What CEOs are doing to support working parents
In a new survey of working parents, family benefits startup Cleo found that in nearly 50% of families, at least one parent had taken a step back in their career during the pandemic — whether that meant cutting back on hours or leaving their job altogether. These challenges have more acutely impacted working women, who tend to shoulder the majority of caregiving and child care responsibilities. Amid the rise of the Delta variant and the uncertainty around school re-openings, balancing full-time work with caregiving is no less challenging now.
We talked to CEOs at companies that have adopted hybrid or fully remote models, in part to be more inclusive of working parents. Here, they share some of the other things they’re doing to help accommodate parents — and working women, in particular — as the pandemic continues:
Kasey Edwards, founder and CEO of Helpr: Childcare belongs alongside vision and dental in the benefits package. The care breakdowns we saw as a result of COVID-19 weren’t fresh or unique; they happen every day for working families.
We’ll stay in our home offices practicing flex work with lots of backup care for the team and support our global employers with safe, equitable, and practical child and adult care.
During the pandemic we expanded our policy to 100 hours of backup care through our Out Of Network care support, and will practice flex work indefinitely.
Bianca Padilla, co-founder and
CEO of Carewell: We transitioned to being fully remote so our team can be close to family. I never want anyone to feel bad about saying “I’ll be offline for a few hours today because my child has a play at school.” COVID has blurred the line between work and “life.” I don’t want to offer work/ life balance, because that insinuates that one of the two is suffering or that there’s a natural imbalance. I want to offer work/life integration. I hire smart people who get their work done and do it really well — whether that’s from behind a desk or in a hockey arena watching their kid’s game.
Li Haslett Chen, founder and CEO of Narrativ: We’re building a work culture that focuses on outcomes versus hours worked or meeting time. This enables all employees, including working mothers, to have the flexibility to balance all their priorities and demands on their time. As far as benefits, we started providing employees with a $500 stipend when they start at Narrativ, in addition to a $50/month benefit to help manage the unique demands of working remotely. Our remote-first model also gives working parents more flexibility to balance child care, and we also offer 12 weeks paid parental leave and generous contributions toward benefit coverage for families.
Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of Winnie:
One of the biggest reasons our work environment is so appealing to parents is the flexibility we offer our employees. It’s very normal at Winnie to have children pop into video calls and for employees to block time on their calendar for day care drop-off. We also use our own product to support our parent employees in their child care search. Each of the founders has three young children and many people on the team are parents. When employees need to find new child care arrangements, we make sure they can do so easily with Winnie and if not, we use that as an example to make our product better for all parents.
Sarahjane Sacchetti, CEO of Cleo:
I’ve continued to see discussions around returning to “normal” and going back to the way things were. The reality is that if we go back to a pre-pandemic state for working parents, we’ve failed. Companies shouldn’t be aiming to return to as it was pre-pandemic. The pandemic highlighted disparities and issues that have existed for centuries, including the lack of employer-led support for working parents, lack of diversity among leadership teams, and more. Employers that are removing the support they granted during the pandemic should expect a mass exodus in the coming months as their employees seek out workplaces that lend comprehensive and holistic support to their parent communities.
We’re committed to making a meaningful dent in solving the long-standing gap in employer-led support for working parents, and our internal efforts reflect what we’re encouraging other employers to implement.
We provide support to our employees in a variety of ways, including: a culture of flexibility and embracing the realities of parenting at every level — executives normalize caring for their families, from pick up and drop off, to real time parenting or home schooling; free membership to UrbanSitter, Ginger, and Head space; and flexible PTO, plus a culture where leaders encourage and expect employees to take time off.