It’s time for organizations to recognize childcare assistance as a needed benefit, on par with … [+]
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If you’ve read my previous Forbes articles, or what I posted on LinkedIn before I joined the Forbes network, you know I’m on a mission: to get as many organizations as possible to use this terrible crisis to fundamentally change how we work.
We may not realize it today, but when future generations look back at how people worked prior to the global pandemic of 2020-2021 they’ll laugh at our habits. “You mean people used to commute 45 minutes or more each way in crammed trains or buses, or in bumper-to-bumper traffic, just so they could sit at a desk for most of the day—and they did this day after day, five days a week? What kind of craziness was that?”
While Covid-19 has prompted millions to ditch such craziness for better ways of working, it’s important to recognize that the new ways have not been all that great for everyone. We’ve seen many colleagues struggling to get their work done with children at home. Others have been distracted by housemates or the need to care for sick relatives. Many have quietly suffered from loneliness or stress due to the perception that they need to work at all hours of the day and night.
Like many, we’ve been surveying employees during the pandemic. In our last survey, completed several months ago, 83% of employees said they felt at least as productive working from home as they did pre-Covid when they worked on-site. Parents with adequate childcare did even better: 89% of them felt equally or more productive, 11 percentage points higher than those without adequate childcare (78%).
Since most parents work or want to work [Prior to the pandemic this included 66% of U.S. mothers with young children, 77% of those with school-age children (6-18) and 93% of fathers with children under 18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.], an 11% productivity gap is significant—and provides a compelling argument for organizations to recognize childcare assistance as a needed benefit, on par with healthcare.
Many companies have done so. One here in Boston is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a healthcare research institute whose chief people officer, Frances Taplett, has put in place a wide-ranging menu of caregiver benefits, including paid parental leave, adoption assistance, subsidized emergency care and up to $7,500 per year in financial assistance for employee childcare. The purpose, Taplett says, is to create a company culture that “allows employees to flourish both at work and at home.” And at the beginning of the crisis, last March, the Broad Institute established a high-testing daycare center so parents needed in the laboratories, or working from home, could keep working.
Flourishing at home has been a challenge for many non-parents as well. While 79% of non-parents told us that they felt just as productive, or more so, than they did before the pandemic, 21%—or one in five—felt less productive. That’s double the percentage of parents with adequate daycare support, where only 11%—one out of ten—felt less productive. This means employers need to pay attention to non-parents as well.
There are many possible reasons that so many non-parents feel they’ve been floundering: loneliness and isolation, a surfeit of distractions, cramped living quarters, and lack of quiet, privacy or work boundaries (such as regular working hours), among others. Regardless of the cause, this should provide a powerful incentive for organizations to increase their focus on employee well-being. This means all employees.
Our company supports a range of employee wellness initiatives, including fitness reimbursements, mental health benefits and even a free meditation app (which I use to help me relax at the end of a busy day). Many other ideas, courtesy of Aetna, can be found here.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, women in particular have suffered the most from the isolation, stress, and familial juggling Covid-19 has required. They were especially clobbered by the quarantines, “reporting weight gain and increased depression, stress and insomnia,” according to the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. As a result, many have now left the labor force. That’s why companies need to act with urgency.
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for companies, public agencies and organizations of every kind to update the ways they support their employees, both at the office and at home.
Most companies able to do so stepped up their games to support their colleagues and co-workers during the pandemic. Now it’s time for them to recognize that they should have been doing this all along and look for ways to step it up even further. Their employees’ well-being is their organizations’ well-being; wellness matters.
