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- Contact Child Care Aware www.childcareaware.org
and find out what’s most needed in your community, what other employers are
doing, and what information and counseling the agency can provide.
- Have lunch with your employees and listen to their child care concerns. Ask whether your personnel policies help parents’ needs to balance work and family. Conduct a more formal survey to identify dependent care and other work/family problems and potential solutions.
- Sponsor “lunch and learns” or other get-togethers designed to provide information and resources to parents and other workers related to work/family issues or other topics of interest to them.
- Set up a Dependent Care Assistance Plan to allow employees to pay for child care with pre-tax dollars.
- Offer parental leave, flextime, staggered schedules, job sharing, telecommuting, and other ways of structuring work to help parents and other workers manage family needs.
- Look into setting up a system of back-up care for employees whose regular child care arrangements break down unexpectedly.
- Investigate establishing child care resource and referral assistance for your employees to help them find the right child care to meet their needs. Help them pay for care. Help them find safe and stimulating after-school programs. Join with other employers to establish a child care center, or establish an on-site child care center.
- Make sure employees have a few minutes and ready access to a phone between 3 and 4 p.m. to call home and check on their school-age children. Reserve a few front-row parking spots for pregnant employees.
- Put child care on the agenda of your next Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, or other business organization meeting. Invite a panel of parents, child care providers, resource and referral representatives, and a business owner who is already providing child care support.
- Adopt a local child care center or family child care network. Provide business training, computer support, supplies or recycled materials.
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