From extended paid maternity leave to breast milk shipping on the company’s tab, employers nationwide are embracing new and innovative family-friendly benefits.
The International Foundation’s latest report, Employee Benefits Survey 2016, examines the many ways employers are creating a family-friendly culture in the workplace. See how your organization measures up to your peers across the country.
Fertility Health Care Benefits
A quarter of employers (24%) with 500 or more employees offer fertility services as part of their health care benefits. Nineteen percent cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments, 12% cover fertility medications and 9% cover non-IVF fertility treatments.
In the Silicon Valley race for top talent, both Facebook and Apple have added egg freezing as a benefit for women who choose to delay having children. The survey report found that 4% of large employers nationwide offered this benefit. Fertility services are more common among employers that have at least 500 employees. Only 4% of employers with fewer than 50 employees offer fertility services. Employers with a self-funded health plan are also more likely to offer fertility services than those with insured plans.
[Related: FMLA E-Learning Course]
Paid Leave and Flexible Work Schedules
Among employers of all sizes—from less than 50 employees to more than 10,000—more than one-third (37%) offer paid maternity leave and nearly one-quarter (24%) offer paid paternity leave.
Tech companies have led the trend of extended maternity leave. Netflix offers new moms and dads unlimited paid parental leave for the first year following the birth or adoption of a child. Facebook gives all new parents four months paid parental leave, Twitter provides new parents with 20 weeks paid leave, and Google offers 18 weeks paid leave.
Employers are also offering leave to attend a child’s activities—9% provide paid leave, and 21% offer unpaid leave.
To help employees maintain a better work/life balance, 47% of employers offer flexible work hours or compressed workweeks, and 9% offer job sharing (where two or more part-time workers share one full-time job).
Unique Family-Friendly Perks
Employers are also offering benefits to help parents find or afford day care coverage. These perks include popular dependent care flexible spending accounts (69%) as well as the dream scenario of on-site child care (8%). A number of employers also offer resource and referral services for child care (22%).
Other employers offer unique perks for families who wish to adopt. Fourteen percent offer resource and referral services for adopted children, and 16% offer financial assistance for adoption. Nineteen percent offer paid leave for adoption.
A small 1% of employers allow babies at work, and another 1% provide breast milk shipping for new mothers who travel—a benefit that has made headlines in recent years as companies such as Clif Bar, Ernst & Young, IBM and Twitter have added it to their employee benefit lineup.
And for those bleary-eyed new moms and dads running on zero sleep—62% of employers offer on-site coffee, and 5% offer nap rooms for their workforce.
Find the full report, Employee Benefits Survey 2016, at www.ifebp.org/benefitsurvey2016.
Brenda Hofmann
Senior Communications Associate at the International Foundation
