Sarah Hardy is the Cofounder and COO of Bobbie, the mom-founded and led infant formula company.
In September, I found myself testifying in front of Congress. I stood there, pleading with our leaders to extend the child care funding, which provided relief during the pandemic to child care centers and home-based daycares and was set to expire on September 30.
Am I in the business of child care? No, but as the cofounder and COO of a business that employs a team of majority parents, and as a working parent myself, I know to my core that this moment requires immediate action.
If your business has even one working parent on your team, this should matter to you. When my company posted a survey on social media, we found that child care isn’t only critical to our employees but equally so to our larger community of parents. Out of about 630 responses, 86% said childcare was essential to their ability to work, and 87% said losing access to childcare would negatively impact their mental health. Affordability is also a top child care concern among working parents.
To be clear, it was never my intention to testify in front of Congress, though I am humbled and honored to have been there as a leader, business owner and, mostly, as a mother. I believe my company is a case study on how the private sector can be fiscally successful when they invest in working parents. We must look modern parenthood in the eye and build systems that make it possible.
From my view, government support is critical; however, there are also actions business leaders themselves can take to support working parents on their teams. Here are a few recommendations based on my experience implementing them in my own business.
Show up with benefits.
Comprehensive health benefits and competitive pay are the foundation for supporting working parents on your team. I also recommend providing a generous and realistic parental leave program for birthing and non-birthing parents alike. At my company, for example, we instated “TakeOurLeave,” a parental leave policy that allows all parents to take up to a year of leave and return to work when they’re ready to do so. Knowing we couldn’t move the needle alone, we took it one step further and open-sourced the policy so other companies could follow suit.
I recognize the hesitancy you might feel as a business leader to offer a leave program of this nature, but the positive impact of having parents return to work on their own terms cannot be understated. We’ve had this policy in place for a year and a half, and I’ve seen firsthand how empowering parents to return to work when they’re fully ready to be there has an undeniably positive effect. It can be felt and seen throughout the organization—from employee retention to productivity to a sense of belonging.
Build a culture that empowers parents to parent.
My company’s most impactful employee support structures that allow working parents to balance the personal and professional undeniably come down to a fully remote culture with unlimited personal time off. This empowers working parents to flex between their role as a “data scientist and mom” or “marketing director and dad,” for example, in a way that I believe in-office culture simply does not.
We center our culture around encouraging our team to bring their whole self to work. This manifests itself in ways ranging from calendar transparency to a radically candid Slack culture. To foster this in your own company, encourage team members to share and block time when they’re picking up their kids from daycare, attending a dance recital or running to a doctor’s appointment. Being a working parent often means interweaving these elements of real life with work life. Show the parents on your team that they’re fully supported by ensuring your executive team models these behaviors as well.
These seemingly small actions add up. There’s no rulebook for how to support the working parents on your team, but simply asking them how you can support them in this moment will go far. Being a working parent is difficult, and so much of that comes back to a lack of proper support structures. But until the public sector steps up, the onus is on private companies to try to solve the problem for working parents.
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