Child Care's Role for Today's Employer's
The challenge of today's market place
The race to attract and retain quality people in today's business world has gone from offering the highest salary to the best benefits. Many of today's best companies are getting and retaining the best people with the lure of employment benefits not by paying the highest salaries. These benefits include items like stock options, expense accounts, dental and health care, flexible hours, and child care. Many of the best people are taking lower wages to get better employee benefits. One of the largest movements is the need for family attractive benefits. More people are looking for companies that are family oriented and providing benefits that are geared towards family needs. This is not just providing good health care but, also child care incentives. The increasing trend of working mothers is more and more common in the market today then ever before. The steady increase of dual income households has lead to the need for quality child care. This need has 60 percent of mothers today returning to work within one year of having a child compared to 40 percent twenty years ago (Kiger 2004). This same environment has raised concern in several areas like finding quality child care, employee absenteeism and productivity, and rise in salary needs. With the challenge of getting and keeping quality people the target of most companies why are they not using this disparity to help meet their needs? The large cost of offering child care as a benefit to employees is one of the biggest myths that companies must understand. Many people only look at the bottom line when it comes to viewing the quarterly report. Researching the need and benefit of company supported child care is one area that a ...