Dee Ann Turner spent 33 years at Chick-fil-A and helped build its on-site child care center. She was also one of its parents.

Dee Ann Turner can tell you exactly how long it took Chick-fil-A to open an on-site child care center, because she measured it in children. When the conversation started, she had two sons and, as she puts it, no possibility of having a third. When the center finally opened in 2001, she had a two-year-old. He started in the two-year-old class the week the doors opened.

Turner spent 33 years at Chick-fil-A and retired as Vice President of Talent. She had a hand in a great deal over those years, but the center is the thing she comes back to. "One of the greatest experiences I had was when we decided to open an on-site childcare center," she says. She was one of two people carrying it internally, and she was also about to become one of the parents using it.

The question that started it, which was not hers

Turner is careful about where the credit goes. The idea did not come out of a strategy session, and it did not come from her. It came from a single hourly employee who decided to say something to the president of the company.

"We had really an hourly employee that was brave enough to go to the president of the company and ask, do you realize what an issue this is for women specifically," Turner recalls. "At that time in our organization, we were losing a lot of women because they were choosing to stay home because there was inadequate childcare in our area."

It took convincing. The decision ultimately ran through president Jimmy Collins and founder Truett Cathy, and Collins went to bat for it because of that conversation. That is the point where Turner came in. What began as one person's question became a team, and she and Chastain carried it from there through years of development.

The business case, and the human one

The retention problem was the real driver, and Turner, whose whole career was talent, watched it play out in one department in particular.

"We had this revolving door of accountants, and a lot of them were females, and they would come in and, you know, when they had children, they would decide to stay home because of this lack of childcare," she says. The center changed that. "The great benefit of it was the retention we had."

The day she knew

Before committing, Turner went to see what a corporate child care center actually looked like. Bright Horizons sent them to All Saints. Turner had never set foot in one before. On-site care was barely a category yet, and she was about to recommend that her employer build one.

"What we saw that day blew us away," Turner says. "That was the day we knew we had the right partner."

Her description of how Bright Horizons showed up is the line she still reaches for two decades later. "I described them as coming in with their cape on, because they came in as heroes and made it easy for us."

A parent inside her own project

When the doors opened, Turner stopped being only the person who helped build the center and became someone dropping her own child off at it. What she noticed first was how little separation there was between the center and the working day around it.

"The children had their kindergarten graduation in the atrium," Turner says. "We had an on-site cafe as well, so it was common for parents to go and pick up their children for a little while and bring them in for lunch and take them back."

Employees got to know their coworkers as people, not just as colleagues. Turner thinks it lifted everybody's spirits to have children around.

She even knows that “there's at least one couple that started there as babies, and they're married today and have four or five children of their own," she says.

She was also in a good position to judge the result. Her two older sons had been in other arrangements before the center existed, in-home care and another child care center, so she had something concrete to compare it against.

"Bright Horizons was just far and above better," she says. "It was a combination of the character of the people who worked there and their caring spirit and their confidence."

What she tells leaders now

Turner retired in 2018. She has since written on talent, service and career, speaks internationally on organizational culture, and does some selective consulting. Asked what she would say to leaders weighing this decision today, she does not hedge.

"The cost of child care has skyrocketed. If they're going to pay a lot of money for child care, it needs to be high quality child care," she says. Then the part she considers most important: "To the extent that employers can actually subsidize that, I think that's one of the most important benefits. It's become so prohibitive for two parents to work, and yet expenses are such that they need to work."

"Finding the best talent and keeping the best talent is providing childcare, and subsidizing it where possible."