WORKING PARENTS REACH
A BREAKING POINT
Working parents are worn down and looking for help, with many
calling family benefits as big a retention motivator as a hefty
raise. As one surveyed employee pointedly remarked about their
center, “If it goes, I go.” Yet getting value — for your employees
and your company — hinges not merely on the existence of your
center, but on its design to match what your working parents
need. Long before design meets build, your center plan will need
to take into account answers gleaned from critical questions:
• Demand: Who is your target demographic and how will they
use your center?
• Location: Will your ideal location be on-site or near-site,
and can you creatively repurpose existing space instead of
building new?
• Costs: What do you need to include in startup budgets and
how can you ensure you’re maximizing all available resources
to reduce the cost burden?
• Liability: How will you manage risk and ensure your
organization is fully indemnified?
• Quality and Health & Safety: Is your center on top of all
state licensing regulations governing the operations of
child care centers and ongoing requirements for national
accreditation standards?
• Future Sustainability: What is your operational plan and
how will you ensure your center’s early learning can take your
center beyond opening day?
The Starting Point:
Evaluating Key Criteria
A thriving employer-sponsored child care center comes from
thoughtful design that addresses identified challenges, and
dependably meets employees’ individual needs. But what is that
need in hours and ages? And who is the specific audience you’re
supporting?
Delivering on demand starts with a dependent-care needs
assessment aimed at understanding key information about the
specific employees you’re trying to reach, including:
• Employee demographics
• Hours employees work and when they need care
• Ages of their children
• Specific employee populations you’re trying reach — corporate
or frontlines
• Tuition they can afford and subsidies required to meet their
budgets
Since employee demand will change over time, such demographic
studies will have to look past the number of parents with children
today, and include future-focused projections about what the
audience will look like tomorrow, as well.
CHALLENGE
You need to provide
flexible support for
frontlines.
SOLUTION
Employee studies showed that
Iowa manufacturer Vermeer
parents were up at 4:30 each
morning and driving miles out
of their way to find child care
that met their work schedules.
In partnership with Bright
Horizons, Vermeer developed
a child care center with a 5:30
a.m. opening, and a location
that not only cares for young
children, but that serves as a
pick-up/drop-off point for bus
routes for school-age children.
Who Will Use Your Center?
A thorough search for a location must start with the question — on- or
near-site? That will depend on who’s using your center. In fact, the same
dependent-care needs assessment used to identify audience will also
provide clues to where your center should live. You’ll also need to understand
employee commuting patterns — increasingly important as hybrid work
arrangements begin to weigh heavily on how often people come to the office
— and how many days they’ll need care.
Once you’ve zeroed in on your ideal geography, the challenge becomes
identifying specific space and the breadth of construction needs. A fromthe-ground-up build is not always necessary. It’s why Bright Horizons site
searches always include new-build analyses, an assessment of opportunities
to creatively leverage an existing structure, and the pros and cons of each.
Additional qualifications for a suitable space include:
• Local jurisdictional requirements, including zoning regulations and
building codes
• The ability of a site to accommodate essential elements such as outdoor
play and parking
• Capital improvements recommended to support high-quality
programming into the future
Because high-quality child care must be safe, as well as developmentally
appropriate, every exploration of space must include insights from design
professionals who both understand and have background in the specialty of
child care design.
CHALLENGE
We need to be able
to support shifts in
our employees’ child
care demand.
SOLUTION
Wisconsin employer Kwik Trip
knew its employee demand for
child care could fluctuate over
time, necessitating a solution
that could flex as its employees
did. Ultimately, space identified
for the center was chosen to
both accommodate today’s
demand for child care, and
be flexible enough to ensure
capacity could be expanded
when needed.
Where Will You Locate
Your Center?
Space and equipment will form the most visible launch items on
your budget. But one of the nuances of child care is that your
company’s geographic location will affect start-up and operations
costs as much as real estate, and must be factored into every
element, from staffing to tuition to subsidies.
• Staffing: Just as tuition will vary depending on the local
child care market, attracting the best teachers will require
a competitive analysis of area salary and benchmarking of
benefits.
• Tuition subsidies: Market-rate tuition will vary by geography;
and what your employees can afford will determine how much
of that tuition will need to be subsidized.
Where you’re located can also offer opportunities for savings.
Federal tax credits (and state, in some cases) can offset your
investment burden; some states offer additional subsidies.
Accessing both will require an understanding of what’s available,
what you’re eligible for, and how to leverage them.
CHALLENGE
We’re concerned about
the risk of a child care
center.
SOLUTION
Legal liability, says the
Washington Post, is one of
an employer’s top barriers to
child care. It shouldn’t be. Full
indemnification can and must
be built into any child care
partner’s offering, including
insurance that’s above the
industry standard for liability.
How Much Will the Center
Cost to Create?
Parents looking for child care want more
than babysitting, but rather high-quality
support for development, learning, and
school readiness that follows children
from infancy to the elementary school
years. Delivering on that quality requires
expert input on key components including:
How Will Your
Center Deliver On
Quality And Safety?
• Curriculum: An early education framework
based both on what’s known about young
learners and what’s needed for children to
become academically and socially ready
for school
• Safety: Expert design offering
developmentally appropriate environments
that meet or exceed all safety codes, and
where children will be able to confidently
engage in cognitive, social, and physical
skill-building
• Teacher development: Training and growth
opportunities that both ensure the highest
level of professional guidance for students,
and the staff consistency (via retention) for
children in the center’s care
Additionally, in the current environment,
centers must be prepared for evolving
health protocols, and linked to appropriate
professional expertise to monitor, maintain,
and adapt related practices.
Looking To The Future;
How To Support Your
Investment Long-Term
How will you operate your center in the future? Long-term
results will hinge on operations, and your ability to consistently
offer high-quality child care that is safe, optimally used, and
efficiently and strategically run. All will require an experienced
partner who understands the unique mechanics of a center.
Classroom fill rates, for example, are not merely the number of
families enthusiastically enrolled in your center on any given day,
but also the complex projections and critical waitlist management
required to maintain enrollment levels even as families move or
children inevitably (and regularly) age up and out. Further, an ideal
partner understands not just the full-time enrollment equation, but
also how to potentially optimize usage by supporting emergency
back-up care needs for other employees.
With turnover at an all-time high, and working parents — the third
of the workforce who are your future leaders — under particular
duress, the returns of a center are clear, as illustrated by one
employer’s substantial retention benefits. “On average, we have
about a 24 percent employee turnover,” said HCA Healthcare’s
Erica White on a recent webinar. Among employees who use child
care, however, “We only see about a 6 percent turnover.”
But an experienced partner, says Kwik Trip’s John McHugh, is
essential. “We realize that we sell gasoline and hot dogs,” he told
the Wisconsin NPR Morning Show with a laugh. “Child care…that’s
not our expertise. So we wanted to make sure we partner with
people who are experts in this area.”
Expanding
Your Reach: The
Benefits of Shared
Business Model
A flexible child care benefit
can simultaneously support
employees who need regular
weekly arrangements, as
well as those who only need
occasional back-up care.
Bright Horizons makes that
possible, leveraging existing
infrastructure to connect
employees with available
spaces. It’s one of the many
ways — training, benefits,
curriculum — our shared
business model delivers
for employers across the
country. “While economies
of scale are hard to come by
in our industry,” once wrote
Bright Horizons founder
Roger Brown in Harvard
Business Review, “we have
gained many advantages
of scale by spreading
knowledge and techniques
across our centers.” That
advantage exists to this day.
ON Site Child Care Buyers Guide
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