Inclusion means supporting workers who are caregivers of all kinds. What financial, health, and scheduling challenges do families face today? How can innovative benefits and workplaces empower workers to meet their responsibilities and excel on the job? From Day One gathered expert speakers for a virtual conference titled “Giving Working Families the Benefits and Flexibility They Need Today.” Among the highlights:

Where a Family-Friendly Culture Is a Core Organizational Value 

Working parents have long grappled with the challenge of balancing family with career aspirations. For Serena Anthony, chief people officer at the global advertising company GroupM, one of the most difficult aspects of being a working parent involves spearheading the people-management function for her organization for an entire continent–North America–while managing travel for work. “My favorite saying at home is ‘the juggle is real.’ As a mom of twin girls, there’s guilt associated with having to pick up and leave.”

HR professionals are tasked with upholding the well-being of their people: building a family-friendly culture is now more important than ever in the wake of changing work lifestyles. “We have the ability to accommodate the personal lives and commitments in our work days that we once didn’t have,” she said.

As a client-focused business, much of GroupM’s work culture revolves around in-person efforts and collaboration. However, that approach has shifted gears to focus on what their people need now. “We want to provide autonomy to manage your days, to perform your work, but also not have it infringe on personal lives,” said Anthony. “We’ve all about convening with purpose when we are in the office–and fostering a sense of flexibility when we’re not.”

Flexibility has become an all-too-common phrase touted by corporations these days, but then they have to deliver on that promise. For GroupM, it means forming a working style and an ability to execute on deliverables that align with employees’ personal circumstances. The company regularly hosts town halls with staff to emphasize communications around work-life policies and foster a sense of collaboration. “There’s no one-size-fits-all as it relates to how someone should perform their work day,” she said.

Moderator Ericka Sóuter, author of How to Have a Kid and a Life: A Survival Guide, posed a question on how to strike a happy medium with employees who are reluctant to return to the office. Per Anthony, it was important to  maintain a realistic approach based on an individual's specific role responsibilities. “We have over 7,000 employees. If you occupy a role where you absolutely are required to be in the office, or not being there would pose a business risk for us, let’s talk about what that looks like. What do you need from us?” she said.

In the face of the Great Resignation, many organizations responded in a knee-jerk manner to try to slow attrition. But instead of throwing money at people who are leaving to take a similar job with slightly better pay, said Anthony, “we can go all-in on creating an environment that makes our people feel like they actually want to work with us.” To do so, GroupM onboarded programs such as an internal mental-health-allies program–training employees to catch red flags among peers and introduced health care and wellness services.

In the rise of social justice and political issues that permeate work cultures, GroupM no longer adopts a noncommittal approach, as its people expect leadership to speak up. “I took on the job in the midst of the pandemic shortly after the George Floyd incident, amid the racial uprising. One of the first conversations with my CEO was needing to speak on it,” Anthony said.

Anthony underscores how important it is for HR teams to check on their own mental health as well. “We’re the first point of contact for people when they’re struggling,” she said. “You have to 100% check on yourself and make sure you’re okay. Put yourself first.”

Sóuter pointed out that in order for individuals to put themselves first, companies need to ensure they are creating a climate where people feel that they won’t be penalized for doing just that. For that purpose, GroupM designed a formal, centralized place where trained investigators are present to create that sense of safety. “If there’s ever a feeling that an employee feels like they’re on the receiving end of reprisal because they spent too much time focusing on their mental health but their manager may be discriminating, we now have a function where you can take your concern to employee relations and have it looked into with objectivity and consistency,” she said.

According to Anthony, the best way for HR functions to drive change at companies reluctant to embrace this new culture is by positioning proposals in a way that translates new programs into greater output and performance for the company. Said Anthony: “If we can’t keep pivoting to accommodate what is happening around us, we’re doomed.”–By Tania Rahman

The Motherhood Penalty: How Employers Can Help Abolish It

While most people are familiar with the term “glass ceiling” concerning the challenges women face in business, less common is the term “motherhood penalty,” which refers specifically to how mothers are disadvantaged in the working world. “It impacts every part of a woman’s career—we’re talking about earnings, ability to get hired, evaluations and promotions,” said Lydia Dishman, a senior editor at Fast Company, who moderated a executive panel conversation on the penalty and what employers could do to mitigate it.

This penalty comes in many forms. Working mothers earn 70 cents to every working father's dollar, and mothers are offered $11,000 less in starting salaries than non-mothers. And during 2020, 34% of men with children received promotions, compared to just 9% of women with children. But the penalty rears its head in other ways: how women often need to leave the workforce because their families cannot afford childcare or the difficulties they experience when they try to re-enter later in life.

A challenging part of the motherhood penalty is that many people don’t know if they’ve been affected by it, said Deborah Hanus, co-founder and CEO of Sparrow, a company that manages leave policies for employers. “Rarely does someone tell you that you’ve been passed over for promotion for the reason that they’re perceiving you as less competent,” Hanus said. “But I think a lot of it comes back to this concept of this idea that women are uniquely qualified as mothers and caregivers in a way that fathers are not.”

To eradicate the motherhood penalty, we must first change the culture. Liat Krawczyk, founder of the Childcare Innovation Lab at the New York City Economic Development Corp., shared that during the pandemic, she struggled to work from home while raising a three-year-old child and pregnant with another. But she realized that many women do not have the same opportunities and are forced to leave the workforce due to a lack of flexibility or childcare’s high costs. “We’re constantly being told to adjust to existing structures, instead of changing the structures to adjust to moms in particular,” Krawczyk said. “So I think the conversation needs to start to change in the other direction.”

Ann Roberts, chief people officer at Flo Health, a technology company focused on women’s health, contributed a European perspective to the panel. Because European countries mandate maternity leave, there’s never a question of whether a mother will be able to come back to work or have enough time off—even if she doesn’t always take all the time offered. Roberts compared the lack of regulation in U.S. with many state laws prohibiting puppies from being sold before they’re eight weeks old because it would be cruel to take them away from their mothers.

“Where the regulation and where Social Security is failing, the private market is stepping in. So there is a fierce war for talent. Companies are hemorrhaging good people that are not coming back to work,” Roberts said. “And there is a shift starting to pick up [of companies] being a lot more vocal about what is being offered that is kind of bridging the gap, but it’s still in the niches.”

Phyllis Stewart Pires, senior director of WorkLife Strategy at Stanford University, shared how companies and organizations offering paternity leave and more flexible solutions for their employees help everyone—including the company and its bottom line. “It is such an enormous opportunity to attract and retain talent, particularly when we’re looking to attract and retain women, but really everyone benefits from it,” she said.

Companies may offer various plans for caretaking leaves. But panelist Amie Major, VP and head of talent management at Verisk Analytics, emphasized the importance of managers embracing flexibility and considering all options when helping their employees. During one of her pregnancies, she had preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition, and opted to take her leave early so she wouldn’t have to go into the office. But her manager insisted that she work from home to avoid cutting into her maternity leave.

She used this experience to help guide the return-to-office policies at Verisk, where managers found that there was no one-size-fits-all approach because every employee had a unique situation. “What we really needed to do was to train up our managers around how to have conversations, how to think about a plan, how to consider what the work is, and then leave it to them,” Major said.

Employers have many options to consider when creating parental benefits. New York City’s Childcare Innovation Lab released a toolkit for employers to compare their options while focusing on employee well-being and high return on investment. Some companies may offer payment assistance while others work directly with daycare providers, but assuring that the solutions make the most sense for their employees is of utmost importance.

Only when employers recognize the struggles mothers face in the workforce–and strive to make changes–will the motherhood penalty start dissipating.

Until then, Hanus recommends that the most important thing working parents can do to help is to take the caregiving leave they have to help propel working culture toward recognizing its importance. Companies may become aware of the many situations that families may face, including bereavement, loss of a pregnancy, or other medical issues. “Fathers should be taking leave, mothers should be taking leave. Families do come in all shapes and all sizes,” she said. “And I think that designing policies that account for those unexpected situations, and understanding everything that can happen, is so, so incredibly helpful.”–By Erika Riley

Working While Parenting Is a Balancing Act: How to Make It Work for You

When 73% of working adults have some caregiving responsibility in their family and when, per a FlexJobs survey, 53% of mothers and 51% of fathers say that that working makes it hard to be a good parent, the concept of work-life balance is invoked quite frequently. But it has one big assumption that needs to be dispelled: “Balance implies that we’re juggling things, that we’re perfectly aligned,” said Angela Nelson, executive director of clinical services at the benefits platform Rethink Care, in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference. “That’s just not real life. What can we do to make things work?”

The concept started in the 1970s, during an era of major shifts in gender roles and societal pressure towards equal opportunity, when it was known as work-family-life balance, Nelson said. And while there’s no single definition of it, the main components  are two domains (work and life) that both require attention, but not to the detriment of the other; the need for satisfaction in both of those domains without conflict; and the acknowledgement that, while we have different roles in life, the demands in one role can creep into the other. “Work-life balance should be considered as a degree of autonomy that we have over the demands and our capacity to meet goals,” Nelson explained, summarizing the findings of Thomas Kalliath and Paula Brough from their Journal of Management & Organization article in 2015, “Work-life balance: A review of the meaning of the balance construct.”

So, why is it important? From an employer standpoint, having work-life balance translates into more productivity, fewer sick days, and more longevity. In fact, when employees have to leave the workforce for caregiving reasons, the result is a loss of institutional knowledge. By contrast, employees who achieve some kind of balance report lower levels of fatigue, better health outcomes, and more time spent with loved ones. Work-life balance is a key component in the burnout vs. engagement equation, where burnout is a syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment. “I don’t feel like I am succeeding in anything,” Nelson recalls telling her husband at the height of the pandemic, where work and caregiving happened not only at the same time, but also in the same place. By contrast, engagement is a work-related state of mind characterized by positivity, fulfillment, vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Key strategies Nelson recommended: An assessment phase comes first, with questions such as, “Am I sleeping enough?” and “Am I constantly falling behind?” Next, one has to define their own values. “We think of values as our heart’s deepest desires, but it’s more about how we want to act on an ongoing basis, and how you want to treat yourself and those around you,” said Nelson.
The key strategy is organization, part of executive functioning. “There’s a lot of value in embracing organization or making it a goal to be more organized,” said Nelson, using as an example, something as mundane as putting keys on the same tray upon getting home as opposed to just forgetting about that and then wasting precious time trying to look for them.

Part of organization is the act of managing time, and how we like to prioritize tasks. Take care of smaller ones at first and hard ones for later, or the opposite? As a clinician, Nelson also teaches “the time detective,” which is about understanding and feeling the passage of time. While traditionally this applied to children with special needs, it’s something adults in the workforce also benefit from. “We want to look at our phone monitor: Are we spending more time on the apps than we thought?” she said.

At work, the culture and the benefit packages are finally skewing towards work-life balance, Nelson said. “Collaborate with employers. Do self assessment; be specific; be positive and proactive; be realistic,” said Nelson. “Our managers want us to be happy.”

In general, the breakdown of tasks is not always going to be 50:50, sometimes it’s more of an an 80:20. “Having an open discussion can prevent resentment,” said Nelson. “Align values with co-parents, let go of expectation and embrace partnership.” This also means really determining where to set the priorities, even at homed. If you’re teaching your kids how to do laundry, is it worth it to put a lot of emphasis onto their learning how to fold clothes properly? “I am not going to sweat it, I am not going to put it on my parental load,” said Nelson. Similarly, “If I spend all weekend doing sports tournaments, attending birthday parties, things are really piling on. We need to think about how to do things better–even at home.”–By Angelica Frey

No Longer a ‘Nice to Have’: Do You Know What Benefits Are Now Critical for Success?

Yesterday’s traditional benefits programs are now just the baseline for today’s workforce, according to Elizabeth Myers, senior director of thought leadership for the childcare provider Bright Horizons. The past few tumultuous years have exposed the challenges facing employees at all life stages, whether they are working parents or those juggling other caregiving responsibilities like elder care. What all have in common is a need for healthy work-life integration. Even more, workers want a chance to grow, both personally and within a company, Myers said in a Thought Leadership Spotlight at the conference.

Further complicating the picture are the complex organizational structures that have evolved since the pandemic’s onset, creating a patchwork of full-time, part-time, and freelance employees working remotely, onsite, or in hybrid arrangements. But with greater flexibility comes the critical issue of trust. Employers want to trust that their employees are making the best decisions about their own productivity, while employees want to know that their organization is standing up for key values, Myers said. She advises employers to find ways to ensure that employees feel they have control over their own work, are appreciated for their contributions, and are connected to the organization.

“I’m a big fan of self-determination theory, which in its simplified state means that motivation comes from a combination of feeling autonomy, competence and relatedness,” Myers said. The good news is more organizations are recognizing that success in business depends on paying attention to the unique struggles employees face and then developing effective, flexible programs to meet their emotional, educational and economic needs across the life stages, Myers said. For example:

•Wellstar Health System in Georgia, where the majority of employees are frontline workers who provide direct care to patients, has put in place childcare programs that have helped retain and attract new workers. Three childcare centers remained open during the pandemic even as programs operated by others were shutting down. Employees can use backup care hours, a flexible benefit for when a primary caregiver arrangement breaks down, for both child and elder care. Wellstar offers onsite employee assistance program counselors and is launching proactive mental health care.

•Massachusetts General Hospital, which considers childcare an investment in its workforce, relies on its centers for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to give its nurses and doctors peace of mind knowing that their children are well cared for when they come to work. The hospital also provides backup care centers for employees’ children up to the age of 12.

•Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts rebranded all of its sick time to wellness time, destigmatizing time off for mental health as well as physical health. Benefits include reimbursement for massages, acupuncture, mental health apps, gym memberships, home workout equipment and ergonomic home-office furniture. Educational tutoring supports students from childhood through graduate school.

•Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas had a 94% retention rate for participants in its education assistance program, and more than 700 employees have graduated.

•Bloomberg offers employees 25 days of backup care that can be used to fill in the gaps in their children’s calendars when school is not in session. The program covers general and virtual tutoring.

Employers are increasingly offering higher education support to compete for and retain talent, Myers said. The support takes many forms, including counseling for student-loan refinancing or consolidation, contributions toward student loan repayment, free and low-cost degrees, classes toward career pathways, and tuition reimbursement. College coaching is another attractive benefit for parents worried about their children entering college. Coaching tools can range from assistance with deciding on which school is the right fit to essay reviews, help with applications and financial aid forms, and advice on financial aid negotiation.

Myers said many clients that launched programs to help working parents during the pandemic have retained these benefits because they proved successful. One organization researched what its remote workers found they had time for that their onsite counterparts did not. The employer then provided onsite resources such as parking lot oil changes and car detailing, concierge laundry services, and food-delivery gift cards to allow onsite employees to accomplish the same goals. “That really raised the equity between the groups,” she said.

Generation Z and millennial employees especially are looking for flexible benefits that grow and change with their life and family trajectory, Myers said. This demographic represents a large portion of the workforce and its emerging leaders. They are the most educated generation in U.S. history, yet they earn 20% less than baby boomers did at their age. Often saddled in educational debt, they face an out-of-control housing market and, now, a potential recession. “Millennials, as a demographic, just can’t really catch a financial break,” Myers said.

Women are particularly at risk of dropping out of the workforce, Myers said. A recent Bright Horizons survey found that 53% of women workers report they are more stressed out than they were a year ago, and 46% also feel burnout. Because of that burnout, 40% of working mothers are ready to leave, and more than half are planning an exit within the next two years. “That says to me that the Great Resignation and the Great Reshuffling are far from over,” Myers said.–By Susan Kelly