The business case to support parents is overwhelming. Policies supporting parents are critical to recruiting new – and retaining existing – workers, especially in a tight labor market, not to mention boosted worker productivity. A recent report from Moms First and BCG suggests that companies that strategically allocate resources to childcare benefits are seeing a return on investment of 90% to 425%.
Year after year the Just Capital polling highlights that the American public wants companies to prioritize their workers, specifically by providing benefits and work-life balance among the top five issues. In fact, a survey of working mothers further connects the dots between receiving more parental leave and being more satisfied at their workplace.
As a result, we see leading business executives prioritize these policies. In a Just Capital interview with Morgan Stanley Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Stark, he said paid parental leave “has low direct costs” and “a significant impact in terms of improving productivity, retention, and employee morale.”
We are also seeing companies realize the benefit of more publicly offering benefits geared towards families and caregivers. From 2023 to 2024, disclosure of paid parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers increased by seven and eight percentage points, respectively.
So what employers lead the pack with their policies in 2024? Just Capital analyzed the policies and practices of the Russell 1000 and five came to the forefront.
You can find more information about corporate practices and policies like those elevated here in the latest version of our Just Jobs Scorecard, a data-driven interactive tool companies can use to assess their performance and transparency on key job quality practices and worker policies.
In the meantime, check out the full list, as well as NBC News’ coverage of it, below.
If you’re a corporate leader, we invite you to unpack your company’s performance in the 2024 Rankings and/or the Just Jobs Scorecard, gain insights into how to improve on the issues that matter most to the American public, and/or learn how to engage with Just to take action to support worker well-being though the Corporate Impact Lab. Please reach out to corpengage@justcapital.com.
Ranked 2nd in the Commercial Support Services industry in the annual Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies
The Benefits:
Ranked 1st in the Transaction Processing industry in the annual Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies
Ranked 2nd in the Clothing & Accessories industry in the annual Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies
The Benefits:
Ranked 5th in the Capital Markets industry in the annual Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies
The Benefits:
Ranked 14th in the Software industry in the annual Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies
The Benefits:
Methodology note: All of these companies exemplify leading practice by offering inclusive paid parental leave for 20 or more weeks to both primary and secondary caregivers, in addition to offering emergency backup and subsidized routine dependent care policies.
As more people in the workforce enter the “sandwich generation,” caring for their own children and older parents or relatives, access to equitable leave policies is becoming more and more desirable for employees. Despite this, only 9% of the largest U.S. companies currently offer parity of 12 weeks or more of paid parental leave to both caregivers, according to a recent JUST Capital report. In fact, research suggests that the percentage of companies offering paid parental leave has actually decreased in recent years.
One company that has prioritized its leave benefits is Morgan Stanley, which doubled down on parental leave in 2021. After analyzing results of a global employee survey and benchmarking peers, Morgan Stanley increased its parental leave to 16 weeks for all caregivers and four weeks of paid leave to care for a family member with a serious health condition, among other generous policies, such as a $75,000 maximum family building benefit to assist employees with the cost of adoption, surrogacy and fertility treatments. Previously the company offered primary caregivers 16 weeks of parental leave and non-primary caregivers six weeks of parental leave. This step forward to parity is critical to cultivating both gender and racial equity in the workplace.
JUST Capital recently spoke with Dr. David Stark, Morgan Stanley’s Chief Medical Officer and Global Head of Benefits, Analytics, and Technology Strategy, to learn more about how and why Morgan Stanley implemented its enhanced paid parental leave policy, as well as the impact on its workforce and company as a whole.
You increased your paid parental leave to 16 weeks for all caregivers – what prompted you to make this level of investment?
We made this change back in 2021. So, recall that the pandemic led to the caregiving crisis. We were seeing people leaving the workforce to take care of their kids or their parents or others in the home. This is on top of, you know, the “sandwich generation” being an issue, and I’m a part of that myself. We know that women were disproportionately being taken out of the workforce to shoulder those [caregiving] burdens. We were recognizing all of that. Additionally, in 2021, we did a global employee benefits survey, which was a really detailed and eye-opening survey. Overall, the vast majority of our employees were very happy with their benefits, but paid parental leave and family support were areas that were highlighted as opportunities for improvement. In fact, paid parental leave was the top driver that could promote increased satisfaction relative to other potential design changes we were considering.
The pandemic, the external environment, and our own surveying led us to benchmark our family support benefits against our peers, and then decide to prioritize the [family support] space for focus. What we learned is that our paid parental leave benefit had fallen behind our peers.
What did the progression of planning and rolling out of this benefit look like?
Using all of the [survey and benchmark insights], we developed a multi-year roadmap to enhance our family benefits – not just parental leave, but other support benefits. We addressed paid parental leave first. We thought that was where we could have the most significant impact.
We also looked for some quick wins that we could achieve relatively easily. For example, we put in place NICU and stillbirth leaves, and we eliminated a one year of service term requirement. We did that immediately while we took a little bit more time to redesign and socialize the more extensive expansion of parental leave enhancement. We also enhanced our family building benefit. We already had a pretty generous fertility benefit ($30,000 lifetime benefit) to support fertility regardless of infertility diagnosis, but we wanted to make that benefit more holistic. We expanded the benefit to provide a $75,000 lifetime maximum to support family-building across adoption, surrogacy, and fertility.
We expanded our paid parental leave to provide 16 weeks across the board for all parents, regardless of primary/non-primary [parent] and gender. In the U.S., we provide an additional six to eight weeks of disability leave for birth parents, resulting in a total of 22 to 24 weeks of parental leave.
How did you build the case for that level of support? What hurdles did you need to overcome?
Management was generally supportive of the change. It was obviously important to socialize the change within each of our business units, since the extended duration would have distinct and nuanced impacts on their respective organizations, resulting in the need to backfill roles and potentially impacting performance measures. This was actually happening amid a broader backdrop of the “great reshuffling” or the “great resignation.” James Gorman, our CEO, made a call to his operating committee at an off-site meeting that he felt strongly that we needed to renew the social contract with our workforce. That [prioritization] led to a very holistic look across the benefits space.
The general environment was very supportive of making these changes. It was viewed as an investment in maternal and infant health, long-term retention, and productivity upon returning to work. Those [investments] were weighed very favorably against the obvious, but relatively small, short-term issue of needing to backfill [roles held by employees on leave].
How do you respond to executives who say, paid parental leave is nice, but we can’t expand benefits in this economy?
Enhancing parental leave has low direct costs. It has a significant impact in terms of improving productivity, retention, and employee morale. Anecdotally, the feedback that we get from employees who’ve had the time to bond with their child, recover from giving birth, and support their partner in recovering from giving birth, is that [access to paid time] buys loyalty. And that’s almost immeasurable relative to the cost. It’s part of long-term thinking.
Oftentimes, frontline workers are not offered the same benefits as their corporate peers. How are you supporting not only corporate employees, but hourly employees or contract employees when it comes to parental leave?
Employees who work 20 hours or more, whether they’re hourly workers or salaried, are eligible for a full suite of benefits, and that includes paid parental leave.
As a global business, how do you approach benefits across different countries and territories?
That’s the fun part. Increasingly, through the pandemic and beyond, we have felt the need to provide more consistency globally across the board. We’ve actually worked very hard to first understand: What are the policies in the 40 countries where we operate? What’s the regulatory environment across all of our markets? What are local practices? And then we worked to establish, in this case, a global minimum standard to ensure consistency. That led to the 16 weeks [of paid parental leave] as a floor for all employees, and in certain markets, where regulations or local practices allow for more leave, we do that.
As a more general matter, delivering healthcare and other benefits globally is fascinating and challenging. The United States is probably the only country where employers are the principal providers or purchasers of healthcare on behalf of their employees. In most other countries, employees top up their national healthcare benefits with employer-sponsored plans. There’s obviously a lot of unevenness to navigate. We don’t strive to be equal across the board, we strive to be equitable across the board.
What benefits have you seen in your workforce in terms of recruitment, retention, wellbeing, productivity?
We are a year in, so, perhaps a little bit early for a formal evaluation, but we are quite rigorous about how we collect data to evaluate our programs and our offerings. On utilization, what we’re seeing is all parents are taking more time off for leave. One obvious question that could come up whenever an employer changes a policy or expands a leave is: are our employees actually taking advantage of it? I’m proud that our employees are. Birth parents are taking off, on average, five more weeks (+30%, from 16 to 21 weeks); non-birth parents are taking off four more weeks (+70%, from 6 weeks to 10 weeks). Additionally, non-birth parents are now deciding to take leave, whereas in the past so-called non primary parents (traditionally, the dads) might not be taking leave. Now, adjusting for headcount changes, we’re seeing about 15% more non-birth parents opting to take leave, which is great. Another component of the leave that we introduced was flexible leave, so you can take leave in up to three chunks over the year and can even start your leave before childbirth as well. My husband and I had our third kid in January, so I took off five weeks initially and I’ll take off two other chunks. That is what worked best for my family and my work. Of the non-birth parents who are taking parental leave, about 20% of them are opting to take advantage of our “flexible” leave policy, which allows parents to split their leave in up to three separate intervals.
What advice would you give an executive who wants to lead on this issue in their own company? What should they do first? What’s something to avoid doing?
We have quite a rigorous approach, and I’m very proud of how we developed our strategy around benefits design. I mentioned the dedicated benefits survey that we did back in 2021 – that was a global survey and which 35% of our entire workforce participated in – and it was quite extensive. In addition to that, we have our annual engagement survey where we ask about whether employees feel they have the resources they need to support their health and well-being. We also hold managers accountable. In their upward feedback of their managers, employees are asked whether their manager supports their health and well-being.
We also have a Global Wellbeing Board that we developed in the last two years, comprised of 16 senior leaders across the firm, like CEOs of business divisions. The responsibility of this board is senior accountability and ownership over our health and well-being strategy. I felt that this was important, because although HR/HR benefits traditionally has the role of developing and rolling out new programs and resources, health and well-being is a business imperative. It therefore requires involvement and buy-in from across the business. That’s been an excellent additional source, not just of leadership and visibility, but actually providing input into our strategy.
Complementing that top-down structure, we have a bottom up-structure: our Global Wellbeing Influencer Network that we also launched in the last year. This is essentially a grassroots network of employees, who have already demonstrated commitment and interest in supporting well-being issues. We’re giving them resources: awareness, programming resources, access to our programs, and a community to network through, so that they can be evangelists for our benefits and provide feedback both to HR and to the Global Wellbeing Board on our benefits. We have a lot of distinct modalities for collective sentiment around benefits.
We also look at hard data utilization, claims data, external benchmarking data, and market research. That all funnels into developing our multi-year strategy. This is a long-winded way of saying that we’re quite rigorous about using data to support the business case that we develop for any change in our benefits. And then ultimately, our job is to manage population health for our 83,000 employees in 40 countries. As a Chief Medical Officer, in addition to being a Global Head of Benefits, when I speak to management about the work that we’re doing, I’m speaking with this lens as a population health leader, not just as a benefits professional. I think that helps advance our case as well.
Given your role, how do you make the connection between increased paid leave and health?
I’m a physician, a pediatric neurologist by training. I have a background in biomedical data science, and biomedical informatics, so I’m serious when I say we were quite rigorous across all of our programs. There’s essentially four types of metrics that I care about: they are utilization, costs or affordability (both for employees and for the firm), employee experience, and then ultimately, health-specific outcomes.
Over time, we can actually do observational studies, where we look at different employee groups, those who have utilized a particular benefit, and those who have not. Then we look at outcomes of interest over time, whether that’s retention, productivity measures, or other performance measures that we have. Sometimes we rely on external measures for this as well. We know supporting mental health is the right thing to do, and so I’ve strongly made the case that we’re not always going to be able to demonstrate with hard metrics and ROI behind what we do. There are certain times where we have to say, “look, we already know this is the right thing to do. The evidence is out there. It’s been proven externally. Let’s not spend time arguing over whether it’s the right thing to do. Let’s agree and deploy internally, and then follow up over time.”
JUST Capital, in collaboration with partners, established the Corporate Care Network to advance the well-being of workers and demonstrate the long-term value of investment in workers. The Network is committed to driving increased access to care benefits, including paid leave and flexible work policies, and highlighting leaders in the space.
If you’re interested in gaining insights into how to improve on the issues that matter most to the American public, and learning how your company can get involved in the Network, please reach out to JUST Capital impact@justcapital.com.
(Luis Alvarez/Getty Images)
A few weeks ago, our team published a survey report that showed a large majority of the American public is feeling the rising cost of child care in the United States. 41% said they missed work in the past year to take care of their children or know someone who did. And as JUST’s Alison Omens and Kavya Vaghul wrote this week, regardless of what policies do or don’t come out of Congress, it will be companies that play a pivotal role in allowing working mothers – and women in general – to thrive.
According to the annual “Women in the Workplace” report from McKinsey and LeanIn, released this week, burnout is prevalent among women, especially among mothers of young children, and is worse for those mothers when they are “the only woman in the room” among their teams. The researchers, who surveyed 65,000 employees across 423 American organizations, also found that senior-level women are twice as likely as senior-level men to be spending time on diversity, equity, and inclusion work, without it being recognized in performance reviews or compensation.
Individual stories of women rising to the top of organizations (GM CEO Mary Barra was just named the next chair of the Business Roundtable) can mask not only the lack of representation on a larger scale, but the significant gap in internal development across corporate America. The report’s authors pointed to “the “broken rung” in promotions at the first step up to manager, which leaves women “dramatically underrepresented in mid-level management,” with “sharp drops in representation of women of color at every level of advancement.” Even companies prioritizing diversity of recruitment are falling short when it comes to mentorship and sponsorship, they found.
This report was focused on white-collar workers, but as former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi (her book “My Life in Full” now out) told Yahoo Finance, “We have to address this on an urgent, urgent basis,” for all. Many women are staying home not because they can’t work, she said, but “because they don’t have an alternative.”
Be well,
Martin Whittaker
Discovery, Microsoft, and Truist have invested around $120 million into a fund designed to allocate capital to banks providing services to low-income, rural, and minority borrowers.
Ford is teaming up with SK Innovation to invest over $11 billion into new factories that will create nearly 11,000 jobs to produce electric vehicles and their batteries.
Sempra Energy will pay $1.8 billion to residents of a Los Angeles community after the largest natural gas leak in the nation took nearly four months to clean up.
As part of our mission to build a more just and equitable economy, we were proud to work closely with five influential asset managers – Goldman Sachs Asset Management, BlackRock, Lord Abbett, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and Vanguard – to foster discussion around racial and economic disparities, leading to the development of a new Municipal Issuer Racial Equity & Inclusion Engagement Framework. As described in Bloomberg, the group is working with two minority-owned underwriters, Loop Capital Markets and Siebert Williams Shank & Co. to “develop and distribute a questionnaire that governments will be asked to fill out before new bond deals are arranged. It will ask about policing policies, efforts to combat race-based inequality, social services and the demographic breakdown of the government’s workforce, among other things.” You can also read more about the work in Bond Buyer.
Martin describes how business can turn idealism into purposeful reality in this feature interview in PR Week where he discusses corporate accountability and our annual Rankings of America’s largest companies based on how they treat their employees, communities, customers, shareholders, and the environment.
To follow up on our August survey analysis on how Americans think companies are living up to the Business Roundtable’s redefined purpose of a corporation, we released a more in-depth exploration of key findings into the public’s attitude toward capitalism, and the impacts of large corporations on their stakeholders. We hope you’ll dig into the details.
Board director Peter Georgescu wrote a powerful essay for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business on his life, and how, 60 years after his arrival in America, he is determined to strengthen the foundations of capitalism by getting companies to move from shareholder primacy to stakeholder capitalism.
(Eric Rojas/The B Team)
“Leaders of today should accelerate innovation while reducing risk. They follow science. They see diversity in leadership for the competitive advantage it is and the bottom-line benefit it brings. They understand that the clock is ticking, future generations are counting on us and, in the words of poet Amanda Gorman, ‘History has its eyes on us.’”
“We need business to step up. But traditionally, businesses have been reticent and instead hide behind a convenient excuse that they exist to do nothing more than maximize shareholder wealth. One of the silver linings of the last four years with the prior administration is that you saw a lot of CEOs of publicly traded companies take positions on topics they hadn’t spoken on before. It’s progress, but change is going to take a lot more than opinions.”
“Mary has a long track record of success and is a business leader who recognizes the strength of the multi-stakeholder approach to creating value, and I am thrilled to pass the baton to her. Her understanding of America’s workforce and vision for the future is the exact perspective the Roundtable needs as we continue to work with Congress and the Administration on public policies for tomorrow.”
Several studies seek to help companies understand what’s driving the Great Resignation. McKinsey’s report found that the top reasons for employee departures include: “they didn’t feel valued by their organizations (54%) or their managers (52%) or because they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work (51%).” Limeade’s report cited the top drivers as “Burnout: 40%; Company going through organizational changes: 34%; Lack of flexibility: 20%; Instances of discrimination: 20%,;Contributions and ideas not being valued: 20%.” EY reveals that over half of global employees would quit their jobs if not offered a similar level of flexibility post-pandemic.
Axios reports a surge of job listings stating that an employee must be vaccinated to apply and work at the company, and an increase in job searches for companies without vaccine mandates.
Bloomberg reports that nearly two-thirds of the world’s heaviest corporate emitters have net-zero targets. While a good step, our recent climate week panel showed why setting interim goals is critically important on the road to net-zero. The Hill reports that Boston University is divesting its endowment from fossil fuels, following in the wake of Harvard’s announcement to do the same two weeks ago.
This chart comes from our recent polling on caregiving, and shows that a majority of Americans support a federal policy offering 12 weeks of paid leave for caregiving. Learn more about how they think companies can help here.
(Hill Street Studios – Getty Images)
We are in a critical moment for considering what it means to be a working parent, especially a working mom, in this country.
In a new survey with our partner the Harris Poll, we found that over the past year and a half of the pandemic, the majority of respondents have become painfully aware of the high cost of child care. Of those respondents, 41% said they or someone they know missed work to care for their kids, and 36% said they or someone they know left their job or switched to part-time work for the same reason.
Majorities agreed that companies have a responsibility to take care of the parents in their workforces through all nine benefits mentioned, including part-time or job-sharing opportunities (69%), flexible work schedules (68%), and discounted or subsidized caregiving like after-school care (58%).
There was also strong agreement on the need for public support, with a massive 78% in favor of a federal 12-week paid leave policy that employees could use to take care of not just children, but also a sick spouse or parent. This is interesting, given Congress yesterday marked up legislation supporting universal paid family leave.
Business leaders continue to grapple with this. Some have called for passing federal leave programs, including engaging in the dialogue in Congress about federal paid family leave policies. Leaders of companies like Etsy, Gap, Chobani, and Patagonia met recently with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss child care, and a separate coalition of 300 companies – including Danone North America, Levi Strauss & Co., Pinterest, and Salesforce –has come out in support of passing paid leave in the spending bill.
Julie Kashen of the Century Foundation is a major proponent of passing both child care and paid leave policies, and in an interview with JUST pointed to 2019 research showing that $57 billion in earnings, productivity, and revenue is lost each year due to a lack of child care guarantees. “I think that became even more evident, and gave employers more of a stake in this, after the pandemic,” she said.
Be well,
Martin Whittaker
P.S. I want to encourage everyone to sign up for our event with Deepak Chopra next Thursday, September 16th at 4:30 p.m. ET as we celebrate naming him Chairman Emeritus and launch the Deepak Chopra Scholars Fund in his honor – find details below. The mission of JUST was sparked in the class Deepak taught at Columbia Business School years ago, and we’d love for you to join us in carrying on his vision.
Amazon announces it will offer to pay 100% of college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees starting in January 2022, covering tuition, fees, and textbooks.
Labcorp is raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Google commits to be water positive, replenishing more water than it consumes by 2030.
Nike shareholders will vote on a proposal requesting disclosure around the company’s work to promote diversity and inclusion, a move that’s seen as long overdue.
Walmart phases out its decades-old quarterly bonuses for store workers as it implements hourly wage increases for hundreds of thousands of its employees.
JUST Events
Thursday, September 16 from 4:30PM – 5:30PM EST: We are thrilled to bestow the honor of Chairman Emeritus on JUST Capital Co-Founder Deepak Chopra, and as a fitting way to continue his legacy at JUST, we will be establishing the Deepak Chopra Scholars Fund to support the next generation of leaders through our internship program. The live virtual event will feature a conversation with Martin and Deepak, as well as a special performance! Register here and make a contribution to support the Deepak Chopra Scholars Fund today! We hope you can join us!
SEPTEMBER 15: Worker Financial Wellness: How Corporations Can Build Quality Jobs Improving workers’ financial wellness is good for both employees AND employers. See how companies participating in our Worker Financial Wellness Initiative – including Chipotle, Prudential Financial, and PayPal – are making their employees’ well-being a corporate priority. Hosted by the Aspen Institute and moderated by Lauren Weber from The Wall Street Journal. RSVP here.
SEPTEMBER 21: Quarterly JUST Call with HP CEO Enrique Lores
Join us for the latest installment of the Quarterly JUST Call (QJC) with HP CEO Enrique Lores. HP is a JUST 100 company that under Lores’ leadership has created value for shareholders while excelling on climate action, diversity and inclusion, and digital equity. JUST CEO Martin Whittaker will explore each of these areas with Lores, and, since it is timed with Climate Week, pay special attention to HP’s latest environmental sustainability efforts. Sign up for the Quarterly JUST Call here.
While there has been plenty of hand wringing about a potential labor shortage, one discussion has received little attention: If we want people to head back to work, we should pay them a living wage. Read more in this Fortune editorial by Alison Omens and Amy Glasmeier, creator of the Living Wage Calculator, and check out our living wage explainer to learn more about what it is and why it’s so important to the dialogue today.
LinkedIn’s Editors also presented a round-up of related posts showcasing how more leaders are eyeing financial wellness. On a related theme, a fascinating new ESG survey of retail investors showcased in Marketwatch, showed that respondents cared much more about fair wages for workers than environmental issues, demonstrating another key reason why companies should be investing in their most important asset, their workers.
JUST spoke with Jon Hale, Global Head of Sustainability at Morningstar, and Zach Conway, CEO of Seeds Investor, to discuss the ways both firms are providing data-driven insights to help financial advisors and end investors make more sustainable investing decisions. Watch the full conversation here.
Martin appeared on The Conscious Capitalists podcast to talk about our polling of the American public, what issues Americans have top of mind when it comes to work, and what business needs to do to reclaim worker trust.
“I do think that overall there’s support for these particular policies and an understanding that it’s good for children and families, it’s good for racial and gender equity, and it happens to also be good for businesses and the economy. It’s rare for there to be these policies that really can be such a win for all.”
“This is a simple exercise, in many ways, to demonstrate an important point, which is that the gains to GDP are for everyone and closing the gaps isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not just that we’re rearranging distributionally the proceeds from the same-sized pie, we’re actually improving the size of the pie and then distributing the proceeds from that improvement, so that’s a different game than what many people think about when they think about equity.”
“We have contingency plans to respond to many different types of events, including an activist investor. We engage regularly with shareholders in constructive two-way dialogue and look forward to discussing the next chapter of our lower carbon story with them later this month.”
Bloomberg reports on a new study published by Brookings, showing that inequality in employment, education, and earnings has cost the U.S. economy nearly $23 trillion over the past 30 years, a sum that is likely to increase as minority populations expand.
Andrew Winston and Paul Polman encourage companies in an editorial in MIT Sloan Management Review to back up their lofty statements on climate change with policy advocacyand holding their trade associations accountable, citing recent research from Ceres. Stay tuned for their new book “Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take,” coming out in October.
Maggie McGrath of ForbesWomen highlights new survey data showing two-thirds of college-educated workers may avoid Texas because of the abortion ban. Fortune’s Broadsheet asks if major companies will start responding to the new Texas law, or whether this is one of the issues that the business community will continue to remain silent on.
CNN reveals that the average U.S worker is both older and more diverse compared to 40-years ago. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that this crop of workers is also changing jobs more often – and demanding higher wages – as the pandemic recedes.
Axios reports on the scale of Delta concerns: 3.2 million Americans said they were not working because they were “concerned about getting or spreading the coronavirus,” in the Census Household Pulse Survey, up from 2.5 million in July.
This chart comes from the National Women’s Law Center, showing female unemployment by race over the last year and a half. Read the full report for more insights on female employment through COVID-19.
Of all the changes that COVID-19 has brought, work from home (WFH) policies have been among the most significant for businesses today and will likely remain a key consideration for companies as the pandemic continues and then subsides. Prior to the global health crisis, the option to work from home was accessible to only about 37% of workers, and around 20% of wage and salary workers were working remotely on an average day, with people of color even less able to access work from home benefits.
Work, and the workplace, is changing around the world at a rapid pace. With people living and working longer, employers are managing up to five generations at work on any given day. Offering benefits, including greater flexibility through WFH policies, helps workers of all ages. While it remains to be seen how companies will adjust to work from home schedules once it is safe to return to working in the office, there are myriad benefits to creating some regular WFH structure for employees, especially the increased flexibility that can benefit employees across age groups. It is clear that companies will continue to operate under a WFH structure where possible into 2021, with some even making the decision to go remote permanently or at least offer this benefit as an option.
There are many forms that WFH policies can take, many of which can decrease working costs for both employers and their employees – including office space rental, commute times and costs, dependent care coverage, and more. Employers can also see a significant increase in productivity when shifting more employees to work remotely due to the limitations of workplace distractions, flexibility in working hours, ability to take more productive breaks, and increased morale. Turnover is significantly reduced by remote work policies as well, with increased flexibility, better work-life balance, and reduced/eliminated commute times increasing employee satisfaction overall.
JUST Capital was proud to partner with AARP to make this guide available. Download the report below to read the full report detailing the following key findings:
We invite you to read the other two guides in this series offering additional insights on navigating key workplace issues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic:
Even before roughly 40% of Americans began working from home to prevent the spread of COVID-19, millions of Americans were juggling the demands of work and caregiving, with more and more caregivers struggling to coordinate care. Current caregiving infrastructure in the United States does not meet the many needs of families, and most corporate policies are focused on filling short-term care gaps in lieu of broader systemic support with a strong focus on childcare, meaning that those caring for older adults, or a combination of older and younger family members, are often left behind in policy creation. Since the needs of caregivers vary so vastly, depending on the provision of care to older adults, children, or some combination of the two, any conversation about companies’ policies around dependent care must explore the need for a broader infrastructure of care to be developed to build community, increase employee engagement, and better engage stakeholders more broadly.
Workers are a primary value driver for companies, and employers can increase productivity as well as decrease absenteeism by providing resources to support employees who are also care providers. Most importantly, evidence suggests that offering dependent care will keep women within the workforce and provide critical support for fathers and secondary caregivers. AARP’s Caregiving in the U.S. Report highlights some of the sacrifices employees make at their jobs in order to accommodate for caregiving responsibilities at home, especially as it relates to caring for older adults. Workers may go in early to work or leave late, reduce their schedules to part-time hours, take leaves of absence, turn down promotions, retire early, and even quit working altogether. It is clear overall that the lack of support and resources for both child and elder care forces workers to take on increased responsibilities at home without help, and this prevents them from bringing their full capacity to the workplace. To help mitigate this disparity, companies can provide myriad flexible elder and childcare options for their employees.
Increasingly employers will need to offer this benefit to attract and retain talent. Employees look for companies that support both primary and secondary caregivers, and the millennial generation that makes up a large portion of the U.S. workforce is no exception – many of these employees factor their plans for family building and childcare into their job search, and providing these resources in benefits offerings can give companies an advantage as they look to distinguish themselves from competitors.
JUST Capital was proud to partner with AARP to make this guide available. Download the report below to read the full report detailing the following key findings:
We invite you to read the other two guides in this series offering additional insights on navigating key workplace issues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic:
