Five decades of providing accessible childcare to employees: here’s what businesses should know

The official first day of summer is often a reminder for many parents and caregivers of the increased needs for childcare, and for business leaders, this moment can offer an opportunity to reflect on their role in supporting both the employee and the caregiver. ?

Corporate support for accessible childcare has quickly become status quo in a post-pandemic workplace, as employees request more flexibility between work and their everyday lives. In fact, a recently released?report ?from The Best Place for Working Parents? , over 2,000 businesses that participated in the survey reaffirmed that family-friendly is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must-have’ for employers and their employees today. Notably, businesses that offer on-site childcare also have a retention rate 7.4 times higher than businesses without, and improved loyalty among employees.??

Childcare has been an important component of Frontier Co-op's culture and benefits since our very beginnings in 1976 – a small co-op where employees rotated roles and responsibilities, critical among them was taking care of everyone’s kids for the day.?

As we grew, our primary employee base became women from rural farming families who were looking to supplement their income and get insurance for their families, so childcare was incredibly important to them.?Almost 50 years later, these benefits have grown and evolved but childcare and providing a variety of options that fit different families’ needs is still a crucial benefit for our employees, and critical to our team’s ability to recruit top talent.??

As part of Frontier Co-op's Breaking Down Barriers to Employment initiative, our program is subsidized by the company, on average, parents spend $2 per hour for childcare, or roughly $100 per week including healthy, organic and homemade meals for the children each day.?We also provide other wraparound services like working with the local school district to serve as a pickup and drop-off location for kids before and after school and summer camps for employees’ kids over breaks. These supportive programs were implemented to build on Frontier Co-op’s purpose— ‘Doing Good, Works’—within our walls.?

The impact of providing childcare benefits as an employer was recently highlighted at the Best Places for Working Parents 2024 National Summit alongside Sara McLeod , Director, Global Executive Compensation at Whirlpool and Nicole De Santis , Principal at BCG – who recently released their new report on the ROI of? child care for employers – and walked away with some key learnings from our discussion:??

• Parents miss far less work when they can count on reliable, available childcare. Those surveyed said that they avoided up to 13 work absences a year when they no longer had to juggle childcare disruptions.?
• When searching for the organizations or businesses to partner with, a key differentiator is not the cost of the partnership, but also ensuring that their values align with your company values to form a mutual grounding of how you can best support your employees.
• Research proves that providing childcare benefits make sense both financially and strategically and the role of business leaders is pivotal in shifting the current landscape around accessible childcare and enabling parents and caregivers to remain in the workforce.

However, we know these changes can’t happen overnight and any employer considering a childcare program to support their employees, I’d say the first step is to listen with an open mind to your team about what their needs are, and don’t be afraid to start small.?

Not every company can house and subsidize an on-site childcare program but think creatively about how you can work with your employees to help ease the burden of childcare costs, remove the pressure of finding a program that’s accessible for them locally or even just reduce stress by allowing more flexibility in scheduling. Take the time to figure out what approach is sustainable for your company, what works for you and grow from there.?

Denise Hernandez, an HR coordinator at Frontier Co-op, shared why these programs are so impactful not only on her day-to-day life, but how she and her children see their future: “Being able to split my work life and my mom life has been really important to me. It’s shown me that I can get wherever I want to in life, and I can show my children that.”?

Megan Schulte is the VP of human resources at Frontier Co-op?