With two income households becoming a necessity, local companies have heard the plight of working parents and have worked to create change. From state-of-the-art daycare centers to flexible work schedules, these companies are assisting parents to help take some of the pressure off of raising a young family while supporting their career goals.
Expanding into onsite childcare
With a large expansion in Provo on the horizon, the survey-software company is adding jobs and an on-site daycare program to its facility. The STEM-focused curriculum daycare is set to open in the fall and will be headed up by Ann Whittaker, founder of the award-winning preschool, Kids Village. The daycare will be able to accommodate 250 children ranging in age from three months to five years. Age appropriate activates that focus on new technologies aim at teaching children from an early age to enjoy learning while receiving excellent care. Employees will pay for the service.
“Qualtrics’ mission is to the rid the world of bad experiences,” said Mike Maughan, head of global insights for Qualtrics. “One experience that we know we can make better is the new parent experience and the working experience, so when we had the opportunity to expand our campus, one of the things we wanted to make sure we did was include an on-site daycare to ensure that we allowed our employees and their families that benefit.”
And the response has been overwhelming positive.
Across multiple industries
Qualtrics isn’t the only company making changes to help parents. Overstock prides themselves on having a work environment and culture where working parents can find success, so they opened their onsite daycare in 2017.
And in more recent years, the company has done more, like opening up an onsite medical clinic, to assist working parents. Meghan Tuohig, Overstock’s Chief People Officer, utilizes the daycare for her own daughter.
“About a year ago, I was in a meeting and I got a call from the daycare, they said ‘you have to come pick up [your daughter] she has a fever and she can’t be here’,” said Tuohig. “It was within a couple of minutes and I was out of my meeting, walked over to the daycare, pulled her out, walked across the hallway to our [onsite medical clinic], and she was getting her ear infection diagnosed and we were walking out of there with an antibiotic. That was an ordeal that would have taken the better half of my day if all those things had been offsite.”
Overstock also provides a caregiver travel policy. This allows an employee who is required to travel for work, and has a child under the age of two, an additional round trip ticket so they can bring a caregiver of their choice.
In addition, Overstock has a 9/80 schedule which allows for a three-day weekend every other week.
According to Tuohig, these resources help to make her and her coworkers feel more valued. These kinds of investments are of a minimal cost to the company but provides a huge benefit to employees and thusly, a greater return.
For working parents
With a company of just 160 plus employees, it may seem exceptional to incorporate an on-site childcare facility. But for Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO and cofounder of Recursion, he knows first-hand the value of having quality childcare and the challenge working parents face in finding said childcare.
“When I started the company, my wife was done with her residency, and without really great childcare, one of us would have had to made some sort of sacrifice in terms of the intensity of our work.” says Gibson. “We tried to get into the Bright Horizons at Research Park and there was a wait list, we went and looked at a bunch of other daycares and found some good ones, and some not so great ones, which solidified in my mind that this was probably one of the biggest challenges facing anyone at this stage of their life. We basically got the call saying we come to Bright Horizons and had gotten off the list in time.”
The experience Gibson had with getting his own children into daycare was one of the reasons he choose them as the partner in their on-site childcare facility. The quality of the educators and the curriculum provided, even for infants, enriched the children’s experiences while there.
“We are a company where nearly half our company is women and we really see this issue being equal for both men and women,” said Amanda Guisbond, director of communication. “This is for working parents.”