What Are The Compulsory Aspects To Be Considered While Choosing

With the growing focus on Gender Equality and the passing of new bill on the amendment of Maternity Benefits Act, 1961, the maternity leave has been expanded to 26 weeks, including the option to working from home for the nursing moms and corporate day care facility compulsory for organizations where a number of employees are more than 50. But with this, organizations need to understand the important aspects involved in offering day care support benefits to the employees.

75% of women had to leave their work for the care of their infants just before they have almost entered the most fruitful years of their career. This is a major cost for companies, which eventually lose its dedicated talent pool.

Customary Practices and Representations on Day Care Support 

Where will a woman leave her half-year-old kid when she wants to get back to work? Offering day care support is bliss for both the company and its employees provided they are serious in making a noticeable difference on the gender diversity plan. 

There are several representations followed by the organizations around the world based on their prerequisites. Below are some of the customary ones:

Onsite Day Care: An elite provision set up in office premises only for the staff. In this kind of a planning, the organization partners with a corporate day care service provider. Normally the infrastructure and setup cost is carried by the corporate and the operating associate manages the day care usually providing concessional charges to employees. Various premier organizations across the globe have adopted the onsite daycare facility for their employees.

Near-site Day Care: If an onsite day care model is not optimal due to the space constraints or the lack of a sizeable number of a workforce who want to use the facility, organizations can choose corporate tie-ups with a day care center/crèche close to their office. Various multinational companies like Microsoft and Adobe have already chosen the option of near site centers.

Multiple Tie-ups: In this planning, the corporate ties up with several day care centers to provide a wide variety of options to their staff. This tie-up can be with a single partner who manages multiple centers or with various different partners. Many IT companies like Flipkart and Cognizant have tie-ups with corporate child cares for their workers.  

In all the above plans, the organizations can provide various degrees of revenue support to the employee, for instance, full or partial compensation for expenses, subsidy on fees, etc.

Choosing The Right Corporate Day Care Partner

It is essential that the organizations should study all the types of child care plans and then decide the optimal option for them. According to a recent survey by a day care service provider, “100 working mothers across the Big Indian cities found that majority of the working mothers featured on-site child care facility as the greatest impact employer benefit for them”. 

The following explanations were found according to their day care choices:

• Working mothers spend their most or second most amount of time on daycare

• Around 40% prefer domestic help to look after their children over childcare 

• Half of them want their companies to introduce childcare facility, and this is ranked the best over flexible work schedules

• Child development, learning, and social skills are ranked as top 3 advantages of corporate childcare.

Working mothers found it quite hard to make a decision on a child care center as they were unsure about the safety and health principles, but leaving the kid at home with a caretaker made them anxious for the whole day.

Before deciding on any type of plan, it is crucial to carry out a viability study to understand the utilization confidence about this facility. The facility utilization confidence tries to understand that the employer has the target audience that will be eager about this facility; what are their choices and is there any expectation match; and ultimately does the employer has a growing population that can soon convert into the target audience.

The below is the listing of the set of questions for a swift facility utilization check: 

•   Employee’s average age 

•   Percentage of young moms/parents 

•   Percentage of married women who are young

•   Nature of family support –Joint/Nuclear family 

•   Location significance – Key catchment areas of employees 

•   Choice of Day care factors for the target group  

 On the basis of utilization index, the organization can decide the process it would like to follow. Usually, an onsite childcare is a less feasible option as organizations may not be having the space to support or minimum critical mass for the same. Multiple tie-ups in a city allow working parents to choose whether they want to drop their kids near their residence or near the office.

Once the process is finalized, it is vital for the organization to choose the right corporate daycare partner on the basis of the preferences of the employees. It is equally crucial to regularly audit the services and maintain daycare queries attendant service i.e. an email id, a toll-free number or a support group, that acknowledges the queries of the parents. Finding a daycare for corporates is not a big task, but finding the perfect one is.