Corporate Child Care Solutions: What Are Your Options?

Pondering corporate child care? This is a good place to start.

Whether you're a single mom running your own company, a married mother working the night shift at a call center or a stay-at-home mom looking to return to the workforce, you could certainly use some corporate child care.

Luckily, many employers are starting to understand the value of providing child care to their employees. After all, more accessible child care means happier, more productive employees. Here's a breakdown of corporate child care options, and a few tips for approaching and managing your role as a working parent.

CORPORATE CHILD CARE OPTIONS

On-Site Child Care
The most popular choice for employees is on-site child care. This type of daycare can be provided directly through your employer, which is often the case with multinational corporations, or through the employer's building lease. This option saves the employee from an additional commute to and from a daycare center and is, in most cases, free or subsidized by the company. Employers have begun to institute these programs not simply because they care for the welfare of their employees, but also because studies have shown on-site child care greatly increases production by reducing absenteeism and turnover rates, and enables companies to recruit the employees they need.

Backup Care Companies
Many companies who haven't made the full commitment to on-site childcare still realize the drain employee absenteeism can have on production. In these cases, employers provide backup care for children of employees in emergency situations such as illness, jury duty or school closing. Backup care is growing more popular, but it's not free for the taking. Parents are normally limited to less than 20 days a year and share a co-payment with their employer that's usually fewer than 35 dollars a day. Another downside is that backup care providers in the home have limitations: they can't dispense medication, can't pick kids up from school without authorization and can't sit for sick kids.

Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies
Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (CCR&Rs) act as middlemen between you and child care providers. These agencies can assist you with locating a center to accommodate your child's needs as well as your financial situation. CCR&Rs also work with national agencies and policymakers to ensure the quality of the child care centers meets national requirements for safety, cleanliness and the preparation of your child to attend kindergarten. For more information about CCR&Rs, check out the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies at http://www.naccrra.net or talk to your HR representative.

Web-Based Child Care
Sittercity.com has the first web-based child care solution for companies! With cool features like LiveChat, corporate landing portals and webinars, we push corporate child care solutions into the new millennium. Sittercity's solution is the only web-based solution out there, and allows employees to tap into our database and track jobs, conduct interviews and find sitters from a work terminal. Can't beat that! For more information see the Corporate link on our home page.

QUICK TIPS

Child care can be one of the most important decisions you make about your child's life. After all, in order to be productive at your job, you need to know that he or she is well taken care of. Here are some additional tips when it comes to finding good corporate child care:

• View child care as a part of the benefits package. If you're currently on the hunt for a new job, consider child care benefits just as you would the location of the employer or the salary they're willing to pay- it's just as important. The same goes if you're considering leaving your job. Don't hesitate to use child care benefits (or lack thereof) as a bargaining tool in the process of negotiation.
• Don't dump extra work on coworkers. In the wake of the polarized "Mommy Wars," single women with no kids are starting to speak up about getting extra work dumped on them by moms that are taking more flextime hours. On the other side of the issue, moms are starting to speak up about the resentment aimed at them from single women. If you choose to take advantage of corporate child care benefits, try to keep a balance around you. Talk to your co-workers to make sure they are ok with any workload that gets passed to them. Make sure you don't misuse your hours. If you communicate well, chances are you will avoid this issue entirely.