Tired young mother working from home
The U.S. now ranks last among 38 global peers for work/life quality and family caregiving policy due to our country’s lack of national paid family leave and unaffordable care crisis that lawmakers continue to ignore. While some states have passed legislation requiring that individuals have access to paid leave, sick time, and other necessities to care for themselves and their families, the onus is largely on employers.
However without national laws in place, there is a significant gap between what employers provide and what most families need to survive, much less thrive. More than 70% of employees have caregiving responsibilities, yet the belief that professionals should leave home concerns at home and only focus on work at work often still prevails. This never worked, even in the “mad men era,” and it certainly doesn’t work in today’s workplaces. Yes, we’ve seen shifts in company cultures to bring your “whole self” to work and an overall understanding that there is no magical barrier between our professional and personal lives, but finding a company culture that truly supports working parents and caregivers is often few and far between. Many companies believe they need to do the bare minimum (i.e. what they are legally required to do).
Yet doing the bare minimum is becoming a liability. Take the recent backlash from Kyte Baby’s CEO Ying Liu’s decision to terminate an employee who requested flexible, remote work to care for her adopted newborn who is in the NICU. Liu seems to have been following the law as the employee did not qualify for FMLA (not that it is paid anyway), but her lack of empathy and understanding was quickly called out on TikTok with customers vowing to boycott the brand.
Now that employees and customers have the power to share their stories and experiences (both good and bad) the bare minimum will no longer be tolerated. Performative lip service is no longer permissible. Companies are expected to walk the talk with policies, programs, and managers who are trained in how to support working parents and caregivers.
With tools and services, like the recently launched CareSprint.org available, employers can no longer hide behind the guise that they are unsure how to transform corporate culture and support family care. CareSprint is the first open marketplace to ensure working families succeed, centralizing employer solutions, management learning, and civic engagement across the care spectrum from Child Care to Aging Care. CareSprint Founder, Sarah Johal’s goal is to help business leaders think broader than common benefits and total rewards packages. By discovering more categories, companies can create a more holistic and humanized approach and provide mid-managers with the proper tools to walk the walk. Lynn Perkins Co-Founder of Urbansitter sees the opportunity, “We know that these benefits are crucial to employee retention. CareSprint makes it easy for companies to navigate care benefit options and helps us connect with companies looking for a service like ours."
Motherhood bias is still far too prevalent and while it may not always be as overt as what is captured in the headlines, we hear it from our clients at WRK/360 all the time. Managers and leaders are still calling maternity leave a ‘vacation.’ Parents are still judged when they have to leave early for school pickup and can’t afford to (or want to) outsource their care responsibilities, and fathers are getting bullied for taking paternity leave. Not only does it feed into a corporate culture that pushes out parents and caregivers it can often lead to costly attrition rates and litigation.
That is why it is critical for family-friendly companies to also advocate for legislative change. There will always be a set of employers who will never prioritize care unless it is a legal mandate. That’s where CareSprint’s Civic Engagement platform steps in. In partnership with founders, Arshad Ahmed & Aly Ibrahim, this simple dashboard, powered by Civiqa, lists federal and state legislation CareSprint actively supports and ways for anyone to get involved this coming election year.
Those of us running companies that support working caregivers see the need for more collaboration and multiple solutions to bring about change at the employee level, company level, and policy level. Sarah Hardy, Co-Founder and Chief People and Experience Officer at Bobbie shared "As a for-profit company founded and led by moms, we've made the choice to lead with advocacy efforts from day one — our mission is rooted in changing parenting culture and we cannot do that unless we are using our platform and resources to move the needle on issues that impact parents across the US, from paid leave to the maternal mortality crisis.”
Personally and professionally, I’m excited about an open marketplace that will make it easier for employers and individuals to create a corporate America that works for all working families. Our combined vision is to create a country where no one is forced to choose between their career and their family. Where mothers can succeed in their definition of success without penalty to their health or wealth. Where fathers take their entire parental leave and share the mental load. Where managers don’t assume we’re not committed enough. Johal captures this feeling so succinctly: “Our families deserve so much better than last place. Policy alone won’t fix this, and our innovative business leaders can’t be expected to solve this alone. It’s going to take intentional investment, measured practice, and people-centered decision-making.”
