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?
Phyllis:
Oh, my goodness, yes. So, based on our history and the continued need we’ve heard from our community, and our emphasis on addressing affordability, I would just start by saying that we are all in. So, what I’m going to share, I know it’s a [00:32:00] very robust set of supports that we have at Stanford that we’re very fortunate to have. So, there’s several ways that we support dependent care needs broadly. One is we have an infrastructure and a staff in place to provide the strategic alignment, and the leadership influence, and the visibility necessary to keep a system like this going. I just wanna shout out to Janet Zamudio and Caitlin Azhderian, who are members of the Stanford team that focus on our child care system and our work-life office, which provides the broader dependent care supports.
We continually work with our constituents. As I mentioned, we are famous for what we call working groups, where we bring together the families that are struggling with these issues, and we allow them to give voice to what our prioritization should be. And they are instrumental in providing influence to leaders and [00:33:00] to help us do things like prepare for our budgeting process that comes up every year and needs all of the infrastructure and support to move our recommendations for greater support through those processes. We also, I wanna mention, we provide portable grants across all of our constituents based on need, and those are funded in a variety of ways. But those portable grants can be used at our own centers as well as for other forms of care. So, we do try to help the people that can’t get into our centers.
And then there’s the direct support to our child care system. And as I mentioned, my big mantra that everyone hears me talk about all the time is long-term sustainability. Childcare systems cannot come and go. Once you put it in, it becomes an important part of the community infrastructure. So, we absolutely understand the trilemma that was nicely [00:34:00] laid out in the early part of this webinar. So, first, it is critical to us that our centers meet the highest quality standards. All of our centers are NAEYC accredited, and we’re incredibly proud of that. And they also…we have a regular monitoring system that our childcare oversight team leverages as well. We partner with experts in our own community, experts…with the partners that we work with, like Bright Horizons, to ensure that we’re tuned into the ongoing challenge of merging parent needs and wants with current and well-regarded research on what children need during the critical years. And we know that that is a constant conversation between our families and our caregivers.
We try to keep our tuition rates slightly below market in the area, which has become more and more difficult as the cost of labor in our centers has grown [00:35:00] considerably, particularly post-pandemic. And then we try to couple that with having a total compensation package for our teachers that is above market. And that’s so that we can ensure greater retention and stability for children and families. So, in order to keep this tricky balance of all of those pieces of the trilemma, we do offer our… So, our centers do not pay rent. They receive rent-free space. And then we have…and this is something that we added in 2018, we also fund all of their facilities costs. So, it’s basically a fully loaded building. So, we cover their janitorial, their landscape, their utilities, their IT, their security. And that equates to about 6% of their operating costs. And our agreement with them is that that then funds, the teacher compensation packages at the above market [00:36:00] level that I was mentioning.
Childcare only works with teachers. And so we also, as I mentioned, work to keep a compensation package that attracts and retains teachers, which has become really challenging in the last three years as labor costs in the childcare industry have just really ballooned, with good news being that teachers are getting paid more. So, of course, that’s always a challenge is worth so thrilled that that’s happening and it’s put additional pressure on our center structure. So, another way that we try to support teacher attraction and retention is that we offer our center operators the opportunity to offer bonuses to teachers when they stay for periods of time. And then, as I mentioned, we have the portable grants. And in addition to the portable grants, we also have a tuition reduction program for our graduate students and postdocs for [00:37:00] those that use our centers.
I found, and you heard that I parsed it out based on sort of what dilemma we were working to solve with that money. I would say that I found strategically, over the years working with leaders and organizations, if you can make a connection between what part of the trilemma you’re trying to solve with particular pots of money, that can help them feel comfortable and kind of get out of the mindset of this is just a ballooning subsidy that seems to ever grow and really try to get into some targeted impact. As I talked about, childcare needs to be sustainable. And so at Stanford, we’re sort of trying to put this whole package together so that we are maintaining that long-term sustainability while really facing some unprecedented challenges. [00:38:00]
Jennifer:
Yeah. And, Phil, I wonder if you could just add one little piece about you, any thoughts you have about how to help get that approval for those investments. Is there any recommendation you have there?
Phyllis:
Absolutely. So, I just wanna say, absolutely investing in childcare pays off. I mean, all of the things that were mentioned earlier, it has helped us to attract and retain employees, especially women and employees from underrepresented communities. We’ve seen an increase in that number. Now, that’s certainly a multifaceted, long-term work that’s been done. And it’s not just because we offer childcare, but we know that by helping to address some of the inherent challenges in moving to our expensive community with young children, it has been a contributing factor. We’ve also, as I said, been at this since the 1970s. [00:39:00] And so it’s gotten more challenging within the last few years. And I believe that we have entered an era when the childcare crisis can only be addressed with a comprehensive, collaborative approach among public and private employers, federal and state governments, and the vast array of childcare providers that are out there. And we have and continue to get involved at national, local, governmental levels when we can to help influence that.
I’d say closer to home, as I mentioned, we think of childcare as a long play. And so I think it’s really important when you’re making the case for this kind of hugely impactful opportunity that you do have the discussion about this trilemma. And that you don’t just get excited about getting somebody in your real estate department to find a space, but you really have the conversation [00:40:00] about what will the long-term support be needed to meet affordability goals, to meet quality goals, to make sure that we’ve done enough to impact the supply. And then having a champion at the leadership level, we’ve been really fortunate. The two provosts that I’ve had the pleasure of working under have both…they’ve had different reasons. The first provost that I worked with, he really wanted to differentiate faculty offers. So, he was all in from that perspective.
Our most recent provost was a working mom when she was going after tenure, and her three children were in on-campus childcare. So, you know, she sort of came at this with a slightly more experiential understanding of it. But, you know, I think finding… But I would say don’t rely on one champion. Ensure that you’ve got the understanding [00:41:00] of the value of childcare from various critical players. Those that are making the financial decisions, the resource decisions, your rainmakers, those responsible for your external image, those who worry about your risk, bring all those people into the conversation and really make sure they understand the opportunity that this represents. And, you know, I just…again, I think partner with the experts that can help you quantify the need and return. Find peers in your industry who are doing this and can help you with that. And then build your allies internally to ensure the ongoing visibility.
Jennifer:
Great. Thank you, Phyllis. That was a lot of great advice.
Phyllis:
You’re very welcome.
Jennifer:
[inaudible 00:41:47] you being with us today. So, now Angie’s gonna join us. And she is in the process of developing her first childcare center. So, Angie Bissen, manager of HR business partners at [00:42:00] Hormel Foods. She was key in getting approval for the center that will open next year to support Hormel employees. So, welcome, Angie.
Angie Bissen:
Great. Thanks for having me.
Jennifer:
Sure. And I was hoping you would be able to share some background on your center and the business case you made for opening your center.
Angie:
Sure. So, we just recently broke ground on a center here in Austin, Minnesota, which is where our corporate headquarters as well as our largest manufacturing facility is based. The center will be for 130 capacity. For those of you not as familiar with Hormel Foods, we’re a global branded food company. But what makes this kind of unique is we’re a Fortune 500 company situated with the headquarters in a community of about 25,000 people. So, we really have kind of a unique situation there where we’re trying to attract talent into the community of Austin. And we have to play a big part in supporting the community. And [00:43:00] so opening the center was something that was a really important initiative, not only for our employees but also for the community.
We are opening the center in a location that’s not on campus because, as you heard, we have corporate offices. We have a manufacturing facility, some R&D labs. So, we are opening the center in a location in the community that’s kind of central to all of our campuses, as well as accessible for community members because it is important for us to have this center open for community members as well as our Hormel Foods team members.
We just continued to hear that childcare was becoming a barrier for attracting and retaining talent for us. You know, not only attracting talent into our organization but attracting talent to move internally to Austin for career development or experiences. You know, with some of our largest [00:44:00] manufacturing facilities and positions here at our corporate office, it’s really important for us to be able to get people to come to Austin and get that experience. And we were hearing that it was becoming a challenge that younger families were not wanting to move here because of a lack of childcare availability. And, you know, especially in those youngest ages, you know, you heard Phyllis speak to it, too, the youngest ages are the biggest need for us.
And so we’re excited that our center will have, you know, just almost half of the slots that will be dedicated to ages 2 and under. So, I definitely think those will be our biggest demand when we open.
And not unique to Hormel, you heard earlier that the demographics of the workforce are changing. And so, for us, this issue is not gonna go away. It’s been about a five-year journey for us trying to gain the support and get to this point where we’ve broke ground. And throughout that five years, we’ve only seen that lack of childcare [00:45:00] accessibility continue to compound and get worse. And as we, you know, have boomers exiting the workforce and more people coming in that are in family building years, this was just a really important initiative for us to take on.
Jennifer:
Terrific. And as you mentioned, you had that approval process. So, having recently gotten approval to move forward, what advice do you have for others who are getting started or may be needing to get approval for additional financial investment, as we’ve talked about the labor costs are increasing in the centers.
Angie:
Yeah. You know, I think one of the biggest eye-opening things early on was… We’re a food company. We make great food. That’s what we do. We don’t run childcare centers. And so when we started having this conversation with our leaders, you know, they got this kind of deer in the headlights look like, “That’s not what we do. We don’t know anything about this. It’s scary.” And so really making sure that you have a [00:46:00] good, strong partner like Bright Horizons that brings that expertise to help educate leaders. You know, the education component was huge for us that, you know, a lot of business leaders come from a background of being educated on supply and demand that the market fixes itself. We don’t need to intervene. And we really had to start from square one and help the leaders understand why this isn’t going to fix itself, why it’s really important for us as an organization to be the one to start to spearhead a solution here.
The other piece I think is really important is that childcare solutions need to be collaborative. We partnered with different areas of our community because we were hearing different, you know, the school system, the not-for-profits. A lot of other employers in our community were having challenges with child care, so, you know, we started kind of a community conversation about it. [00:47:00] We also talked with our local government agencies to gain their support and gain their buy-in on this. And the other piece is, you know, child care isn’t always a one-size-fits-all solution. So, what works for one community or one company might not work somewhere else. And so we were really intentional in trying to figure out what was the need of Hormel Foods in Austin. And, for us, that was, you know, bringing another option to community. We didn’t wanna just have another center like we already have. We really wanted to bring another center that is maybe a more familiar quality to what our families that have care in larger metros had, and when they come in, that helps.
And then I think the last piece that was something we learned, later on, was there was a bit of a pushback [00:48:00] around, well, this is just for parents. What about everybody else? And we really had to work on educating that this investment isn’t just to benefit parents. It definitely helps parents by providing that reliable child care, but it helps the productivity of the workforce. It helps the reliability of your teams at lower absenteeism. So, if I’m an empty nester on a team and my coworkers are calling out of work because they don’t have child care, that impacts me. And so we really kind of had to paint that holistic picture that child care, not only helps parents, but it helps the workforce as a whole, as well as economic development of the community. And that was really where we started to gain, you know, the buy-in of the leaders.
Jennifer:
Thank you. That’s a great story in terms of the extended reach of the center as well. It’s something [00:49:00] we often…Elizabeth and I do research on and try to help educate other organizations about that it’s not just the number of spaces you have in the center, but it has a much broader reach to have that service available to support your workforce overall. I know the center is not open yet, but have you seen any impact already?
Angie:
You know, we actually just completed an engagement survey with our population, and it was really fun to see that there’s already people commenting about how excited they are about this childcare center, how proud they are that Hormel is supporting working parents. And I would say, at least weekly, I’m getting questions on, you know, when is it gonna open? Is it on track? When are we gonna hear more information? So, there’s been a lot of buzz. We’re obviously really early on. We’re expecting opening next spring. But we are already hearing a lot of favorable comments from our population on this initiative.
Jennifer:
That’s terrific. And I [00:50:00] know, I mean, you touched on it is also gonna be open to the community. And I know you had kind of a neat arrangement there. Phyllis mentioned also kind of meeting government to play a role here as child care is getting more and more expensive to provide and even with employers supporting the cost of care and making it affordable for their employees while also high quality. Do you have a few thoughts about it? I know you did a lot of work in terms of trying to get some support from your community as well.
Angie:
Yeah. Like I said, the collaborative nature of these solutions is really important. And while an organization could do this on their own if they wanted, it’s really important to have the buy-in of the whole community. And that’s part of the reason why we chose to open the center to the community. We’re gonna obviously give priority enrollment to our team members, but we are gonna open it as a community resource. And why we chose a centralized location for the center is so that it is accessible to our whole community. And we went [00:51:00] to each of our governing bodies, our local, our school board, our county government, our city government. And we talked to them about, you know, this really isn’t just a Hormel issue. This is a community issue. And we’re happy to collaborate and help bring a solution forward to the community that wouldn’t exist without, you know, the financial backing of an organization. And we just asked for their support. And so we ultimately did end up pursuing a temporary tax abatement so that it just helps us get up and running with this center. And, you know, as many of you know, the childcare centers are not a millionaire-making machine. It’s expensive to deliver that service. And so we really appreciate the support of the local government in helping make this as feasible as possible to bring into our community.
Jennifer:
Thank you, Angie. Thank you for sharing that. I wanna thank both Phyllis and Angie for their time today. One of the themes, you know, that Angie just finished touching on is [00:52:00] they both mentioned this need for collaboration to solve the childcare crisis, including your employers, parents, providers, and the government. And I do wanna encourage those of you either with centers or those of you thinking about adding centers to consider ways that government can support your efforts and perhaps enlist the support of your government relations colleagues. You know, Georgia is a great example of a state that has a great childcare tax credit. And that almost makes providing childcare cost neutral. But, of course, that only works if you’re in a state that has income tax and that you’re an entity that pays taxes. So, there could be other creative ways to help get funding and just encourage you to help perhaps look into that to support you in this effort. And so now we wanna share…I know we’re a little bit over time, so apologies. We wanted to share a quick two-minute video about the positive impact Georgia Power Center has had on their employees and the organization overall.
VIDEO BEGINS
Travis Bell:
Number one, we’re in the electric utility. So, when we have weather events, we show up, we shine the brightest when the lights are out.
Raven King:
Having a childcare center that understood the needs of the business and aligned the schedule of the operations with the business has been extremely beneficial to me.
Shannon Harris:
So, we spent a lot of time meeting with employees and found that this was something that helped both men and women as we were looking to increase retention at the company. And also, we really have it as a recruitment tool to say, Georgia Power is focused on you and your family.
Julie Paul:
I think having access to the childcare helps Georgia Power recruit talent, just for the well-being component. Knowing that Georgia Power, not only says that they’re family focused and promote work-life balance, but they have avenues and opportunities to actually walk the walk.
Billie Culler:
It gives me time to actually focus on work. Having a 2-year-old at home and on the phone [00:54:00] and trying to work is very difficult.
Raul Rodriguez:
It helps me focus on the other part of my day job, and that’s being present and being there for my team at Georgia Power. So, really, to answer that, I get to be fully present at my Georgia Power job.
Woman:
It gives me space to do my job without worrying about who’s taking care of my children. I’ve been able to participate in work activities that I wouldn’t have had access to if I didn’t have someone that I trusted to watch my children.
Billie:
With women having access to the childcare, it shows that Georgia Power is diverse. That lets me know that they think about me, they value me, not only as an employee but also as a woman and a mother as well.
Travis:
As we talk to new hires, and we highlight the different perks and benefits, from a 401(k) standpoint to the medical benefits that come with employment here, we also highlight the benefits [00:55:00] of having a childcare center right next door. And for those that have children or those that are thinking about having children, that resonates with them, resonates, and leads to ultimate either retention or ultimately recruiting.
Shannon:
We’re focused on you in keeping you as an employee here long-term. The childcare center, to me, is probably the best sales tool that we have to show that.
VIDEO ENDS
Jennifer:
I wanna thank you all for joining us today. I wanna thank Phyllis, and Angie, and Elizabeth for joining me in producing this webinar, and hope you found it valuable. Have a great day.
END TRANSCRIPT
