One of the most overlooked demographics when designing employee benefits is working moms. For example, a recent survey reported that only 6% of companies with 500+ employees offered on-site childcare benefits.
With over 24 million women with children in the US labor force, this provides an opportunity to stand out from the crowd - you can offer employee benefits that are personalized to the unique challenges of working moms.
In this article, we shall outline the significance of employee benefits for working moms and discuss the high-impact perks to offer your team.
The Role of Employment Benefits in Supporting Working Moms
At the top of the list of challenges working moms face is the “second shift,” where they are expected to come home from a full day of work and immediately jump into household chores like cooking, cleaning, and breastfeeding.
As such, providing employment benefits to working moms involves building a support system that recognizes these challenges and supports them.
Let’s break down why employee benefits are vital for working moms:
- Holistic Well-Being: Working moms often juggle complex responsibilities, which can take a toll on their health. So when you offer benefits such as paid maternity leave and flexible working hours, you contribute to their holistic well-being. In return, working moms can improve their emotional balance and physical health, which contribute to better work performance.
- Increased Job Satisfaction: Offering benefits that address the needs of working moms can boost morale, job satisfaction, and loyalty. This is because such benefits make the moms feel supported and valued, forming emotional connections with the organization.
- Attracts Top Talent: Tailored benefits for working moms help your organization stand out from the competition. It signals to talented moms that you respect their commitments outside the office, making your company a dream career destination.
- Reduce Burnout: Employee benefits such as flexible work hours and paid time off allow working mums to take breaks in between shifts, reducing their risk of burnout.
- Improved Company Culture: Supporting the working moms in your organization will help cultivate a culture of empathy, inclusivity, and respect. Such values, in turn, help create a safe work environment for all employees regardless of their demographics.
Key Statutory Benefits for Moms
Statutory benefits are perks mandated by federal, state, or local laws. They typically provide the minimum legal protections that ensure employers do not discriminate against pregnant women and mothers.
Provide the following statutory benefits for working moms on your team:
1. Paid Maternity Leave
This is one of the most essential employee benefits you can offer working moms in your organization. It allows your employees to recover from childbirth, bond with their infants, and adjust to new family routines before returning to work without fear of losing their income.
Although not federally mandated, most states have mandatory paid parental leave, with the allowed period varying by jurisdiction.
2. Healthcare Cover
Working moms often list healthcare benefits as a top priority when job hunting. This is an indicator that you should offer comprehensive family healthcare plans to ensure the moms working for your business and their children receive necessary care without creating significant financial burdens.
Some common benefits to include in your employee benefits program for working moms include prenatal and postnatal care, pediatric services, and maternal health screenings.
3. Child Support and Parental Rights
Statutory regulations also create a foundation for mothers’ rights within the workplace. For example, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires employer-sponsored health plans to cover breastfeeding supports, equipment, and supplies.
In addition, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires employers to provide time for nursing mothers to express milk for one year after childbirth and give a space that is not a bathroom for this purpose.
Flexible Work Benefits for Moms
Employers should offer working moms flexible work benefits to help them balance their work and family demands, improving their work-life balance.
Some benefits you could provide eligible members include:
4. Remote Work Options
As remote work becomes more common and less of a perk, it offers working moms the perfect opportunity to balance work and family responsibilities.
Allowing moms in your company to work from home reduces their commute time so that they can tackle the day's tasks without the stress of the commute. It also increases the time moms spend with their kids, which reduces their worry about their children’s well-being.
5. Flexible Work Hours
Similarly, flexible working hours enable moms to adjust their schedules to accommodate childcare or school-related needs.
For example, working moms can clock out earlier than usual to attend a school event and make up the time later in the week.
Additional Workplace Benefits for Moms
In addition to statutory and flexible work benefits, you can offer optional perks to enhance working moms’ holistic well-being.
Here are some examples of benefits to consider:
6. Health and Wellness Programs
Motherhood is often a stressful, anxious, and overwhelming experience. Offering access to corporate mental wellness programs such as counselling, stress management classes, yoga workshops, and therapy helps them unwind and relax, reducing burnout.
Additionally, enroll them in wellness challenges, such as daily step tracking, or offer subsidized gym subscriptions to encourage them to stay fit.
7. Parental Leave
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires employers to provide new parents with job-protected leave. However, you should not focus solely on maternity leave; offer leave options for employees whose partners have had a child.
This ensures that both parents are present during the first few weeks of a child's life and helps build stronger familial bonds. In addition, when partners also have access to leave, mothers experience less pressure and a more equitable distribution of early childcare responsibilities.
8. Unlimited Paid Time Off
Unlimited PTO may seem counterproductive for you as an employer. However, it allows working moms to take time to care for their children without worrying about running out of paid time off or losing their jobs.
The perceived job security helps boost working moms’ job satisfaction, encouraging them to stay at your organization longer.
Employer-Sponsored Financial Benefits
In a recent survey, at least 55% of parents reported that they couldn’t afford childcare without their employers’ support.
One of the main reasons is that the cost of raising a child keeps rising while wages remain stagnant.
Consider offering the following benefits to working mothers to address their financial worries:
9. Student Loan Repayment Assistance
As taking care of children becomes a top priority for moms, other critical bills may take a back seat. For example, moms may struggle to pay down their student loan debt because they are focused on rising child care costs.
As an employer, you can offer moms student loan repayment assistance of up to $5,250 tax-free. This will significantly lighten their financial burden, allowing them to focus more on work.
10. Financial Security Schemes
Enroll your working moms in income protection plans, such as disability insurance, to ensure they are eligible to receive a monthly stipend if they are unable to work due to illness or disability.
Additionally, contribute to your employees' life insurance, so their dependents receive a lump-sum payment in the event of their death.
11. Recognition and Rewards
Another way to keep working moms motivated and enhance job satisfaction is by celebrating their achievements/milestones. Offer thoughtful employee wellness gifts, such as paid spa sessions, gratitude journals, and calming teas, to help moms relax after stressful shifts.
Additionally, you could integrate wellness incentives into your corporate health and wellness programs to encourage more moms to enroll and participate in the challenges.
How? With SoHookd.
SoHookd offers the only wellness-focused marketplace where employees can redeem incentives that support their wellness needs. Also, we offer no-contract experiential benefits that you can customize to your team’s needs and launch in two weeks.
Download our free ebook to discover how to leverage psychology-backed incentives to drive engagement among working moms in your team.
How Companies Can Improve Employment Benefits for Moms
The best way to improve employee benefits for moms is to look beyond generic offerings and create thoughtful, targeted benefits.
Let’s look at some of the strategies to consider:
- Understanding What Working Moms Actually Need: You should conduct surveys, host focus groups, and collect data on your employees' parental responsibilities. Understanding the realities of working moms in your company will help you design benefits that address real concerns rather than assumptions.
- Partner with a Wellness Broker: One way to make your employment benefits for moms affordable is to collaborate with a benefits broker so that you can leverage their industry knowledge and network to negotiate for premium perks at competitive rates.
- Personalize Benefits to Individual Needs: Not all working moms are the same. Their needs differ based on age, marital status, number of children, and stage of parenthood, and so should be the offered employee benefits.
- Introduce Wellness Programs: Implement experiential employee benefits that cater to working moms' mental health, stress management, fitness, and sleep to boost their well-being. Such packages could include therapy sessions, wellness days, and peer support groups where working moms can share their experiences without judgment.
- Tackle the Childcare Challenge: One of the biggest challenges for working moms and mothers seeking employment is finding affordable childcare. As an employer, you could help moms by offering on-site childcare facilities, partnerships with childcare centres, after-school programs, or childcare subsidies. Such levels of support can substantially reduce absenteeism among working moms.
- Improve Communication: Conduct Q&A sessions, provide digital guides, and adequately train members so moms can access and use the available benefits.
Common Challenges and How to Avoid Them
Even as a well-meaning employer, you are still likely to make mistakes when designing employee benefits for working moms.
These are the common pitfalls that you must avoid to prevent your employee benefits strategies from failing within a few years:
- Overlooking Incentives: Employees are unlikely to participate in some programs without incentives to overcome psychological barriers, especially procrastination. Integrate employee wellness incentives into your benefits packages to boost enrollment and participation rates.
- Taking a One-Size-Fits-All Approach: In most companies, working moms receive the same benefits packages despite having different needs. Consider customizing benefit programs to the various needs of working moms, including their age, number of kids, and marital status, to make the perks more effective.
- Penalizing Women Who Utilize the Benefits: Working moms fear facing workplace discrimination or bias whenever they take maternity leave. To avoid this, implement strict policies that explicitly protect mothers from discrimination and ensure they have the same opportunities for career progression as other employees.
- Focusing Only on New Moms: Many employers ignore the ongoing challenges of being a working mom and only prioritize new parents. However, motherhood comes with perpetual childcare challenges that last until children turn 18. As such, ensure your benefits extend beyond the newborn stage. For example, consider flexible hours to allow working moms to juggle between their work and family commitments.
Pro tip: One of the best ways to avoid these common pitfalls is by designing employment benefits from “scratch” so that you can customize them to your team’s needs. At SoHookd, we can partner to help you build your own program that is highly specialized and personalized to each mother’s individual needs and preferences. This often results in significantly higher employee enrollment and participation rates than offering generic benefits.
Schedule a call today so we can start working on a wellness benefits program for moms on your team.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below are answers to common questions about employee benefits for moms:
How Can HR Teams Design Better Policies For Moms?
HR teams should consider collecting employee feedback, benchmarking competitor benefits, analyzing benefits usage, and understanding the demographic makeup of their workforce.
This will help them design inclusive, flexible, and regularly updated policies that reflect the evolving needs of working moms.
Are Employment Benefits Different for Single Mothers?
Yes and no. Single mothers mostly receive the same benefits as mothers in two-parent households. However, they often require and qualify for additional support due to having fewer caregiving partners.
They are eligible for benefits such as childcare subsidies, flexible schedules, and housing assistance.
Can Moms Request Custom Benefits From Employers?
Yes. Moms can request custom benefits from employers by leveraging federal laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
Many companies also offer additional accommodations for working mothers beyond those mandated by federal law, such as enhanced maternity leave and flexible hours.
What Tax Benefits Are Available for Working Mothers?
Working mothers are eligible for tax credit deductions for childcare expenses, health savings accounts, and dependent care benefits.
Such benefits are covered by federal mandates such as the Child Tax Credit (CTC), Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). There are also regional tax benefits that vary by state that moms should consider.
Conclusion
Working moms play a vital role in the modern workplace. That’s why employers need to design employee benefits that meet their specific needs. This ensures they can navigate their work and family responsibilities under significantly less stressful circumstances.
Most companies already offer mandatory employee benefits, but these are not enough. So how do they improve the existing packages? By adding experiential perks like health and wellness programs.
At SoHookd, we have nearly 10 years of experience helping companies launch wellness programs to improve their employee benefits packages. Our programs can work as standalone programs or complement existing ones. Our partnerships are procurement-friendly: we will not tie you down with contracts or charge PEPM fees.
Let’s partner to customize wellness benefits for your working moms and launch the program within 2 weeks. Schedule a personalized call today.
