With the expectation that remote work will continue, some companies are adjusting their existing family support programs, paid leave and other benefits.
Photo: Getty ImagesChild-care problems are getting worse for many parents and employers amid a nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases.
With schools considering extending classroom closures in favor of online education, and day-care centers weighing whether they can afford to stay open under social-distancing guidelines, companies are forced to improvise anew to balance productivity with increasingly uncertain child-care options for their employees.
“Until school starts, we haven’t made any policies because we just don’t know what the future holds,” says Jack McBride, CEO of Contec, a maker of infection-control products.
Contec has 850 employees, including about 500 at manufacturing facilities in its home base of Spartanburg, S.C., that have mostly stayed open during the pandemic. Many workers have relied on family and friends for backup child care, says Mr. McBride. Some switched to overnight shifts to be caregivers during the day, but that schedule is unsustainable for parents in the long term, he says.
After the pandemic closed schools in March, Contec offered up to 12 weeks of leave for people on staff at least a year. Now with coronavirus cases surging in many states including South Carolina, the company is considering new options such as subsidizing local child-care centers to help keep them open.
Mr. McBride was one of several current and former chief executives who signed a letter to Congress in May urging economic relief for both home-based and larger-facility child-care operations.
Roughly 13% of parents have lost jobs or reduced work hours because of a lack of child care during the pandemic, according to a coming report by Northeastern University. And their options are dwindling.
In March, Congress approved the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which provides up to 12 weeks of paid leave for employees who are parents of homebound children through the end of 2020. Companies with more than 500 workers are exempted, and businesses with fewer than 50 employees can also apply for an exemption.
School districts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego have said they won’t reopen in the fall as California rolled back its reopening plans, and more cities including Houston, Atlanta and Nashville, Tenn., have said they, too, will begin the year with remote learning only. In New York City, the nation’s largest public school system has a plan that keeps children at home a few days a week, a model being considered across the U.S.
School districts in California and other states have said they will begin the school year with remote learning only.
Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg NewsMeanwhile, about 18% of child-care centers and 9% of family child-care homes remain closed, and 82% of child-care programs overall say they don’t expect to survive longer than a year, according to a July 13 report from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
In Atlanta, Jeresha White owns three child-care centers licensed for about 200 children combined. She has since reopened one center, and enrollment hasn’t reached more than 10 children at a location that used to care for up to 80. Some of her parents have lost jobs and stopped coming, while other parents working through the pandemic in health care and restaurants are relying on her. At the current rate, she’s unsure about staying in business beyond the next three months.
“Now, I’m in a worse state of uncertainty than I was when all of this happened,” Ms. White says.
One of her parents, Meosha Andrews, brings her two youngest children, ages 3 and 5, to the center. During the pandemic, Ms. Andrews has worked from home with all four of her children, who include a middle-schooler and elementary-schooler.
“It’s hard trying to work from home, trying to be a teacher, trying to be a counselor, a cook,” says Ms. Andrews, who works in the health-care industry. “But also it has given me the opportunity to spend more time with them.”
With the expectation that remote work will continue, some companies are adjusting their existing family support programs, extending paid leave, backup child care and other benefits. They are also looking at new ways to further integrate family and work.
Cisco Systems—which has about 44,300 U.S. employees, nearly half of whom are parents or caregivers—already offered on-site child-care centers, which reopened in San Jose, Calif., after a temporary shutdown. About 31% of parents are using the services, some having returned to the office and others who continue to work from home. Cisco kept its offices open during the pandemic for facility-dependent workers, though a majority of the workforce shifted to home. Katelyn Johnson, who leads Cisco’s child-care operations, said the company has a plan to shift workers back to the office “because we do know the value of working on teams in person.”
The company is considering using their centers as a place where students in first through seventh grades can do their distance learning when schools are closed with the guidance of teachers, giving parents some extra support, Ms. Johnson says.
“We want to take off that mental stress of having to juggle work and home life at the same time,” she says. “If employees are not truly engaged, and they’re feeling overwhelmed, they’re not going to perform.”
Salesforce.com said parents will still be allowed to work from home until school resumes, even after offices reopen, and parental leave and backup child-care offerings have been extended and increased. This summer, the company is hosting a week-long virtual Salesforce Adventurers Club for children to have story time with executives, baking and coding lessons and other activities.
Eimear Marrinan’s children Aoibhin and Fiadh at her home office in Dublin.
Photo: Eimear MarrinanHubSpot, a 3,500-employee software company in Cambridge, Mass., in March hired two teachers to run virtual events for children such as story time or a session in which they learn about outer space. The company is now discussing how to create programs that are “not just for kids versus parents, but as families as a whole” while continuing a focus on flexibility for employees, says Eimear Marrinan, who is based in Dublin and joined HubSpot in May as director of culture.
During one of Ms. Marrinan’s first executive meetings on Zoom, one of her daughters interrupted and played the “Paw Patrol” cartoon. To her relief, members of the executive team responded by posting “Paw Patrol” backgrounds on their Zoom screens.
“That has shaped HubSpot—knowing that this is not a normal situation and breaking down that awkwardness,” Ms. Marrinan says.
Write to Katherine Sayre at katherine.sayre@wsj.com
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