Business & child care: corporate America is finally listening to its employees' requests to help solve the day-care dilemma

Black Enterprise, Dec, 1993 by Marjorie Whigham-Desir

The drawback, however, is most often in the quality and scope of services offered. Human resource and child care experts caution that when contracts are made with large referral agencies, managers should find out whether the agency has a smaller satellite office or subcontracts with smaller agencies. Local services provide more specific information about child care in that area. The more specific the referral information, the more beneficial it is to employees.

"Our company referral agency was helpful in finding organized child care, but not in finding individuals for in-home care," says Cassandra Philippeaux, director of employment and employee relations for corporate headquarters at Sterling Winthrop in New York City. The referral firm supplied her with a list of agencies that could provide nannies and a listing of family day-care homes, but Philippeaux did not like the caregivers the agencies sent.

Because she had difficulty finding quality care, Philippeaux went back to work without a sitter. "My husband took off three weeks from work to stay at home with our son. I considered taking a personal leave of absence and thought my career was going to end abruptly," she says. Three nannies and 15 months later, the couple now uses a family day-care home they found via the same referral service, an option they reconsidered now that their child was older. "It's a service that companies should offer, but employees should know the type of references the agency is best at offering."

Child Care At Work

Perhaps the most widely sought-after corporate child care benefit are on- or near-site child care centers. The Roche Child Care Center sponsored by Hoffman-La Roche is considered a model facility in the corporate child care business. The tan two-story house on a tree-lined street in a residential neighborhood of Nutley, N.J., looks almost like any other house on the block. But it is home-away-from-home for 133 children, ages 18 months to 12 years, whose parents work for the pharmaceutical giant.

When the firm decided to open its own center, they spent two years contracting with a child care center five miles away from its headquarter plant. But employee needs--accessibility to the job, quality of care, affordability for a cross-section of employees and a shortage of child care spaces--were not being met. So in 1980, the company renovated a home it owned on the back lot of its headquarters, and developed a model based on the economic goals of the company.

"This is a department like any other," claims Dianne Keel Atkins, director of corporate child care services for Hoffman-La Roche. "Whatever policies apply to the rest of the company apply here, from staffing and operations to budgets and benefits." All teachers on-staff at the center have bachelor's degrees in early childhood or elementary education and several have or are working on their master's degrees.

An average of 450 to 500 employees per year utilize the company's child-care services, including resource and referral services. Employees spend $440 per month for full-time, on-site care. The center is open five days a week year-round from 6:45 a.m. to 6 p.m. to accommodate workers who must report to work by 7 a.m. Employees like Rudolph Brown say the Roche Child Care Center, where he brings his 5-year-old daughter, Kalea, has kept him with the company. "I've been offered other opportunities elsewhere, but they didn't have a child care program or one like Roche's," says Brown, a compensation and systems consultant. "When looking at the possibility of changing jobs, I also look at the kind of education and child care that will be available with a move."