Home Depot is making the problem of a no-show babysitter or a sick parent a little less onerous -- for both workers and the company -- with a new benefit that provides emergency in-home care in such situations.
The giant retailer is offering a “backup dependent care” program that workers can use as many as 10 times a year to get day care or in-home care for a child or elderly person. Employees pay a $25 to $35 deductible and the company picks up the rest of the cost.
“We know people do leave because of things like that, people miss work,” said Tim Crow, Home Depot’s top human resources executive. “This is going to be an attractor. It’s a great recruiting tool for us.”
Breakdowns in child- or elder-care plans lead 59 percent of employees or their spouses to miss work in a year, according to the 2007 Workplace Options’ National Survey of Working Adults. In a 2009 study by the National Alliance for Caregiving, 70 percent of caregivers said their work was affected by those responsibilities; two-thirds said they went in late, left early, or took time off to care for people.
Home Depot added the dependent care benefit this year. One reason was that the company is adding a 278-space competitively priced corporate day care facility -- Little Apron Academy -- at its Atlanta headquarters and wanted to provide a benefit usable by all workers, executives said.
Crow said the need to offer competitive benefits also played into the decision. As the economy improves, benefits will drive where the best people seek jobs, he said.
“There’s always a war for talent, and it will heat up,” Crow said.
About 4 percent of employers offer backup childcare and 2 percent offer backup elder care, said Evren Esen, manager of the Society for Human Resource Management survey research center. That’s about the same level that offer subsidized or unsubsidized child care.
Although several Georgia companies have on-site child care -- among them Chick-fil-A, Aflac, NCR and Georgia Power/Southern Company -- Esen said she doesn’t see much of an increase in the benefit.
An employer needs to be large enough to make offering childcare worthwhile, she said, and needs to have an employee population that has a use for it.
“It makes sense to open a facility if you have a couple hundred or more employees sending their children there,” Esen said.
Georgia Power started offering on-site child care three years ago, media relations manager Christy Ihrig said, as it began to hire younger employees when its workforce aged. Ihrig, whose 16-month-old son Jackson is at the company day care, said she and other workers don’t have to rush out of the office to get their children before day cares close and can better concentrate on their work -- and stay at their desks longer. At Columbus-based Aflac, some parents have lunch with their children at the day care before heading back to the office, spokeswoman Laura Kane said.
“If they’re not worried about their child, the care they’re getting, they’re more focused on their work,” Kane said.
Aflac recruiting specialist Lori Horton said the availability of child care has helped her sell the insurance company to some potential employees.
Home Depot spokesman Steve Holmes said the company will use child care tax credits to offset the construction of its day care facility. The credits are available to all businesses that offer state-licensed childcare facilities, and range from 75 to 100 percent of the cost of building and operating a facility, spread over several years.
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