The last few years have seen many leading players offer gender agnostics parenting leave to employees to welcome a new child through birth, surrogacy or adoption. Google, Novartis, Amazon, Zomato, Diageo, Cyient, Microsoft, Facebook, and Swiggy are a few organisations that offer strong parental support to both mothers and fathers. Accenture offers inclusive benefits and looks at primary and secondary caregivers instead of the marital status or gender of their employees.
We are beginning to see a similar trend in offering childcare benefits as well. Covid 19 adversely disrupted parents’ work schedules and in the last two years, we have seen India Inc. step up to help parents with innovative solutions and changes in their policies to tackle challenges around childcare.
In the wake of the pandemic, we have watched our clients dial-up family first initiatives for both working parents and make childcare an important part of their employee engagement strategy. Virtual child care was offered as a benefit to all parents irrespective of marital status or gender. Most organisations either funded the benefit in part or in full and plan to continue doing the same even in 2022.
Amidst the pandemic, a large number of organisations are rolling out gender-inclusive childcare policies with the benefit applicable to working parents.
In a recent survey* that we conducted to understand emerging childcare trends, 54% of companies offer daycare support to both men and women. Given that hybrid working is the way forward, we expect to see a larger number of companies making the change in their daycare policy to make the benefit more meaningful and relevant for their employees.
*ProEves childcare support survey Oct 2021.
We at ProEves understand the challenges that our partner organisations are facing and have been supporting over 100 plus organisations to enable inclusive and integrated childcare services.
To understand industry-wise trends and get details on how we can support you in your childcare journey reach out to us or Visit ProEves