Investing in caregiving benefits pays off
or, an interview with Lauren Smith Brody of Fifth Trimester and Lauren Hobbs of Vivvi
Earlier this year, Vivvi and The Fifth Trimester issued a joint report called “The R.O.I. of Caregiving Benefits”, and once I read it, I knew I wanted to interview the study’s authors, Lauren Hobbs and Lauren Smith Brody. Combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, they learned more about working parents’ priorities when it comes to caregiving benefits. Some of their main findings include:
Every $1 invested in caregiving benefits drives $18.93, for an R.O.I. of nearly 18x.
90% of parents surveyed said that they’d rather have an ongoing childcare subsidy of $10,000 than an immediate $10,000 cash bonus.
59% of respondents say that if they had backup or subsidized child care they would be likely to stay in their job for at least four years. (And retaining good employees saves organizations tons of money!)
57% of survey respondents say that if their employer had backup or subsidized child care they would take on higher-level work.
Lauren Smith Brody is the CEO of The Fifth Trimester, a workplace gender equality firm, and a co-founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit the Chamber of Mothers. Lauren’s work grew out of her bestselling book The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom’s Guide to Style, Sanity, and Success After Baby.
Lauren Hobbs is Vivvi's Chief Marketing Officer and is responsible for delivering the company's mission and vision into the everyday lives of its partners, families and children. Vivvi makes child care and early learning more accessible and affordable by partnering with employers to provide child care as a benefit, as well as providing exceptional early education and child care to children ages 0-5 through its network of schools in New York and Westchester.
Below you’ll find my interview with Lauren and Lauren, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
JW: What are the caregiving benefits that parents most desire, and why are they worth the investment?
LH: The major takeaway in our report is that different benefits ring true for different people and different companies. And so the importance of flexibility—not necessarily in the sense of “flexible work”—but flexibility of access and implementation is probably the most important thing that we found.
LSB: We also found that the environment mattered—people were happy when they had policies that were crafted to suit their needs in the moment or had an organizational culture that embraced the idea of care being important. So it was the company culture, along with the actual benefits, that created the whole picture of what mattered to these people.
JW: Sometimes parents and non-parents are pitted against each other in the workplace, but your research suggests that when companies offer caregiving benefits, it's a "win" for everyone. Tell us more.
LH: One of the biggest takeaways of the report is that caregiving benefits are not just for the person using the benefit—they also benefit that person’s team and their manager. These benefits support diversity in the workplace by allowing more people to not only show up, but deliver on their work beyond just the basics.
LSB: We actually asked survey respondents to rank the benefits that were most appealing to them. And we asked them to rank them in two different ways. One, how important the benefit was if they thought they might use it themselves. And two, even if they knew they weren't going to use it themselves, how important it was to them.
What’s so interesting is that respondents actually ranked paid family leave and backup childcare higher if they thought they weren't going to use them themselves. And what that told us is that people absolutely know the team-wide impact of having institutional support for their caregiving colleagues. First, because it communicated an important value across the organization that, "your care work is important, we want to support it." But also everybody's been on a team where they've been impacted by another teammate’s care work. It can be a beautiful and collegial thing when it works really well. And it can also be a recipe for resentment if people don't feel that their colleagues are supported.
JW: In the report, you note that parents excel at internal business development--bridging teams and bringing people together--but identify external business development--travel, networking--as a pain point. What are your recommendations for how companies can address this?
LH: There are different solutions for different jobs and different company structures. For instance, one person we interviewed talked about leveraging care reimbursements and backup care so that she could travel more spontaneously. Another talked about leveraging hours that she could work in the morning to manage a global team to then recoup some time in the afternoon for mentoring internally (work that might typically be done over a drink after-hours).
So I think it's, again, not necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution. It's more about creating optionality and then allowing people to find creative solutions and providing those as examples, so that then others feel empowered to do the same.
LSB: I think it's important for your readers to acknowledge and not feel bad about the fact that, inevitably, there will be work sprints—there will be things that require creative compromise. I find that the antidote to resentment is “paying yourself back”, even if it doesn't work out to be the exact same number of hours that you give yourself back, but it’s important to do something that just feels like a little win for yourself.
It’s also important to leverage the structures you have. For example, in the interviews, people talked about how their employee resource groups weren't just echo chambers of commiseration, but they were a way for employees to funnel up ideas that grew out of them, to management.
JW: Parenthood is often framed as a distraction in the workforce, but your survey reinforces what so many parents intuitively know--becoming a parent makes them WAY more efficient, focused, and productive. How can we change this deeply ingrained narrative to reflect reality?
LSB: Re-writing this narrative is so important to us, because it’s false. Parenthood actually makes people crave stability, crave growth, crave mattering and meaning in their work. And that shows up in the quality of the work they do, when they have the support they need.
We've reached an absolute moral tipping point. The number of American citizens supporting federal paid leave is through the stratosphere. But what's been missing is the business case. And our great hope is that it becomes clearer than ever that these are not just “nice things to do”, but that it’s actually a business imperative.
JW: As I was reading your report, I kept thinking about the lifecycle of caregiving. I'm already seeing this now with clients I work with, but in the next decade or so, I imagine we will see an influx of workers (especially female workers) hit with the double-whammy of caregiving for their kids along with their aging Boomer parents. How can we increase the sense of urgency around this issue?
LSB: That’s why we wanted to not just look at childcare specifically, but caregiving more broadly. People are not just caring for their children, as you said, they're caring for older generations, they're caring for themselves, they're caring for their partners and spouses. Caregiving is truly universal. I talk a lot about the five generation workforce, and the common thread is that we're all invested in caregiving more than we ever have been. And, I think, this is largely because of COVID. The older generations, in particular, are identifying as caregivers at higher rates than they used to—because they were more actively involved in intergenerational family care during COVID and they want to hang onto it.
So I think it’s important to not just talk about support for brand new moms, but all moms. And not just moms, but moms and dads. And not just moms and dads, but anybody who is providing care for someone in their family or extended family. It's the great equalizer. And it's also the thing that proves that this is not a niche issue, that this is an everybody issue. And so when you solve it, you're solving it with greater financial impact for all.
JW: When I talk to clients and readers who work for nonprofits or smaller companies/start-ups, I think there’s a sense that caregiving benefits are for large, Fortune 500-type companies. What advice do you have for folks who work in more resource-limited settings that want to advocate for these benefits?
LH: One of the benefits of working for a smaller organization is that you really can lean into meeting individualized needs, because you’re not working within a huge bureaucracy. I would also suggest that people check out worksheets we’ve created about how to advocate for childcare benefits and how to advocate for flexibility at work that can be used by anyone, regardless of the size of their organization.
JW: This is a big question, and one that's a bit outside the scope of the report, but I’m grappling with how much responsibility we should place on the corporate sector vs. the government for providing needed caregiving benefits, because there are some obvious downsides to privatizing them (i.e., millions of workers operate outside the corporate structure, benefits often don't apply to hourly workers and others who need them the most, these benefits can become "golden handcuffs" to those who do have access to them, etc.). I'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue.
LH: The need is so vast that we need to tackle it from many different angles—and the corporate side is one. We very much believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and that, of course, the federal government needs to do more. But, in the meantime, corporations have a huge opportunity to do better and to do more and—in some cases, to do something at all. If companies want to retain their caregivers, promote their caregivers, and create more diverse leadership teams, they need to do something now.
LSB: I'm sure you already know this statistic, but the United States is the only wealthy country that does not have paid maternity leave. The United States spends about $500 per toddler per year on childcare where the average in other wealthy nations is $14,000 per toddler per year. That is not because they're better people than we are here, it's because they see the economic case and they see how important it is to invest in, and support, young families so that adults are able to remain in the workforce.
And so when I see the private sector making progress in this domain, I think it helps normalize the idea that these are good business decisions. These are not “handouts”, instead these are really an investment in our own economy, as well as in the health and wellbeing of our population.
