myfamilycare.co.uk

My Family Care Consultancy

Companies need to be the employer of choice - if you have better people than the competition you are half way to achieving your business goals. If you want to retain and recruit from, and engage with the best talent pool, then you need to include all those employees who have to combine care commitments with work responsibilities. But how do you know what to do? Which policies will work best for the budget and culture you have? How do you make the business case?

Every employee is different. Every employer has different needs, aims and constraints. We have some great consultants and a wealth of experience. The aim of our Consultancy service is always the same: to help you put the right solution in place for your company.

Broadly, our consultancy service covers any and all of the following areas:

Demographics
Existing Culture
Existing "family" Benefits
Business Aims
Financial Aims
What the existing workforce wants
The Advice

Demographics
How much do you know about your workforce? Do you know what age and gender they are? Where do they live and what their family commitments are? Some companies know more than they should! But most know less. An effective “family” policy needs to be based on accurate demographic detail of the people you are keen to assist.

Existing culture
We cannot advise unless we have a good feel for the business culture. What does your company stand for; what are the values; what is the long term vision and how will it be achieved? Once we understand this we can help advise how those values can be applied to any 'care' benefits - either existing or envisaged.

Existing "family" benefits
What do you do currently? Which childcare vouchers do you use? Is your voucher provider the most appropriate for your company? What is the take up of vouchers like compared to your peer group and in the context of your demographics? If lower or higher than average, why is that? Which other benefits do you have; how well are they known and used? A complete audit of your existing benefits is often an excellent starting point. It's not unheard of for a large employer to unearth benefits they didn't know they had.

Business aims
The crux of any consultancy is to understand and agree the business aims. Employee benefit businesses' talk loosely about "engagement", "recruitment", "retention" and "absenteeism". There needs to be absolute clarity on what the business wants to achieve. There is never an unlimited budget. Therefore the business aims need to be defined, agreed, and benchmarked every single step of the way. It is our belief that family friendly benefits should be measured just as closely as other key performance indicators.

Financial aims
We need to understand both what the financial restrictions are on the solutions you would like to implement and understand how your benefits are measured in terms of financial advantage to the company. For example, if you are a retailer and your issue is absenteeism it is very simple to subsidise a back up childcare plan and measure the cost directly against the benefit. Other benefits are more difficult to put a monetary figure against. We always think it is sensible to try.

What the existing workforce wants
You (the HR department/the company) will have specific aims. A vital element is making sure these aims are tied into what parents/employees/carers actually want. The goal is ultimately to make your workforce “better”, whether that is by making them happier, more productive or more loyal. The wants and needs of your staff will also change over time. Compared to 10 years ago there are now two million more employees with care commitments; the cost of a nanny has come down by 25% and the number of nannies has doubled; there are 30% more women in the workforce; childcare vouchers make care more affordable for 300,000 people; and less and less people have a family network for back up childcare. If the landscape is changing like this the needs of your workforce will also be evolving at a similar rate. It can sometimes take an outside agency to identify how much and how far the needs have changed.

The advice
Our job is to distil everything above and help you put the right package in place for your staff. We deliver the advice however you want: formally, informally, or by presentation to the board.