Healthpoint, Ltd., has created a family-friendly culture throughout the years by encouraging employees to bring their spouses to holiday parties, their families to an annual spring picnic, and their children to “Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day.”
“All of those things help build that overall culture,” says Micky Shepherd, manager, Compensation & Benefits, with Healthpoint (www.healthpoint.com), a pharmaceutical company based in Fort Worth, Texas.
Over the past few years, the firm has made some significant changes to its benefits program by introducing several new family-friendly benefits that are aligned with its culture.
Adoption Assistance
“Healthpoint started offering an adoption assistance program for employees that provides for reimbursement of up to $7,000 toward qualified expenses related to the adoption of a child. Those expenses include legal fees and adoption application fees. The reimbursement can also be used to make changes to the employees’ home, if the changes are necessary to accommodate a handicapped child,” Shepherd explains.
As an employee incurs qualified expenses, he or she submits the proper documentation to Healthpoint, and the company cuts a check to the employee within a couple of weeks, says Shepherd. “We provide reimbursement as costs are generated and paid for.”
Both part-time and full-time employees are eligible for this benefit from the day they start working at Healthpoint, he says. Perry Christensen, Healthpoint’s vice president of Human Resources, says two employees have already received adoption assistance.
Although “this is a unique benefit that obviously not everyone is going to use,” Shepherd says employees appreciate the fact that the company has taken the initiative to offer adoption assistance.
Parental Leave
A new parental leave benefit that was just introduced this January also has been well received by employees, Christensen says. In addition to the 2 to 3 weeks of paid vacation that employees are eligible for, any employee (male or female) is entitled to take 5 paid days off within 60 days of the birth or adoption of their child, he says. “It’s just like an extra week of vacation.”
A “handful” of employees have already taken parental leave, Shepherd says. And more are “lined up to use it,” says Christensen. With a relatively young workforce, Healthpoint typically has 15 to 25 births per year, and he expects as many employees to take parental leave.
Benefits for Part-Timers
Healthpoint pays approximately 85 percent of healthcare premiums for its full-time employees, and more than a year ago, it started offering the same medical benefits to part-timers—at a slightly higher cost. “They pay a little more to maintain full-time benefits, but it’s not a large percentage,” Christensen says.
Healthpoint has only a few part-time employees. All four part-timers who have medical benefits are working mothers, and three of them had previously left Healthpoint due to family obligations. “We attracted back some great employees who only left because they wanted to spend time with their families,” Christensen says, referring to this as an “unexpected” but positive result of introducing this benefit.
“Prior to having this policy in place, they wouldn’t have been eligible for our health and wellness benefits, but now they are,” says Shepherd. “It is the same exact plan that everyone else is on.”
Other new family-friendly benefits include job sharing, enhanced flexibility, and the inclusion of in vitro fertilization services in the medical plan.
Offering family-friendly benefits has helped Healthpoint retain top talent, according to Christensen. “People like working here and the opportunities, and they like our culture, so they stay here.”
Healthpoint received “pretty phenomenal” scores in an employee survey conducted for the Best Companies to Work for in Texas 2010 ranking, he says. The company, which ranked #20 on the list, received “exceptionally high scores” in how employees view the mission and direction of the company and development opportunities. “The family-friendly culture has been kind of the icing on the cake.”
What to Do
A family-friendly culture takes time to cultivate, so Christensen recommends using a “two-pronged, bottom-up approach” for gaining input and support. He suggests identifying who in senior management supports a family-friendly culture and then building on that support.
If it is unclear how supportive senior management is for such an endeavor, Christensen says you should seek input from a cross-section of employees—about their work/life needs and the types of family-friendly benefits that would be helpful to them—and then take that feedback to senior management.
To help ensure the success of new benefits, Shepherd recommends soliciting ongoing feedback from employees after implementation.