00:00:00
They're saying, like, yes, we were recognized as humans beyond the work that we did and how can we create those supports for people in our organization?

00:00:08
Yeah. And I think the important thing is, like, all of those women have been very successful and they could have just said, enough, I'm done enough. I did it enough. But they feel so passionate about it and they want to sort of, you know, celebrate some of the good support that they had going through, but also rectify a lot of the bad support that they had going through.

00:00:28
Welcome back to The Work Life Equation podcast. Here we explore how people navigate careers, caregiving, and everything in between. I'm Priya.

00:00:36
And I'm Paul. And we're here to sort of recap another great season on the Bright Horizons Work Life Equation. It's been packed with insights, stories, you know, tactical tips that people can really use in their day-to-day life. And we're really excited to be talking to you now about some of our favorite highlights, some of the things that we have remembered throughout the season.

00:00:58
So stick around as we unpack the biggest takeaways from this season and our guests spotlight the trends we think are going to define the year ahead and share what we're most looking forward to in future episodes.

00:01:10
So Priya, I would like to talk about some statistics because I'm that stat guy and you know, there's some statistics that says Ovia health says that 94% of workers said that family benefits were important or extremely important. I remember our podcast with Cindy Silva, who was really amazing and she said that 30% of employees don't fully understand their benefits. And that to me, it really stuck with me because more benefits, great, but less understanding of more benefits, not great. And that to me, I think so much of what this season was about in a lot of ways was these people who cared so deeply about what they were doing in their roles, but working to make sure they're able to communicate those things with managers and with employees in general.

00:02:01
Yeah. And I think Cindy really highlighted that. So even within Bright Horizons, we do a Modern Family index and our data shows this all the time. And Cindy's highlight of the fact that this was nearly 95% of the workforce was pretty incredible. The what it made me think about, though, Paul, is just the sheer cognitive load parents have and HR professionals have. Right. So she talked about it saying, we're trying to be innovative. We have five generations in the workforce, people turning up, return to office being a mandate. But how do we ensure that people are aware of how to access the Benefit and also from a consumer standpoint, today they're dealing with so much with being a sandwich generation. Trying to navigate this with personal caregiving and benefits must be difficult. I really loved how they were trying to simplify it. And it was definitely one of the episodes where it was clear that HR professionals are thinking about it, which always gives me a ton of relief.

00:03:04
I think one of the themes playing off that Priya, one of the things that came up was the manager lottery and the risk of the manager lottery. Suba Barry from Seramount. She had great stories about winning the manager lottery when she had cancer, and she talked openly about how this manager really impacted her care journey. We talked to Blessing Adesiyan and she talked about how sometimes if you don't win that manager lottery, how you end up being penalized. And I remember talking to Jenny Golseth at Allianz and she was. She sort of says she was that manager who didn't understand. She was that person who, before she had kids, thought very differently. And now, of course, she's kind of made amends and she's gone back to other people. And I think that's a real story. And I think one of the things I really liked is at least the people that we were talking to, they were trying to minimize the manager lottery. They were trying to not just create great policies because as we know here, 30% of employees don't know all their benefits, but. But to communicate them in a way. When you think about all the stuff that Bright Horizons does to communicate to its various stakeholders and partners, what are some of the most effective ways to communicate what is actually available?

00:04:23
I think the manager lottery is one part of it. But just reflecting on what you were saying right now, Paul, the fact that each of these managers, once they have. I heard two distinct themes, right? One was that once you had experienced it, you were doing something actively to pay it forward, so you became the manager who was providing that support. The second, and I love your reference to Jenny where she had an experience and she didn't have empathy for it, but she realized people around her, what she didn't experience, she was willing to listen. So the voice of customer was a really important part of how she approached benefits. And I really liked. She said, fine, I don't have necessarily both the life stage or the situation, but how do I listen to what's required? What we do at Bright Horizons is really interesting is we communicate to consumers where they are. So if you're a young parent or somebody who's providing Support for an elderly. The fact is, we have to be top of mind for saying, when you have the need, just know that there is a benefit you can get to and your employer is doing so much to provide it. So it is both ensuring that you're in the consideration set for the employee, but ensuring that the employer also is playing a role in saying, here's where you can go. And we've also realized that typically employees are in that mind frame when at three or four times in their life. So one is when they have open enrollment season. Everyone thinks about their benefits when they have a life stage. So I had an elderly person in the home, a pet who was unwell, or I required some upscaling or reskilling, or a third part of it is when they're a new employee, everyone looks for what their benefits are. So how do you ensure that they understand it? But I thought how Subha sort of spoke about it in her episode about let's take that lottery and make it a more systemic lottery element was really what employers are doing now, which is very encouraging to see.

00:06:32
Yeah, I thought, you know, Alyssa Friedrich from United Therapeutics, she was saying she has this workforce that is varied. You know, you have salespeople, R&D people in office, people, always remote people. And she was working really hard to communicate what was available. And I thought that was so important because, like, you know, benefit 1.0 would have been, we send out the email. If you don't respond, that's on you. And now we're like, benefit 3.0, 4.0. We're like, okay, we know that people are getting too many emails. We know that people are overwhelmed by the volume of information. How do we break through that and communicate these essential things? Or how do we make sure that managers at least know where to go and look for this stuff when somebody has a very specific need. And as many of these people who are on this season said, they actually have policies for. A lot of these companies have ways. If you were trying to apply to college for your kids, they had resources that you could go to get help with that college application. Well, many people go through that college process, but you're only going to know that your company offers that if you ask. And I was really heartened by the different ways that companies are trying to communicate these benefits to people so that they know, because they know that with these great benefits, people are going to. They're going to. They're going to stay longer. It's going to be a retention benefit.

00:07:54
It's an attraction benefit, It's a retention benefit, it's a progression benefit. The point also is how do you reach an employee when they're at a time of need and how do you reach them where they want to consume it? So again, the fact that it's a salesperson and is on the field now with technology, how people are thinking about this in the benefit 3.0 era is. Is interesting because they're like, when you're on the move, how do we get it to you? When you're in the office, how do we get it to you? If you're in a store, how do we get it to you? Which you can see with people like Walmart as an example, how they're thinking about the fact that even though it's a childcare center that they've set up in. What's a childcare desert, really? Right. It's a big attraction tool for them within Arkansas, which is not necessarily. It has been named as a child care desert. In addition to saying we're providing high quality childcare, they're thinking about how do we ensure that parents and children can spend more time together, how do we form community around parents? So all these spaces that have been created for these parents to hang out and form their first community, in addition to having the community for children, I find really fascinating because that allows employees to continue to be both, you know, work with the employer, but also find their people in these places.

00:09:21

Yeah, I think the Walmart example and what that company has done in Bentonville is huge because they've created this very desirable place for their employees to want to go and live. But it reminds me of our episode with Blessing in which he talks about care as infrastructure. And I think that is so important because it's. Somebody said, if you want to get your employees to the office, you have to build this paved road that's going to go the extra 10 miles to get them there. You would say, oh, well, I will do that. If you're going to say, well, if you want them to be the most productive, you need to run this fiber optic line. So the Internet works very quickly. You say, oh, I'm going to do that. But Blessing frames it. And the same in the Walmart example frames it as a critical infrastructure need so that those companies can work at the highest level. And they can work at the highest level because their employees, both moms and dads, will know that there's a place for their kids to go. And we know 0 to 5, we can plan for kids not being in school. But it's not as if 5 to 18, it gets easier. If anything, it gets a little more challenging because suddenly a kid is sick. Suddenly a kid has to go to. And that happens at the moment when you probably have the most important meeting of your life.

00:10:31
I'm only smiling because my mom decided to tell me bigger children, bigger problems after I'd had the kids. So that wasn't helpful. But yeah, that is, you know, the life stages change and the requirements change. That's part of what we're also trying to navigate as Bright Horizons is to say how can you help with education and care at ages and stages. So whether it is when your children are really young through to even as adults. And again, when we look at the Papa John story, the fact is, as an adult in today's world, where AI is taking over, upscaling and rescaling is becoming a big part of how people need to think about their own education. One is their kid's education. But how do you think about your own education as you're going through that education? How do you provide care for your loved ones? And I think that is in the evolving space for benefits. The notion of saying, how do you create personal well-being and provide these supports for both yourself and your loved ones is an interesting way that employers are thinking about it, but almost what employees are expecting as table stakes.

00:11:40
I think Chad from Papa John's you referenced with his Dough and Degrees. That's so crucial as a theme because it was something that he had experienced personally. He was working at Papa John's, he didn't have a college degree. Then he gets a college degree, then he gets a master's degree. And most recently he finished getting a doctorate degree. I mean, that is remarkable. But he took his personal experience and made it positive for the other people at Papa John's. Just as Jenny from Allianz took her personal experience and made it okay. I realize I need to do something different. But I remember when she was talking like the CEO of Allianz, he's very much behind this. So it's having that leadership support, having people who have, you know, been convinced not just over the years, but over the decades that this is essential to keep those great employees in place. Because what might have happened to someone like John at Papa John's, maybe he doesn't get their degree or maybe has, you know what? I need to leave the workforce and take time off to do this. Instead, Papa John found a way for him to get that degree, stay engaged. And who is he? He's an evangelist now for the organization because he, he's thrilled at how it's worked out for him and he's paying it forward. Which comes back to a theme that we've talked a lot about. How many of these leaders want to pay forward? Either things that happened to them that were positive or rectify negative things and make it positive going forward.

00:13:03

Yeah. And sponsorship, which is a theme that you talk about again from the vantage point of seeing this across employers. The fact that a lot of employers have, I would say, three macro trends and we've heard this across the episodes, but certainly again in the Allianz episode with Jenny, we heard the fact that there are five generations in the workforce, so different needs for different ages and stages. The fact that CHROs and benefits leaders are thinking about how to bring employees back into the office and manage a hybrid workforce. And it's not just the hybrid workforce working from home and working in the office, but also these remote R and D folks having different needs and salespeople having different needs, et cetera. And the third aspect is the fact that employees are looking for more from employers because the cost of care and education is going up. So the fact that employers need to support this and this becomes an attraction and retention tool helps is something that we're seeing thematically. What's really encouraging is the fact that employers are stepping up to say, if employees are more than what they are at work, how do we provide caregiving and well being supports? So I loved our Band of Sisters episode because that was a really good example of how for me, it was a very interesting reflection of how caregiving had changed over the years. And I actually didn't see, even within our own teams, when you see how you expected caregiving and supports from a workplace to how it's being provided today, that's evolved tremendously. And that came through in all four of their experiences. And staying with the theme of paying it forward and sponsorship, all four of them, in their own different ways have gone on to do this, what they got in Pepsi to move on and do more of it in their firms. That's really encouraging to see because they're saying like, yes, we were recognized as humans beyond the work that we did and how can we create those supports for people in our organization?

00:15:15
Yeah. And I think the important thing is all of those women have been very successful and they could have just said, enough, I'm done enough, I did it enough. But they feel so passionate about it and they want to sort of celebrate some of the good support that they had going through, but also rectify a lot of the bad support that they had going through. And what's also interesting is not just they've gone back and spoken at Pepsi many times, but all these other companies are saying, we want you to come in, we want to learn from your experience so we can do better. And that sort of constant improvement came through. I think of when Suba was talking about what it took to be on Seramount list of top 100 companies. 20 years ago, you wouldn't even come close. Oh, you offer some parental leave. That's wonderful. And. And now it's not just parental leave. It's robust caregiving leave. It's other supports that are in place. And the beauty of a top hundred, people criticize them. The top hundred. Are you sure that's the best hundred? No, the top 100. It gets people engaged, it gets companies engaged. And nobody wants to be 119th. You want to be in that top hundred. And once you're in there, you want to rise up. And how do you rise up? You have to keep doing more things for your employees and do the right things. And what I love about Seramount and what UPS has done is that they hold people's feet to the fire. They don't just let you coast. You have to prove that you're actually doing these things. And the result is when you get this list, I know they share the data with the people who participated. They can see where they've fallen short and why they are 98th and not 38th. And I think that's really important because that's the constant improvement that companies put into whatever their core business is. You don't want to stay stagnant with your core businesses, but now they're putting that constant improvement mindset into the benefits that they offer their employees.

00:17:04
Yeah. And it's a measurement framework. Right. You have, even if you're the thousandth company, you get data on what company 1 through 100 are doing and what you can aspire to do if you want to be an employer of choice for family friendly workplaces. So I love the fact that they've not only put the framework, they continue to measure it and evolve it based on what they're hearing from employees at the end of the day, because it allows employers to get the data on saying what are new needs that employees have. And Shubha, how she's converted what she had as an employee to saying what does it take to be a family friendly workplace is. Is tremendous. And again, the work that she's done with the, you know, the hundred family best family friendly workplaces is a great way of sort of again, paying it forward. I mean, I love the theme of sort of saying how each person has taken this and move this into mechanisms by which other people can continue to aspire to be more family friendly. I want to spend a minute on like and I love the infrastructure analogy. As you know, one of the reasons why I love this space is because if you provide the right supports, I think people turn up into work when they're personally anchored, they come into work and they're professionally successful. And that in turn has this really nice sort of ripple effect for how the economy evolves. So I love the fact that she compared it to infrastructure for that specific reason that this is core. This is not something that an employee should fight for by themselves. That employers have a responsibility, governments have a responsibility to make this happen. And we've seen that play itself out even again from our vantage point as Bright Horizons, it's employers stepping up when it's required and in other geographies, government stepping up to provide these supports.

00:19:09
Like you, I'm optimistic, Priya, and that we're at this inflection point because you wouldn't work for a company that didn't offer a 401k plan, you wouldn't work for a company that didn't offer health insurance. It just is not something that people would think of today. But go back 40 years, it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today. But those are examples of infrastructure that have worked. And if you had a question about your 401 plan, we. Well, there's a mechanism to go and ask that question. If you have a question about your healthcare, same thing. And I think when we start thinking about childcare and care in general as an infrastructure need, that takes a lot of the stigma away from it. Because Blessing tells us this very powerful story of when she was a young mother starting her career and not knowing what to do with this infant. Now she had some family help, she had some support, but. But it was like imagine if she was able to be open and honest to an extent. But when it becomes just something that obviously people have children, obviously people have care needs. Just as obviously people get sick and need to go to a doctor and people want to save money so they one day can retire. When we start to think about it in that way, and infrastructure is great because Blessing comes at this as an engineer, it makes it more clinical. And that making it clinical removes the stigma, removes the emotion, removes any Stereotypes like, oh, okay, well, this is a need. And as a good company, you're like, okay, I want to hire people who can have a full life and this is something we're going to provide.

00:20:42
Yeah. And so here's wishing that as we head into the future, that where health and dental benefits were one category and 401k, which were financial savings, was a second category, that employers continue to support personal well being as a third category. And. And education and care can be something that they think about actively as they're thinking about supports for employees.

00:21:06
I'm smiling because I'm thinking, just as your dentist says, did you floss? And you're like, well, I flossed. We want employers. Did you sign up for the childcare benefit? Did you sign up for the emergency care benefit? And that's moving it in the right direction.

00:21:21
Yeah. And your education benefit, I feel like, yeah. And here's hoping that as employers have supported this through Covid and through the years, that they continue to do so and employees gain from this process. And when there's a happy workforce, I think employers succeed and the economy succeeds. So I think this is all 101 in terms of the groundswell that's getting created and hopefully perpetuates. Thank you, guys. That's all we had for today.

00:21:52
And thank you to our listeners for being part of another great season of the Bright Horizons The Work-Life Equation.

00:21:58
So until next time, take care of yourselves, stay personally fulfilled, stay professionally successful, live your life spectacularly, and look forward to seeing you in the next season of The Work-Life Equation podcast.