An Emergency? Some Folks Can Call a Corporate Baby Sitter
Got a mildly sick child? A caregiver who has jetted to Jamaica for a long weekend? An unexpected school holiday?
A growing number of companies have discovered a way to help employees with dependent-care emergencies: They send a corporate baby sitter.
This wrinkle in the blanket of child (or elder) care is still pretty unusual.
Companies that offer the benefit say they find it boosts productivity among the relatively small group that uses it and improves morale in a much larger group of employees who are happy to know that such a backup exists.
“It’s like a virtual benefit,” said Leslie Faught, president of Working Solutions Inc., a consulting firm in Portland, Ore., that specializes in child- and elder-care services for corporate clients around the country. “It’s a benefit that everyone likes but hardly anyone uses.”
Backup care for children (or elderly parents) is a big issue these days. There’s hardly a working parent who doesn’t fear the collapse of the delicately crafted lattice of care that makes working and parenting possible.
There are many times, of course, when no one but mom or dad will do to administer the 7Up and antibiotics. The real difficulty is all those other times that keep kids at home: a runny nose, a low-grade fever, the tail end of a bout with chicken pox, an invasion of termites at the day-care center.
Most employers ignore the problem, leaving employees to find their own solutions. Those can include centers for mildly sick children (usually run by hospitals), a smattering of centers that reserve a few spots for backup care, or the good graces of a kindly relative, friend or neighbor, if you’re lucky.
A Boston company called Children First runs employer-sponsored centers nationwide that are devoted strictly to backup child care. One opened in downtown Los Angeles in December.
Some companies offer referral services to help employees find caregivers when their regular arrangements evaporate. But the corporate baby-sitter concept goes much further: An employee calls a special telephone number and help appears within a few hours.
Here’s an example of a program at work:
A top-ranking executive at a company in Boulder, Colo., phoned her company’s child-care hotline three weeks after giving birth because her employer needed her that day to give an emergency sales presentation, recalled Cindy Carrillo, who runs a Colorado consulting firm that sets up employer coalitions to handle backup dependent care and other disruptions such as school vacations and snow days.
“A grandmother came to her house, threw her arm around her and said, ‘It’s going to be OK, honey,’ ” said Carrillo, president of Work Options Group, based in Louisville, Colo. The service also helped find the woman a nanny when she returned to work.
“People seem to love it,” Carrillo said. Her company’s newest coalition is in Silicon Valley, set up in partnership with a local nonprofit child-care organization called Choices for Children, and should be offering services by January, she said. In some communities, the local chamber of commerce joins the coalition and channels the services to smaller employers that might not be able to afford it on their own.
A backup-care employer coalition in Omaha called Rest Easy is operated by the local Visiting Nurse Assn. Aides are sent to care for mildly sick children at a cost of $10.50 to $14 an hour, which is subsidized by the participating employers.
Similar programs have operated for years in Arizona and are popular with employers in Phoenix and Tucson, said Gail Priznar, sick-child program coordinator for Phoenix-based Arizona Child Care Resources. The Phoenix program employs 30 caregivers, trained in CPR and first aid, who arrive with a kit of fun activities and comfort foods such as juice and Jell-O.
Consultant Faught said her clients that offer such a service--Eddie Bauer, for one--find that employees don’t use it very much but appreciate the peace of mind that such a backup brings.
However, some companies have found a measurable increase in employee productivity.
“There is a certain advantage to offering the program because the level of productivity definitely has increased,” said Linda Parsons, benefits manager of Motorola’s Space & Systems Technology Group in Phoenix. “We don’t have a huge population that uses it, but the ones that use it use it a lot.”
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Has your company developed an interesting way to help employees balance work life and family life? Write to Balancing Act, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. Or send e-mail to nancy.rivera.brooks@latimes.com
