Dive Brief:
- Fortune, in partnership with Great Place to Work, announced the top 50 best workplaces for parents. The top employers offer generous parental leave, flexible work schedules, onsite daycare, fertility treatment and other family-focused benefits. Fortune and Great Place to Work surveyed more then 400,000 employees and reviewed scores of benefit plans.
- In anecdotal responses, workers said their workplaces support work-life balance, don't make parents feel guilty about tending to family responsibilities, value fatherhood as much as motherhood, offer competitive benefits and have career-building opportunities, among other advantages.
- The top five companies are Workday, Ultimate Software, Deloitte, Comcast NBC Universal and Salesforce.
Dive Insight:
Fortune's top companies for parents is setting a tone of support and collaboration that other employers can adopt — and that goes a long way in preserving diversity and retaining talent.
Offering paid parental leave is a key way to keep parents around for the long-haul, but for it to be truly successful, it has to be integrated into the culture. An unusual study from Businessolver shows that men are more likely than women to take childcare benefits and paid leave, likely because women feel they may be seen as less committed if they take the leave.
But paid leave is a valued benefit for employees, as most studies show. A third of employers offer paid family leave and even more plan to do so in 2018, according to a survey by The Standard Insurance Company and the Disability Management Employer Coalition. Since the U.S. remains one of the few industrialized nations without a paid leave policy, states, cities and municipalities have stepped up to offer their own policies.
A House bill was introduced earlier this month that would allow employers operating in multiple states to opt out of a patchwork of paid leave policies. Flexible work schedules are another way to accommodate employees of all kinds, including parents. In fact, retail employees value flexibility over pay, according to a joint study by ManpowerGroup Solutions and the Retail Industry Leaders Association.
