Less than in 10 (9%) employer respondents offer emergency adult and eldercare support, according to research by My Family Care and Hydrogen.
The Childcare and family-friendly benefits: employer survey and parental leave benchmark report, which surveyed 300 HR professionals, also found that 12% of respondents provide back-up care for childcare emergencies.
The research also found:
- 8% of respondents are considering introducing emergency back-up care for children, and 7% are thinking about implementing back-up care for adult or eldercare emergencies.
- 16% of respondents currently offer advice or help with childcare solutions, and 17% provide advice or help with adult dependents or eldercare solutions. This compares to 9% and 8% of respondents, respectively, who are considering implementing these family-friendly measures.
- 16% of respondents are considering taking a more proactive approach to supporting and communicating flexible-working arrangements as part of their family-friendly benefits offering, and 48% already do so.
- 14% of respondents are considering encouraging other types of leave arrangements, for example unpaid parental leave and additional holiday purchase. Currently, 45% of respondents encourage other types of leave arrangements.
- 8% of respondents cite flexible working as the most innovative or successful benefit, initiative or policy they have trialled or introduced in order to be family friendly. Other schemes that respondents consider to be their most successful family-friendly initiative include childcare vouchers (6%), enhanced maternity or shared parental pay (5%), and the provision of back-up care (3%).
- 57% of respondents enhance maternity and adoption pay beyond the statutory minimum, 25% enhance shared parental pay beyond the statutory requirements, and 44% enhance their paternity pay benefit beyond the statutory minimum.
- 61% of respondents who have enhanced their maternity and adoption benefits but have not enhanced shared parental pay are currently reviewing their policies, and may enhance shared parental pay in the future.
- 29% of respondents who have enhanced maternity and adoption benefits but have not enhanced shared parental pay state that this is because the cost of enhancing both maternity and shared parental leave is prohibitive, and 7% of these respondents have not enhanced shared parental pay because they want to focus on retaining and attracting female talent.
Ben Black (pictured), chief executive officer at My Family Care, said: “The most enlightening finding [from the report] was the fact that nearly three quarters of employers said the issue of retaining female talent after parental leave was the most important issue, but shockingly just 40% said they provided support for employees going through the parental leave transition. Employers need to understand that if they want to attract and retain the best female staff who would like to have both a career and family they need to make changes to help them. Things are slowly changing, but they need to change much, much faster.”
Ian Temple, chief executive officer at Hydrogen, added: “Family-friendly benefits are slowly improving among some forward-thinking employers; enhanced maternity or paternity pay, remote and flexible working arrangements are becoming more commonplace, but for many employers there is still a huge amount of work to be done. The line between life and work is blurring and for many of the highly skilled people that we talk to, family-friendly benefits are now a high impact decision factor when seeking a new role.”
