess all the multiplicity of affordability challenges that exist. And we conducted a fairly extensive affordability assessment in 2018, which had led to this really wonderful set of enhancements and additions to our childcare system that we were going to be making, that we did make in 2019, and then the pandemic hit. And so one [00:31:00] of the things I’ll share as we get into our conversation a little bit more is throughout and now after the pandemic, we’re having to continue to rethink the support that we provide to not only our families but our childcare system in order to think of it as a long-term sustainable part of our culture.
Jennifer:
Yeah, I wanted to touch a little bit more on that because 900 is a lot of children you’re providing care for. So, what are some of those ways you’re supporting both your childcare programs, so they can provide high-quality care, and then also your faculty and staff so that that care can be purchased at an affordable price for them?
