With investment comes expectation, and childcare provision is no different.
Whether you’re investing in a product or a culture change – or a happy mix of the two – you’re going to want to keep track of the metrics to understand how much bang you’re getting for your buck. But how do you measure return on investment when it comes to subsidising (or fully financing) emergency childcare?
4 Metrics to Track Emergency Childcare ROI
You’ve taken the very savvy decision of making emergency childcare part of your employee benefit offering. Hoorah! That makes you a pretty empathetic (and forward-thinking) employer in our book! But what you’d really like to know is: what impact is that decision having on your business?
The four metrics that give you the best indication of ROI include:
- The attrition and retention rates of working parents
- The number of carer days taken
- The progression of women in your business
- The productivity of working parents
Retaining Working Parents
One of the quickest ways to lose employees-who-also-happen-to-be-parents is to make little to no effort to help them juggle work with childcare responsibilities.
People have far less patience post-pandemic if a situation isn’t working in their favour – and that very much includes their careers. After the burden of trying to balance parenting with professionalism during ‘Covid times’, working parents want a role that doesn’t drain their wellbeing, with a boss that respects their home life, in an organisation that makes life easier.
You’ll find that when emergency childcare is a core part of your offering, working parents will be far less likely to leave.
Reducing Carer Days
When you have caring responsibilities in your home life, they will always come before work. Put simply, there’s no other choice. Which is why, when working parents struggle to find reliable and affordable childcare, they might end up taking a lot of unplanned leave – or leaving altogether.
Offering emergency childcare reduces the instances of your employees having to take time off work for unexpected caring responsibilities – saving you a great deal of time, money and productivity, and saving the rest of your workers from having to take on extra tasks. Win-win all round.
Progressing Working Mothers
Working mums have had it particularly hard of late, with the Covid-crisis disproportionately impacting women’s careers. In fact, the 2021 Women in the Workforce study by McKinsey found that one third of working mothers contemplated reducing their working responsibilities, or leaving the workforce altogether, to care for children during the pandemic.
The progression of women in your business is of course a metric that can only be measured over an extended period of time, but removing barriers to that progression through the provision of reliable emergency childcare will – undoubtedly – help to advance the careers of your highly capable working mothers.
Increasing Productivity
If working parents aren’t, well, working, they’re not going to be particularly productive. But that doesn’t only impact the mums and dads in your midst: when parents are forced to take time off because their childcare has fallen through, the pressure on the rest of the team increases.
Productivity is easily measured in industries with billable hours, such as law – but even in businesses with less immediately accessible metrics, the impact will be clear.
When parents are free from the worries of unreliable – and unaffordable – childcare, they’re able to be fully present at work. Their productivity will increase, as will the rest of their team’s. But it’s not only productivity that will see a boost: in a less stressful environment, employee engagement and job satisfaction will naturally soar.
If you’re about to offer emergency childcare for the first time, take a quick temperature check of the organisation and include wellbeing-specific questions. Ask the same questions, of the same people, in a few months’ time, and you’ll have a metric to be proud of.
Discover how Bubble For Work’s emergency childcare offering can help to boost productivity, reduce attrition and increase employee engagement in your business.
