Laurie Chamberlin, Head of Recruitment Solutions, North America at LHH, an integrated talent solutions provider.
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The U.S. economy is in the midst of a Great Reshuffle. Hiring rates are outpacing quit rates as employers struggle to keep top talent who are looking for better opportunities. While there’s no surefire solution to this growing crisis, what's abundantly clear is that we can’t afford to lose any more of our current workforce.
This is especially true when it comes to retaining working mothers, who rejoined the workforce in record numbers following the pandemic. In fact, 70.4% of women with children under 5 were employed as of June 2023—an all-time high for our country.
However, despite this encouraging progress, we're currently at risk of pushing these women out of the workforce at a time when we need them the most. Instead of treading backward, let’s seize this moment to embrace the learnings of the past few years. We must commit to building workplaces that are designed to serve working mothers and allow them to remain a vital part of our workforce.
The Vital Supports That Working Caretakers Need
The recent surge of mothers in the workforce was likely driven by two key factors: flexible work options and greater access to child care. With the ability to work remotely or adopt a hybrid schedule, mothers had the flexibility they needed to balance their jobs and caretaking responsibilities. On top of that, federal Covid-19 relief funding unlocked $39 billion to support child care providers in 2021, creating more affordable care opportunities.
But now, more and more employers are beginning to issue strict return-to-office mandates. While the need for reliable, affordable child care will become increasingly important as a result of this, the pandemic-era aid supporting these services expired at the end of September 2023. That loss of funding could result in the closure of 70,000 child care centers across the country, which will likely cause the cost of child care to rise far above the average (around 20% or more of parents' household income).
For far too long, a large number of companies have seen providing child care support as a fringe benefit rather than an economic necessity for attracting and retaining valuable talent. Such a mindset pushes caretakers out of the workforce and ultimately has dire financial repercussions for companies and our country as a whole. In fact, it's estimated that this issue costs the U.S. economy $122 billion a year in lost wages for families, lost revenue for businesses and lost income and sales tax for the government.
Therefore, the most successful companies in today’s tight labor market will be those that double down on the policies that allowed mothers and other caretakers to reenter (and remain in) the workforce.
4 Keys To Building Caretaker-Friendly Workplaces
Simply put, business leaders must recognize child care as a business-critical issue for their employees. When organizations are creative with providing child care accessibility and affordability, they reap benefits tied to recruitment and retention, productivity, employee engagement and internal career progression/succession planning.
Here are four steps that companies should be considering to support working mothers and other caretakers.
1. Provide child care support as part of organization-wide benefits.
Competitive and thoughtful child care benefits are a great way to support your employees as costs rise, which can help ensure they're able to remain productive and focused. Providing stipends, paid leave and/or flexible scheduling can ensure you're successfully recruiting and retaining staff.
2. Build flexibility into the work culture.
Allowing workers—particularly those with dependents—to work a schedule that takes their unique needs into account lets them execute their job responsibilities while meeting their caretaking requirements. To do this, leaders need to emphasize performance and outputs, rather than time spent in the office. What’s more, recent data shows that fostering a healthy work-life balance and providing good working conditions is key for retention.
3. Ensure all policies are gender neutral.
Women tend to carry more child care responsibilities, impacting their ability to progress through their careers and ultimately pushing them out of the workforce. By implementing gender-neutral policies, you can create an opportunity for all parents to balance work and family responsibilities as well as promote an inclusive work environment for all types of families.
4. Encourage senior leaders to be transparent about their own caretaking needs.
Providing resources isn’t enough. Employees must feel empowered to utilize them. Even when they have the option to leverage available benefits, many working parents fear facing the potential consequences and the stigma associated with making child care a priority. This is an opportunity to lead by example. When senior leaders speak candidly about needing to accommodate their personal responsibilities, such as taking advantage of a flexible work schedule to pick up their kids, parents at all levels can worry less about the optics of doing the same.
There are innumerable benefits of supporting working caretakers, from improving recruitment and retention to addressing labor shortages. But the most important is ensuring the current world of work considers the needs of everyone. At this unique moment, where working mothers are making up a greater portion of the workforce, it's imperative that we don’t lose the opportunity to address persisting barriers by building caretaker support into the fabric of our workplaces.
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