These leading companies offer all-around supportive cultures, creating time with family and a level playing field for professional development.
December 12, 2016 (San Francisco, Calif.) – For a significant share of employees, Mom or Dad is the most important job title they'll ever hold. They care about working for a company that honors their family commitments, while their employers must meet the needs of team members with children to retain the best talent. With these important personal and business goals in mind, research and consulting firm Great Place to Work and Fortune are proud to announce this year's ranking of the country's Best Workplaces for Parents.
We analyzed surveys from more than 120,000 co-workers with children, scrutinizing their organizations for the career characteristics that support working parents. These include the availability of specific programs, like parental leave and child care. At the same time, the winning companies also showed much smaller gaps between parents and non-parents when it came to questions surrounding professional development, management fairness, team camaraderie and other elements essential to a high-trust, high-performance workplace culture.
"There's obviously much more to being a parent than giving birth. Likewise, it takes more than family leave to create an outstanding workplace for employees with children," said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work. “Many companies that we survey have innovative family leave offerings. The Best Workplaces for Parents stand above their peers by offering team members a high-trust environment where they feel confident that, if they use these offerings, it will not limit their advancement or growth opportunities in any way. In lower-trust environments, our data has shown that there is often a reluctance to use 'unlimited maternity/paternity leave' or other innovative offerings, because there is not yet evidence that a parent can use these policies and not 'lose' in some way. In a high-trust environment – like the companies on our list – these concerns are not present.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers took the no. 1 spot among the Best Workplaces for Parents, followed by Edward Jones, Ultimate Software, VMware and Alston & Bird. Click here to view all 50 winning companies.
By creating a credible, caring work environment for all employees, these organizations also have found meaningful ways to support the parents among their ranks:
- Starting in 2017, Ernst & Young will offer up to $25,000 in financial assistance for adoptions, as well as for advanced reproductive health procedures that include surrogacy and medically necessary egg and sperm freezing.
- At Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, an emphasis on advancement extends to employees' children. The company sends a congratulatory note from the CEO, along with a gift card, to all honor-roll students who are the children of hourly workers.
- Ultimate Software recognizes that parents with older children often ring up hefty bills for their after-school pursuits. The company provides $300 per child, per year to help cover the cost of sports and other extracurricular activities.
Compared to their peers of similar size, the Best Workplaces were the most admired by parents working at Great Place to Work-Certified™ companies. The winners also stood out for the ways they help meet the unique challenges faced by families welcoming a new baby:
- Companies on the list offered an average of 63 days of paid maternity leave, with their new mothers taking an average of 67 days off.
- Paid paternity leave among the winners averaged 30 days, with new dads taking an average of 20 days off.
- The Best Workplaces also offered an average of 43 days of PTO for adoptions.
The Best Workplaces for Parents is one of a series of rankings by Great Place to Work and Fortune based on employee survey feedback from Great Place to Work–Certified organizations.
About The Best Workplaces for Parents:
Published together with our partner, Fortune, The Best Workplaces for Parents ranking is based on feedback from 122,482 working parents at Great Place to Work–Certified companies that completed our Trust Index© Employee Survey. Mothers, fathers and their colleagues answered 58 questions about the reality of their day-to-day workplace experience, including organization-wide support for work-life balance, the quality of benefits, the fairness of opportunities for professional development and advancement, and their overall assessment of the quality of their workplace.
To determine the winners, Great Place to Work analyzed how positively mothers and fathers experienced their workplace overall, paying special attention to an index of factors where parents tended to have a less-positive experience than colleagues without children. The ranking also takes into account how favorably parents experience their workplace relative to colleagues without children, as well as the availability and generosity of maternity and paternity leave programs, adoption support and childcare programs. Organizations needed to have at least 50 employees to be considered and were compared to peers of similar size.
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