Don't write child care off as a women's issue, though. In a recent survey of parents of children under the age of two, 89% of women and 62% of men reported work-related child-care problems.
The need for child-care assistance is so great that it promises to become a major political issue in the 1990s. Already Congress has before it more than 100 bills that could have some impact on child care.
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MYTH 2
Child-care assistance means an on-site center.
Companies actually have many alternatives to providing on-site day care. And even the simplest plan can be a tremendous help to employees with kids. Here are the plans most often pursued by small companies:
* providing information and referral services that guide parents to high-quality care available in the community;
* offering flexible work schedules that allow parents to match their hours to their babysitters' schedules;
* establishing an IRS-approved plan enabling employees to pay for child care with their pretax earnings;
* subsidizing the cost of child care either directly (through a voucher system that pays a set percentage of the bill) or indirectly (through a plan that may or may not be tied to the benefits package);
* establishing on- or near-site child-care centers on their own, or with other companies.
Companies should begin their consideration of day-care assistance by conducting a careful needs audit. But don't simply round up the preschoolers' parents and ask them for their child-care preferences. Focus on what's happening right now -- where the family lives; the kids' ages; the problems their parents are having with child care; the number of different child-care arrangements made each week; and in some detail, how the family is coping with child-care needs before school, after school, in the summer, and when the kids are sick.
During the study, try not to build false expectations by mentioning services you know the company can't or won't deliver. And don't ask how much the parent would be willing to pay for child care. "If the answers come back 'five bucks a week,' well, you asked!" says Phoenix-based consultant Nadine Mathis. But do include nonparents in the survey -- they may know better than anyone how child-care problems affect morale and productivity in the work force.
What percentage of employees can you expect to participate in the day-care plan? From 5% to 10% participation is considered normal, 20% very good.
Only after the survey are you in a position to figure out what sort of child-care assistance -- if any -- is necessary. Would your company benefit from an on-site child-care center, or would your employees be grateful merely for help in finding quality care in your community? Do employees need help paying for child care? Or would they prefer a more flexible work schedule that might allow them to take on more of their children's care themselves?
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MYTH 3
We can't afford it.
It's true that on-site child care can be expensive. But the alternatives -- the various reimbursement plans, information and referral services, and the flextime approach -- cost surprisingly little, either in time or money.
The cost of resource and referral programs vary with the size of your organization and the contractor you choose. Integrated Genetics, in Framingham, Mass., is paying a mere $3,500 per year for its program, assuming 6% usage on the part of 300 employees. For that fee, the company receives access to 1,300 child-care providers plus parental seminars four times a year.
A dependent-care assistance program, enabling employees to set aside pretax dollars to pay for child care, cost Group 243 only normal fees for bookkeeping changes the first year. "There's a nominal cost in the first year, because you're setting aside salary dollars for your employees," says senior vice-president of corporate administration Carey Ferchland. "After that, there's really nothing to it either financially or logistically -- there's just a ceiling [the maximum amount the employee can withhold] to keep an eye on."
On-site child care is far more expensive, of course. Companies typically subsidize part of the costs of the center rather than the entire cost. Group 243 subsidizes $50,000 of its center's $100,000 to $200,000 program. Taylor Corp. chips in $1,000 per child, or about 40% of operating cost.
Perhaps the smallest company offering subsidized on-site child care is Oliver Wight Cos., a 24-employee management consulting firm in Essex Junction, Vt. It subsidizes more than 50% of the cost of operating its center for 11 children. But the company doesn't find it an outlandish figure. "It's less than it costs to hire one good executive," says benefits administrator Debbie Peck.
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MYTH 4
We won't get much back for all the expense and trouble.
You can't take the benefits of child care to the bank. Most of them aren't easily measured. Still, a whopping 95% of the companies responding to a 1984 survey said the benefits of their child-care programs outweighed the costs.
To what extent, however, most companies don't know. "You want to reduce it to dollars and cents?" asks an incredulous Larry Taylor. "Foolishness. There are too many variables to get an accurate measurement. But we see the benefit in positive employee feedback, parental peace of mind, a more dependable work force, improvements in recruitment and retention, and higher numbers of women in management. These are the things that make it worthwhile for us."
To that list add good public relations, says Group 243's Carey Ferchland. "We've gotten at least one major advertising contract out of this, not to mention headlines in publications we normally couldn't have dreamed of getting into at our age," she says.
Many of the companies that Inc. interviewed believed it would be possible to run their on-site child care centers in the black. They simply choose not to. "I think I could run ours at breakeven," ventures Ferchland, "but it would mean lower salaries, greater staff turnover, worse staff-child ratios, and in general, a lower-quality program. And that's not what we want."
