The most responsible and ethically sound organizations provide their employees with daycare benefits. These benefits tend to be of great help for working parents who do not have enough hours in a day to balance their work, their personal lives, and their ambition of pursuing educational degrees while giving complete care and support to their children. However, employers make certain mistakes while providing daycare programs to their employees. Here are some pitfalls employers should avoid.

Selecting a static daycare network
All daycare networks are not the same. Certain low-cost networks provide daycare services but not of the similar quality or coverage as certain other premium ones. Also, daycare providers have their own scope of location. So, selecting a static daycare provider for employees in terms of location is a bad idea. Employers need to see where each of their employees reside and design the daycare program in a way that employees can use the daycare facilities nearest to their home or work address. Employees would find it inconvenient to travel several miles in order to leave their children at a static daycare provider’s facility.

Bending the rules for individual employees
Certain employees may need (and request) companies to make subtle changes to the daycare benefits they are receiving. For example, a given worker may have run into financial problems, and is, therefore, asking if their daycare amount to be paid can be reduced, or other workers may be asking for greater cost coverage by the employer. Now, yielding to these individual requests is an empathetic thing to do on the employer’s end, but doing so may create a lot of problems. For one, other employees who do not get such customized benefits may be unhappy about it. Also, offering a specific deal to one employee and a completely different benefit to others creates unrest and allegations of special treatment on employers.

All in all, organizations must not change their daycare rules for individual employees. Consistency is key when it comes to daycare programs.

Covering the complete daycare costs for all employees
Organizations need to keep their costs in check too. Most businesses thread a very thin line between being profitable and being loss-making. Therefore, while offering to cover the entire cost of each employee’s daycare expenses is indeed commendable, that would unnecessarily strain the coffers of the organization as well. So, companies must have their workers pay a subsidized percentage amount of the daycare expenses every week or month in order to keep the operation afloat and their business sustainable.

Offering the same benefits to full-time and part-time employees
Speaking of consistency, companies should offer better benefits to full-time employees who have committed themselves completely to the organization compared to part-time workers. On certain occasions, employers offer the same benefits to full-time and part-time employees. While that is great for contracted part-time workers, it is unfair to the full-time employees who will end up generating greater revenues and profits for their employers.

So, organizations must offer that incentive to their full-time employees by giving them the complete range of daycare program benefits. This would not only be fair for everyone but also set a precedent of consistency for all employees.