Claire Ryan’s four-year-old son comes to work with her every day. She drops him off at her company’s on-site day care center at around 8 a.m. and is at her desk in the next 15 minutes. She finishes work around 5 p.m., picking him straight up, and they take the 20-minute drive home together.
Ryan has been working for her company, communications technology firm Cisco, for 18 years. She’s based at its UK head office at Bedfont Lakes, just outside of London. The on-site day care center, which has been running since 2015 with space for 50 children, gives her an incentive to work from the office most days, when she could do her role remotely.
It’s also a huge relief financially as a sole parent, because the service operates under a “salary sacrifice scheme” run by the UK government. This means employees pay for it directly from their salaries before tax kicks in, and they are then only taxed on their remaining salary, reducing the amount of tax they pay. This essentially saves employees between a third and half of what the day care service would otherwise cost.
The company also provides subsidized back-up emergency child care for when parents need it; for example, an ad hoc in-home nanny for when a child is sick.
For Ryan, the benefits go beyond just being able to afford full-time day care as a single parent and continue her career. Having the option of on-site child care also influenced her decision to have her son on her own, via donor conception, in the first place.
“Knowing that the child care facility was there, knowing that I could make a work routine work, and that I could afford it through the salary sacrifice, were some of the key factors that meant I could actually afford to make the choice to become a solo parent,” says Ryan.
“I wouldn’t have made the decision lightly because it would have been financially really tough — I don’t know if I could have afforded to have done it otherwise.”
An employee dealbreaker
Child care support — or lack thereof — has become a dealbreaker for employees who no longer want to compromise on either family life or their careers. Looking for a company that provides better family support was the top reason for leaving a job for 32 percent of the 3,000 UK working parents that child care provider Bright Horizons surveyed for its Modern Family Index 2024.
While 78 percent said they would need to carefully consider their child care options before a promotion or new job, the survey’s results show that employer support, unfortunately, is decreasing. Seventy-two percent feel their employer is supportive of families, compared with 77 percent in 2023. That’s despite 25 percent saying employer subsidized regular child care is one of the top benefits they’d be looking for.
Like Ryan, 34 percent of working moms in the survey also said they’d be more inclined to work from the office rather than remotely if they could get help with child care costs. Highlighting how child care affects working moms in particular, 51 percent in Bright Horizons’ survey say they work flexibly to be able to balance their child care requirements, compared with 27 percent of men. It’s a factor company leaders could take note of when enforcing return to office policies after the Covid-induced period of widespread home working.
Nikki Waites is another working mom whose company loyalty has been deepened by on-site child care. Waites, a soon-to-be mom of two, has worked for UK bank First Direct for 18 years, at the company’s Leeds office — one of two locations in the country with an on-site child care center. Supporting working parents has been a long-time priority of the company: Waites herself was actually one of the first children to attend, as her mom also worked at the company.
“It’s one of the best incentives the company has for parents of young families, so it has been a big driver in me choosing to stay and pursue my career at First Direct,” says Waites.
“I see this making a huge difference to lots of working mothers. Returning to work after having a baby can be a really challenging time, but knowing your baby is next door having a wonderful time, with the best key workers, makes it a lot easier.”
Weighed down by negative news?
Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for.Ryan’s employer Cisco has certainly reaped the benefits in terms of official accolades. Ninety-two percent of employees agree it belongs in the “Great Place to Work” rankings, compared with 54 percent of UK workers in other companies. The company has also made it onto the “Best Workplaces” lists for women, for wellbeing, for development and for tech.
“The feedback we receive around our on-site child care is excellent, particularly in how it can support a return to work after a primary caregiver leave such as maternity leave, giving space and support for people to work out what works for them,” says Jared Hindle, Cisco’s UK and Ireland lead country consultant for people and communities.
“It’s a big incentive for our working parents to come into the office, knowing that their child is getting excellent child care nearby, and giving them that flexibility in their working routines. In many instances it helps to reduce commute times by not having to beat traffic to an alternative child care location.”
Making child care work with limited space
Globally, the World Bank Group’s Gender Strategy recognizes that quality, affordable child care is a key part of helping women in employment. But to achieve this, it says 350 million children need to be catered to — and employers have a big part to play in bridging that gap.
In 2018, its sister organization, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), launched a global working group to develop recommendations, guidelines and policies to make employer-based child care easier for more companies across more countries to adopt. The IFC has since launched partnerships with governments across the Middle East, and in countries like Sri Lanka and Fiji, to encourage more employers in those regions to provide child care as a benefit and facilities on-site.
But the movement seems to be the strongest in the US, where child care providers like Kindercare have partnered with more than 600 organizations to provide on-site child care, up from 400 in 2019. Fellow provider Bright Horizons says it has seen similar increased demand, powering child care centers for US employers such as Kwik Trip, Patagonia, Vermeer, Home Depot, Toyota, Hormel Food Corps and Walmart.
With space at a premium in the UK’s big cities, where most jobs are concentrated — and with many corporate workers still favoring a balance of home and office working — on-site child care might be limited in its potential to become as popular as it is in the U.S.
But a lack of space doesn’t mean employers can’t provide child care support in another form. Ari Last, founder and CEO of UK child care booking platform Bubble, says the number of companies it’s signing up to offer child care as a work perk is growing 50 percent year-on-year, as is the number of inquiries they are getting from interested companies.
Bubble has already partnered with big names like Uber, Deliveroo and the National Gallery to offer free backup child care packages to its staff, in the form of in-home nannies working parents can book as a supplement to their standard arrangements. Many use it during school vacation periods.
Some firms start by offering 15 free hours of child care a year through Bubble, Last says, while many have gone for 50 free hours. A client in the legal sector has opted for a more generous 80 hours, and Bubble is looking to close deals with other firms for 100 to 150 free child care hours a year.
While Last observes that child care is “at the top of the public consciousness,” it’s still far from the norm for most workplaces, especially in the UK, despite companies looking for more ways to boost gender equality in their organizations. He’s working a lot with smaller companies, he adds, in an effort to gain momentum around child care as a work perk, hoping to normalize it.
“We have companies who come at it from a pure productivity perspective, and there are people coming at it from a diversity and inclusion perspective, because they recognize that the lack of child care support is what’s stopping many of the women in their businesses [from getting] ahead,” says Last.
“And when employees are deciding whether to take a new job or stay where they are, what that employer offers from a child care perspective is a massive factor for them.”
