Companies expand services to help out working moms

Some companies have included elder care in addition to child care.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Returning to work after giving birth is tough. Running a half-marathon on top of that is tougher.
But Kirstie Foster did it with the help of her employer General Mills Inc., which provides on-site child-care and health facilities at the company's Minneapolis headquarters. After dropping off her daughter at day care every morning, Foster met with a food behaviorist, a nutritionist and a personal trainer. Six months later, she crossed the finish line.
"After you have a baby, you tend to focus on everything but yourself," said Foster, a corporate public relations manager and runner who has managed to add family life to the mix. "It's difficult to find the time of day to work out and plan meals."
General Mills is among a host of companies that have expanded services for working mothers beyond just maternity leave and flexible hours, according to Working Mother magazine, which released its 19th annual list Tuesday of the 100 best companies for working mothers.
What's behind it
The business rationale behind these efforts? Cheaper and more convenient health care and fitness programs mean employees are more likely to take advantage of them. And happier, healthier employees typically translates into boosted productivity, less absenteeism and fewer health care and disability expenses for the company years down the road, according to Working Mother Media CEO Carol Evans. It also helps mothers maintain a better balance between work and family life, she said.
Foster, a General Mills manager, agrees. "It's not only a cost savings. More importantly, it's a time savings," she said. "When I go home at night, I can go spend time with my husband and daughter."
The general trend among employers nationwide has been toward increased work flexibility options and elder-care benefits in the past few years, while child-care benefits have remained at about the same level, said Ellen Galinsky, president of the nonprofit Families and Work Institute in New York, which was not involved with the study.
Where companies in the booming late 1990s offered more "bells-and-whistles" benefits, today companies are sticking more to fundamentals, Galinsky said -- for example, new ways to offer flexible hours, such as part-year work.
"Things like that are the new frontier," Galinsky said.
Another trend evident at many of the magazine's choices is a growing understanding that working mothers are daughters, too. Companies increasingly are offering such services as dependent-care centers for aging parents and elder health care and referrals.
As the baby boomer generation ages and the average lifespan increases, elder care has become a new focus for IBM Corp., which has appeared in Working Mother's top 100 since the list's inception. While the company has offered elder-care and referral services since 1988, the need for such services has tripled from 9 percent of IBM employees to 27 percent, according to Maria Ferris, manager of work/life and women's initiatives at IBM.
New offerings at the world's biggest seller of computers and related services include care planning and monitoring, a phone check-in service, an elder facility review program and online discussion groups.
"We've found [having a dependent parent] can be very isolating," Ferris said. "It's not a very happy topic. Around the watercooler, everyone wants to talk about babies. No one wants to talk about a sick parent."
All but one of the 100 companies on the list provide elder-care referral services, compared with 21 percent of companies nationwide. And 28 percent offer emergency or backup emergency elder care, compared with 2 percent nationwide.
To remain competitive in attracting quality employees, companies also need to keep up with the times -- an effort that can range from offering such trendy luxuries as massages and yoga classes to readying for wartime setbacks and natural disasters.