Generous benefits on their own aren’t enough to create a competitive workplace that attracts and retains employees with parenting responsibilities.
Employers can fixate on benefits like paid leave when trying to evaluate efforts to support working parents.
When Great place To Work surveyed more than 612,000 employees with parenting duties about their experience in the workplace, benefits like paid leave were only one piece of the puzzle. To make the Best Workplaces for Parents List in 2023, employers had to match generous benefits with another key ingredient: compassionate and helpful management.
For companies on the list, 87% of working parents said management delivers on its promises, compared to just 56% of parents at a typical U.S. workplace.
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Here are the top five companies in the large category (1,000+ employees) on this year’s list:
- Cisco
- Bain & Company
- Deloitte
- NVIDIA
- Marriott International
Here are the top five companies in the small and medium-sized category (10-999 employees):
- WestPac Wealth Partners
- Mercury
- NerdWallet
- dbt Labs
- Paramount Software Solutions
At winning companies, extra support for employees was rewarded with elevated care for the customer.
“It’s hard to give your all for a company when you struggle to care for your family,” says Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work. “These companies know that caring for the needs of workers leads to increased productivity, performance, and innovation velocity — must-haves for businesses today.”
What benefits help employers stand out for working parents?
To understand how great workplaces compete, Great Place To Work identified the top 100 companies and the bottom 100 companies from the organizations eligible for this year’s list, ranked according to how many days of paid leave was offered to new parents.
For the top 100, companies average 78 paid days of maternity leave and 60 paid days of paternity leave. At the bottom 100 companies, employers offered half that average: 40 days paid for moms and 30 days paid for dads.
Other competitive benefits include childcare subsidies (49% of top 100 vs. 23% at bottom 100) and flextime (90% at top 100 vs. 69% at bottom 100).
However, companies were more likely to make the 2023 list when best-in-class benefits were matched with high levels of trust in management.
List winners offer lessons in how to support managers to ensure every employee with parenting duties has a caring and engaged people leader:
- Don’t ignore the importance of weekly one-on-one meetings.
- Extend support to the whole family unit.
- Hold managers accountable for how they support parents.
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