How Vivvi Empowers Parents To Build Careers and Families
Lauren Hobbs is the Chief Marketing Officer at Vivvi, a company focused on reinventing the childcare and early learning space through more personalized employer-sponsored childcare benefits. After rising through the ranks to leadership in the financial services and hospitality industry, Lauren began to see the challenges that she and many of her professional colleagues faced balancing? their roles as parents and professionals.
Below is a short excerpt from my conversation with Lauren about her career journey, how Vivvi is taking a personalized approach to working with employers around childcare benefits, and how Vivvi is creating a more human and inclusive workplace by helping caregivers manage their families and careers.
Who are you, and what’s one experience that shaped your own perspective on work?
I started in the art world before going to Columbia Business School where I got my MBA. After graduating, I joined American Express where I worked in consumer insights before moving into the hospitality industry.?
It was my role as Director of Marketing at Union Square Restaurant Group (Danny Meyer’s company) that truly shaped my career, and continues to inform the work that I do now. While growing the portfolio of USHG brands, I was given a crash course in Danny Meyer’s business philosophy around serving customers, the importance of the experience, and the team-first approach to delivering exceptional moments in the customer journey.
While I worked in the corporate office on the management team, I also saw the unique needs of our large front line workforce, particularly relating to caregiving. It was an important reminder that every employee has their own set of challenges when balancing family and career, and personalization matters.?
What is Vivvi, and what led you to joining as their CMO?
The mission behind Vivvi is to create generational change for working parents by providing affordable and accessible child care and early learning.?
We deliver on that mission by meeting parents where they are, and we design our programs and offerings to account for the realities that parents face while trying to juggle parenting and career in today’s modern workplace.?
At Vivvi we know that child care, and lack thereof, can be a huge burden. This is especially true for women, causing many to drop out of the workforce so they can take care of their family. Our goal is to work with employers so they can step in as an additional support system, and ensure their working parents can raise their families without sacrificing their career ambitions.
I met our co-founder and CEO Charlie Bonello while working in the hospitality industry, and felt immediately connected to the social mission of supporting working parents. Charlie saw the need for this support years ago while running an ecosystem of early stage tech companies called Grand Central Tech. As the company grew to about 1,000 people, he began to see first-hand the number of challenges that employees faced when becoming parents—and the challenges their colleagues and managers faced as well. It turned out that the lack of dependable child care not only affected working parents, it also affected parent’s teammates, peers and colleagues. And if the parent was a manager or leader, there were implications for their entire team.?
As a first-generation working mom, I am honored to be working towards a solution to the child care crisis, and creating that change that so many working parents need.
What are you doing differently to meet the needs of working parents?
Our goal is to provide flexible, affordable and accessible options so that we can truly meet parents and employers where they are. We also know that as a child grows, needs evolve.?
The need for flexibility is something that comes up quite a bit, especially for working parents. Our campuses are open 7AM-7PM, which acknowledges the real schedules of working parents. In addition to on-site care, we also have a number of other flexible offerings to meet the needs of working parents including an in-home care program, access to a backup care network, and virtual 1:1 tutoring for school-aged children.?
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While most employer sponsored child care options are prohibitively expensive, Vivvi is focused on serving employers in a flexible and accessible way, regardless of their size. Our on-site programs are located in major cities across the country, and we use our portfolio of offerings and programs to meet the unique needs of each employer.?
One of our most impactful products is Care Cash, is a financial reimbursement product companies can use to support their employees with child care costs. This product offers maximum flexibility and equitability, allowing employees to get access to care for children either by hiring their own provider, or paying a friend, relative or neighbor for care.?
How does Vivvi approach childcare in a way that meets parents where they are?
Something that resonated with me when I met Charlie and his co-founder Ben Newton was they had a very similar approach to when I worked in the hospitality industry around serving customers and being intentional about the quality of the experience that we want to deliver.?
We’re constantly asking ourselves, how do we find ways to turn some of the most challenging parts of the day for a parent into the best ones? We truly mean it when we say we try to meet parents where they are.?
From a tactical perspective, that means getting into the mindset of a parent throughout the day. So many parents have to make tough choices about what to do when they don’t have child care—which parent has to be the one to miss an important meeting or to stay home for the day with the kids, how to manage their workload when there are school closures or last minute issues, and more. This is something that resonates with me, as they are real scenarios I face daily in juggling my family and work schedules.
We’re constantly trying to figure out how to solve for those very real working parent scenarios. For example, our on-site center hours are 7AM-7PM. Typical on-site centers are open from 9-3PM or 9-5PM. Part of why we intentionally did this is because we know that as parents, we’ve all had that dreaded 4:30PM meeting that ran long and then we were late to pick up our child. Not only are we meeting parents where they are, but we’re trying to alleviate the common pains we know exist.?
You get a chance to partner with a lot of employers who are thinking differently about meeting the needs of their employees. What can other companies learn from them??
Flexibility goes a long way. Vivvi’s flexible offerings and programs help employees of all sizes and shapes. While some come in with a clear idea of what they want, for others, we take a more iterative approach. We’ll work within their goals and budget, and then adjust it over time. This allows employers to better understand the needs of their employees, and make adjustments as those needs evolve.
The thing that stands out to me about our customers is that they really are trying to think of their employees as people, not just cogs in a wheel. They recognize that how employees are managing outside of work directly impacts how they show up and perform at work, and they are taking responsibility in trying to support that holistic approach to well-being.?
They also are taking a new approach to retention and engagement. They recognize that when an employee is exploring potential work opportunities, they’re evaluating how each company is going to support them, and they’re choosing companies that have benefits and policies around that.
Finally, the very forward-thinking companies are recognizing that parenting is more of a marathon versus a sprint. They recognize that supporting parents doesn’t stop with fertility or paid leave benefits. It extends to child care, college support and even elder care. These companies are connecting the dots about how to care for their employees, and finding unique ways to support and retain them through all of life’s stages.
What does your ideal version of a future of work look like?
When I think about the future of work, I think about a place my daughter would want to work in; a place where she doesn’t have to choose between being a parent and having a career, and where she feels supported to do both well. Access to child care is a big part of that, and my hope is that more companies see this not only as a responsibility, but also as an opportunity to create real generational change.
Where can people go to find more information?
Check out our website or follow us at @vivviearlylearn.