Unicef says it best: “The business case is clear: investing in family-friendly policies helps improve workforce productivity and a company’s ability to attract, motivate and retain employees.”
The agency, part of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and development aid to children around the world, recommends that employers implement a range of strategies to support working parents.
These include a minimum of six months of paid parental leave, ensuring that women are not discriminated against, proper entitlement to breastfeeding at work, and support for access to affordable, quality childcare services. .
Hybrid work
Parents working in the United States have long been frustrated with what is on offer in their workplaces and while some companies are doing the work to support employees with families, a brighter light on the matter has been illuminated by the pandemic of Covid-19, which has forced many home workers. These days, offices in major American cities are less than half as busy as before, according to data from security vendor Kastle Systems.
According to Gallup data, six out of 10 employees with remote jobs want a hybrid job arrangement. About a third prefer fully remote work and less than 10% want to be in the office. That part of the picture is very clear, but for parents, what else do they really, really want from their employers?
Solidarity management
A 2021 survey of 1,500 parents working from the Cleo family benefits platform found that 40% of the workforce is made up of parents. With abandonment already a major concern across the U.S. workforce (more than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), parents feeling included and supported on the spot workers are 41% less likely to leave.
Additionally, Cleo’s survey found that over a third of parents planning to leave their jobs do so due to a lack of flexibility. Childcare is the most requested benefit by parents, but less than a fifth of working families have access through their employer.
Benefits made to measure
Companies that offer additional family and health benefits tailored to family and childcare will be ahead in the race for top talent. For example, Adobe supports LGBTQ + employees with progressive family planning and personal support benefits, including same-sex partner health coverage, adoption and surrogacy assistance, and non-birth parental leave. up to 16 weeks.
Professional services firm Deloitte has considered a number of benefits and rewards for its employees, with the aim of creating a culture that promotes personal and professional development. It offers (depending on the area) a wide range of programs to support families, among other benefits. These include adoption / subrogation leave, parental leave and parental leave, as well as foster and care leave.
The company has also taken action on how its teams want to work, with options for compressed work weeks in the summer and hybrid work arrangements, which are of such importance and value to parents.
Cisco also offers family-friendly benefits. The company’s paternal leave policy offers paid leave that is not determined by the parent’s gender or which parent gave birth, but by which parent will be the primary caregiver. The grandparents who work there have three days off to help out when even a newborn joins the family, and the company also offers subsidized childcare, paid leave and insurance.
If you are in the market for a new role, take a look at the VentureBeat Job Board to see who is hiring; below we show three open roles.
Senior Software Engineer, Labs, Google, Mountain View
Google’s software engineers develop next-generation technologies that change the way billions of users connect, explore and interact with each other and with information. Labs is a group focused on incubating early stage efforts to support Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The senior software engineer will use their technical expertise to manage project priorities, deadlines and results. You will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software solutions. You will need a degree or equivalent practical experience, as well as five years of experience in software development in one or more programming languages and with data structures / algorithms. Get the full job description here.
Program Manager for Regional Critical Environments, Microsoft, Redmond
Microsoft’s Cloud Operations & Innovation (CO + I) is the engine that powers cloud services. You will play a key role in providing and managing the critical environment infrastructure and core technologies for Microsoft’s online services, including Bing, Office 365, Xbox, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform. As a regional CEPM program manager (CEPM), your performance goals will include providing direction, guidance and oversight on projects, programs and owning and guiding the resolution of identified gaps in CE programs to enable data centers to achieve more. Get all the application criteria here.
Software Engineer II – Ad Optimization Team, Indeed, Pittsburgh
This Software Engineer II role will join Indeed’s Ad Optimization team, which builds large-scale pipelines, backend services, and advanced templates / algorithms. You will design, develop and maintain pipelines and services and implement efficient algorithms. You will also be able to continuously improve the quality and performance of research and code innovative tools to support rapid experimentation and learning. To apply, you will need a bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, or related fields, as well as over four years of manufacturing-level software engineering experience and proficiency with high-end object-oriented programming languages. level like like Java, Python, Kotlin, Go or similar. Find out more about the role of Software Engineer II here.
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