First, corporations introduced child-care services for employees’ kids. Next came “eldercare” for workers with older parents. Now a handful of companies are bucking the recessionary trend and adding some new twists to family benefits. They’re offering frazzled working parents guidance on their kids’ education or counseling couples who want to adopt a child. While some of the advice might seem all too obvious, advocates of these family programs maintain they can save employees enormous time and reduce anxiety-improving productivity in the process. “I’m talking economics here basically,” says Fran Sussner Rodgers, president of Work/Family Directions, a Boston consulting firm that sells the service to corporations. “Companies are not so much helping individuals but rather becoming the kind of place you have to be to attract the best and right kind of people.”
To use the programs, employees call a toll-free number and talk with education experts, child psychologists or social workers. Kay Croy, an NCNB teller in High Point, N.C., called SchoolSmart because her 12-year-old son, Nathan, was doing so so in math despite a high IQ. A former teacher, Croy had spent many hours trying to help. “It began to feel like I had to make a decision on whether to be his mother or his teacher,” she says. A SchoolSmart adviser directed her to several math programs and suggested that she find a young, male tutor who could find time to shoot baskets with Nathan along with giving math help. Now Croy isn’t so worried anymore, and she credits the counseling service, It’s “one of those little touches that I think will make us better workers,” she says.
A growing number of companies are also adding adoption benefits, usually in the form of time off or financial assistance. The newest programs go even further by offering to walk employees through the adoption maze. Cathy Stirling, who works in the marketing department at Hewlett-Packard in Valley Forge, Pa., was nervous about going to an adoption agency when her company announced its program. She figures the advice she received from Work / Family could have saved her dozens of hours of phone calls and research she had put in up to that point. Last week, Work/Family said, Stirling and her husband were en route to Romania to pick up a little girl.
Where are benefits headed? Divorce advice? Lovelorn lifeline? If the trend continues, it could put Ann Landers out of work-or put her on some corporation’s payroll.
