HR FOCUS
you’ll only pay for the backup care when it’s actually used. In theory, every time it’s accessed, someone is working when otherwise they wouldn't be, which in turn throws up some nice ROI numbers to share with your finance team. There are now close to 2 million employees with access to some kind of emergency child and eldercare scheme. Whilst professional firms and banks were the trailblazers, these days, employers from P&G to Imperial College and the Met Police make sure support is available.
“The childcare industry is well-funded but the eldercare industry isn’t.”
heaven forbid, your childminder takes a holiday. And for parents of school age kids, life becomes a whole lot more complicated when school holidays come round.
When care arrangements break down, it’s incredibly stressful. It’s difficult enough combining career with family without letting your colleagues down for a childcare issue. And whilst the old networks of friends and family might not work like they used to, there is actually lots of good care out there. It’s just accessing it at the last minute that is the problem.
Backup care is possibly the best practical way of supporting your working parents and carers. And the reason it’s become so popular is mainly because the results are so transparent and tangible. You can see who has used care, why they used it, and when they used it. Set up a scheme properly and
www.tomorrowsfm.com
There are really three essential elements for working parents which will make a backup care scheme effective or not. First of all, the care available needs to be trusted, which means making sure all the nurseries, childminders and nannies who might be involved are as good as they need to be. There are two elements to the quality side: the care needs to be good enough to make sure the children are safe. It also needs to be good enough to give your working parents complete confidence – they won’t use it otherwise. When it comes to nurseries and childminders, the UK is lucky to have a big, bad regulator in the form of Ofsted. But nannies are completely unregulated, so that element will need handling with care.
Secondly, the backup care needs to be accessible. All parents will have strong views about what constitutes good care. Some will insist that a nursery is the only sensible option and others will need the flexibility of a nanny. So, first and foremost, you need to ensure there really will be local care available wherever your employees live.
And thirdly, it needs to be affordable. There might be plenty of very good care out there but it’s also expensive. So the employer will need to subsidise it in one form or another. How much you decide to subsidise it is up to you. 20 days of care per year is about as generous as employers
can be. But five days per year and asking the employees to subsidise a percentage of the costs is an increasingly popular way of making the support available to staff.
ELDERCARE When it comes to eldercare, the numbers are truly frightening. One in six of us is a working carer these days. It will be one in three in the not too distant future – we’re all living longer, working longer and having children later. And eldercare is far more complicated than childcare. Our parents don’t live with us. They have views of their own. The childcare industry is well-funded but the eldercare industry isn’t, and being passed from pillar to post by social services will happen to most of us at some time.
Many people are carers without realising it. Dropping in every couple of days to help with your mum’s shopping can suddenly seem very important if you’re sent to Moscow for a week on a business trip. Backup eldercare is similar to childcare but also different. Most working carers are seeking answers first about just what they can do and then seeking solutions, rather than working parents, who know exactly what they want and when they want it. And with eldercare it’s impossible to provide cover until you’ve carried out a home assessment, which means it’s much more about backup care rather than pure emergencies.
It can be notoriously difficult to get straight answers out of suppliers about costs, and I’m afraid it’s no different here. A lot depends on the demographics of the workforce, how generous the employer is and how much employees are asked to contribute. As a very rough guide, though, you should expect about a 10% take up of a backup care scheme and the costs will be anything from £10 to £50 per employee per year. For something a bit more precise, you’ll need to ask…
www.myfamilycare.co.uk
TOMORROW’S FM | 59
Photo By Praveen Kumar via
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