Childcare Tax Break Breakdown

Episode 5: Spreadsheet Secrets: Measuring the True Value of Childcare Benefits on Employee Retention

January 20, 2024 Greg Crisci & Doug Devereaux Season 1 Episode 5
Episode 5: Spreadsheet Secrets: Measuring the True Value of Childcare Benefits on Employee Retention
Childcare Tax Break Breakdown
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Childcare Tax Break Breakdown
Episode 5: Spreadsheet Secrets: Measuring the True Value of Childcare Benefits on Employee Retention
Jan 20, 2024 Season 1 Episode 5
Greg Crisci & Doug Devereaux

In this episode, we discuss the expansion of childcare benefits and the impact of flexible work on turnover. They provide insights on calculating turnover costs and how to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for implementing a childcare benefit program with a real life spreadsheet example that you can download here. The episode highlights the importance of supporting working parents and the potential cost savings for organizations.

Takeaways

  • Childcare benefits can help reduce turnover and improve employee satisfaction.
  • Calculating turnover costs is essential for understanding the financial impact of employee turnover.
  • ROI calculations can demonstrate the value of implementing a childcare benefit program.
  • Supporting working parents is a social and moral imperative that can benefit both employees and organizations.

In our latest podcast episode, "Spreadsheet Secrets: Measuring the True Value of Childcare Benefits on Employee Retention," we dove into the essential topic of family-friendly policies in the workplace and how to calculate the cost savings by implementing a childcare benefit. This is something that's becoming increasingly important for companies everywhere.

We're seeing a real shift in how businesses view employee benefits. Supporting working parents is emerging not just as a moral imperative but as a solid financial strategy. Childcare support is key here, and it’s something that can significantly stabilize a workforce. Our episode comes at a pivotal time, exploring the recent legislative updates to the child tax credit, which could have a substantial impact on families and employee retention.

But it's not all talk and theory. We provided HR professionals with concrete tools and calculations to understand the financial impact of childcare benefits. For example, there's this case study we discussed, showing how a company's investment in childcare resulted in significant savings, with returns of up to $20 for every dollar invested. These are the kinds of figures that can persuade management to adopt more family-friendly policies.

A particularly useful takeaway from the podcast is the editable spreadsheet tool we shared. It allows listeners to directly assess the impact of childcare initiatives on their company’s financial health. This practical tool underlines our commitment to helping HR leaders make informed decisions based on their specific organizational contexts.

To sum it up, this episode is an essential listen for HR leaders who are looking to enhance their company's appeal through thoughtful childcare benefits. We're blending financial insights with a real focus on the well-being of employees, offering a strategy for fostering a supportive environment for working families and the businesses that back them. Don't miss out on this one!

Support the Show.

Thank you for joining us on 'Tax Break Breakdown'! If you found our deep dive into Indiana's childcare benefit program insightful, please consider subscribing for more valuable discussions. For further information, questions, or to share your experiences with childcare benefits, DM Doug or myself here on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll explore more current and upcoming childcare grants and tax programs employers can take advantage of. Don't forget to leave us a review and share this episode with your colleagues. Together, let's make the most of workplace benefits and tax breaks!

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In this episode, we discuss the expansion of childcare benefits and the impact of flexible work on turnover. They provide insights on calculating turnover costs and how to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for implementing a childcare benefit program with a real life spreadsheet example that you can download here. The episode highlights the importance of supporting working parents and the potential cost savings for organizations.

Takeaways

  • Childcare benefits can help reduce turnover and improve employee satisfaction.
  • Calculating turnover costs is essential for understanding the financial impact of employee turnover.
  • ROI calculations can demonstrate the value of implementing a childcare benefit program.
  • Supporting working parents is a social and moral imperative that can benefit both employees and organizations.

In our latest podcast episode, "Spreadsheet Secrets: Measuring the True Value of Childcare Benefits on Employee Retention," we dove into the essential topic of family-friendly policies in the workplace and how to calculate the cost savings by implementing a childcare benefit. This is something that's becoming increasingly important for companies everywhere.

We're seeing a real shift in how businesses view employee benefits. Supporting working parents is emerging not just as a moral imperative but as a solid financial strategy. Childcare support is key here, and it’s something that can significantly stabilize a workforce. Our episode comes at a pivotal time, exploring the recent legislative updates to the child tax credit, which could have a substantial impact on families and employee retention.

But it's not all talk and theory. We provided HR professionals with concrete tools and calculations to understand the financial impact of childcare benefits. For example, there's this case study we discussed, showing how a company's investment in childcare resulted in significant savings, with returns of up to $20 for every dollar invested. These are the kinds of figures that can persuade management to adopt more family-friendly policies.

A particularly useful takeaway from the podcast is the editable spreadsheet tool we shared. It allows listeners to directly assess the impact of childcare initiatives on their company’s financial health. This practical tool underlines our commitment to helping HR leaders make informed decisions based on their specific organizational contexts.

To sum it up, this episode is an essential listen for HR leaders who are looking to enhance their company's appeal through thoughtful childcare benefits. We're blending financial insights with a real focus on the well-being of employees, offering a strategy for fostering a supportive environment for working families and the businesses that back them. Don't miss out on this one!

Support the Show.

Thank you for joining us on 'Tax Break Breakdown'! If you found our deep dive into Indiana's childcare benefit program insightful, please consider subscribing for more valuable discussions. For further information, questions, or to share your experiences with childcare benefits, DM Doug or myself here on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll explore more current and upcoming childcare grants and tax programs employers can take advantage of. Don't forget to leave us a review and share this episode with your colleagues. Together, let's make the most of workplace benefits and tax breaks!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Tax Break Breakdown with your hosts, greg and Doug. Sit back and relax while they review current and upcoming childcare tax credit programs employers can take advantage of.

Speaker 2:

Now on to the show. Well everybody, episode 5. Remotely having this episode from Norwalk, Connecticut. That's where I'm at, Doug, you're still in the.

Speaker 1:

What do they call it what? What do I call it? The Midwest. The Midwest, yeah, the Midwest yeah.

Speaker 2:

I was gonna say something, but I am in Connecticut. It's snowing out here, beautiful day, normally in San Diego, but we have a really great episode for everybody today. We have a couple news articles that we're gonna go through, and this is around the expansion of a childcare benefit. We'll briefly touch on an issue that, still coming to the news yeah, the news left and right about flexible work and then also our main topic is going to be around turnover, and how do you think about turnover and replacement costs, and then how do you tie that to a childcare benefit. This is something that I'm talking with and we've talked to hundreds of HR leaders like having a consensus around turnover and turnover replacement costs. There's not standard across the industry. So then how do you think about it and then how do you apply that to a childcare benefit, which, in our experience, directly affects turnover? So I also like to kick off by talking about our progress Our newsletter 485 subscribers, 76 downloads on our podcast.

Speaker 1:

Take it, that's good.

Speaker 2:

This is our fifth episode. Yeah, somebody is definitely listening. So hey to everybody. Mom, we've already started to map out some future episodes, because there's a lot that's going to happen this year.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's going to happen this year. There's more coming every week and it's going to be an exciting one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so let's jump into the grug fact. It's a grug fact of the day.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about llamas. We actually figured this one out when we were about to record this in the last episode, two episodes ago.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one or two.

Speaker 1:

Here because you had something in your background, you were doing it and you had a llama picture. And this is just our consistent experience with each other, for better or worse probably mostly worse but when we had moved into this house, greg had this beautiful llama picture behind him when we were recording. It's like, oh, that's funny, because we moved into this house, the one thing that the people before us left was a painting of a llama wearing red glasses and I just thought it was hilarious. So we kept it and then continued to accumulate llama stuff. So there's, yeah, got a lot of coffee mugs, rain, had a little ride on llama, fisher price toy and stuff like that. So we're brothers in llama paraphernalia.

Speaker 2:

It just surprises me every time we learn about these things. Now I think after this one, we're starting to fish for connections.

Speaker 1:

But even though the five ones that we've already Sounds like a reach, but that one really isn't. That's random to there's some synergy there, but yeah, no, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but that's okay. Well, I think this may be the last episode with the grug effect. Let's jump into in the news. So I'll do the first one and then, doug, if you want to kick off the second one. But the first one is all around Congress, and this one's related to the childcare tax credit that employees can claim on their tax return, and we're bringing this up because these are the little things that I think a lot of employees maybe don't know, and so you as an HR leader, like this is something you can share.

Speaker 2:

Dig into a little bit deeper. But those families that have kiddos, I believe during the pandemic it went up to 3,000, I believe it was during the pandemic or 3,600. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it went down. It was 3,600, the tax credit and then it went to back to 1,600. Now it's trying to go to 2,000. This isn't I think this is not in legislation yet, but I know that they are trying to expand this childcare tax credit from where it's at higher and then adjust it for inflation, which I think, again, it's one of these things that exist, just like a dependent care account, but not many people take advantage of.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think, kevin, there's a lot we can go into in depth with the studies that came out post-pandemic and increasing the aid to families and the impact of that, and I think we were talking about earlier like, yeah, I'm sort of chattin' poverty rates in half Right, like it's one of those things that's lived in the tax code and legislation that just hasn't changed. As you know, things have gotten significantly more expensive, especially among you know core necessities. So it's great to see the conversation happening. I would love to see that number be a little higher, but you know, progress is progress.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this one, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They say in the first year the expansion would lift as many as 400,000 children out of poverty. 3 million more children would be made less for as their incomes rise closer to the poverty line. I mean, this is one of those things I think was the article was something there was the same like there's no New Year's resolution that could be as powerful as this. Or I butchered that. I definitely butchered that. Set them in there. Yeah, that's it. So this one, I think, keep your eye on it, we will keep our eye on it. It's being introduced, it's bipartisan as well, and I think it says it's announcing a $70 billion bipartisan tax deal to expand the child protected credit. So keep an eye on this one.

Speaker 1:

I guess cross. All right, am I going to too? Let's go.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so too. We're seeing a lot around organizations returning to office right and hybrid working environments. I was reading something the other week that remote job postings are down 75% year over year. People are there's a big push trying to get back into office. There's a really funny video that went viral, I think, from WebMD's parent company trying to entice people to come back to the office.

Speaker 1:

And what we found in the article we're talking about is right, how inequitable that can be right and especially as we've come out of pandemic times, everybody went remote, people didn't leave their houses for weeks on end or maybe that was just me and we got used to it and there's plenty of studies and different things out there to show that productivity is still great right, it's different by industry, culture of organizations. They get it. But the equity of it right, especially when it comes to working parents, women in the workforce and especially those with small children. Having that flexibility in a working environment makes a huge difference and that whole back. There's a lot of resistance to it at the moment, especially as organizations. You know you and I have worked with people at organizations where we've gone through return to office and people have left right. They've gone for other jobs that have been like no, you had people that moved during the pandemic and then had to move back to somewhere where there's an office right and kind of like a soft land and so really like understanding that a flexible work environment is an equity issue, right, it's the big thing up front is like you have to understand it is and the impact that it has on families.

Speaker 1:

As a country, as an economy, as organizations, we want to support families Eventually, right, and we want to take a cynical approach to it. That's where your future will come from. We need people to be able to have families, have stable families, and we've gotten to a place where kind of the expectation is households are dual income, right. So you know that was the decision right that people constantly have to make it's. You know, part of the reason we got into this space, and especially in talking about the tax credits, is to encourage organizations to more support those working families. But there's a you know there's still a lot of skepticism right around remote work. It's a little intangible, it hasn't existed, especially in some of the industries. You know that it made its way into during the pandemic and leaders are struggling with, you know, a bit of that change at times.

Speaker 2:

So, it's yeah, go ahead, no I was going to say in the article and we can link to it. It's unfortunate that fights a bunch of studies, things from McKinsey and so forth, but the underlying case for it is that it has social and there's a social and moral imperative for the case for flexible work. And one of the studies that McKinsey that it states is 90% of women want the ability to work remotely, including fully remote, hybrid work option, and with that have experienced an increased sense of belonging, greater psychological safety and, thanks to less unstructured time with colleagues, fewer microaggressions. I mean, the case is there. I think it certainly is a cultural thing coming from the top and this is just our way of continuing to be an ally and pointing those into the right direction of some of this research.

Speaker 2:

So this is in the Fortune magazine. There's the stat that I that I claimed was from in one of the McKinsey reports and I'll certainly link to it. But there's also a quote that was in the article and I'll read it because it basically defined this whole segment of flexible work. So it says flexible work practices, when utilized by both men, by both women and men, allow more women to ascend a meaningful leadership and more men to engage in meaningful caregiving. This is a triple win. It's great for the business bottom line, it's great for solving gender inequities around pay and advancement and it answers the mail for a lot of men who want to engage more fully as a partner. I mean, bring all those three together. I think it's a triple win.

Speaker 1:

So is I mean and speaking from you know again just the dad side of it. You know, if I didn't have the opportunity to work from home, you know at times like it would be hard, especially with you know things get busy like it's difficult to be there and be present and you know it's something that's important to both of us. So always going to advocate for greater flexibility and good to see that. You know there's been a lot out there about return to office and you know productivity, you know some things that I would consider a bit more dubious and clings like this is very solid information that really supports the direction that I think naturally we're going to end up in. It's a question of how long we fight it and how many people we heard along the way trying to fight it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean I'm feeling, certainly this last couple of years, switching from an employer market to an employee market. I mean there's the bait left and right, but I did. I fundamentally have been an entrepreneur and so I've had some of the luxuries of being able to choose where I'd want to work. But I'm also seeing, when I've talked to front line work, hourly workers, they also have a similar mentality. They get to choose where they're going to work and the flexibility stuff also plays into some of those corporate positions. They're starting to and maybe they've always done this but starting to ask themselves, starting to put the options in their hands, and I think it's I like it, I like the big round. Swell, that's happening. So more power to everybody. This is our way again of just trying to share some of the insights and research that's out there.

Speaker 2:

Now, going into the main topic our podcast here is all about childcare tax credits, how to take advantage of them.

Speaker 2:

But when we talk to employers and we talk to HR leaders, there's a gap between where they're at today with the problem and how to actually get a childcare benefit put in place. I've talked with several organizations that have said this is the right thing to do, and that's kind of all that they need, because they hear some of the stories that we just mentioned. They get it and they see it. In other organizations, I've had it go the opposite, which is, I need to see an exact financial return, what we expect, and in order to do that, you kind of have to work backwards, and so this is our way of helping arm you. If you're looking to make a case for childcare benefits to your manager, your boss, vp, level C, level, cfo, there's a couple of different ways to do this and there's a couple of different steps, and for those also that will be watching on YouTube, I'm going to share my screen on a couple of spreadsheets that we've put together. So, doug, let's talk about the first step calculating turnover costs.

Speaker 1:

I mean every organization, I think, looks at this a little differently. But I think there's one of the things we always endeavor to do when we look at this is be conservative but try to be as accurate as we can. And there's different ways to look at it. Without context, right, because a lot of times we don't have context, we don't have insight into exactly how an organization does this, and so when we look at it, we can look at the average annual salary, we can drive that down to weekly, and then we can look at the way I like to look at is time to hire right? Is it going to factor into it? And also time to productivity right. And time to productivity is something in my experience of being in the HR.

Speaker 1:

The HCM space for a long time tends not to get factored in because it's a little bit of a softer cost. But it's a legitimate cost because you have to train, you have to onboard. Just because that person's shut up on their first day doesn't mean that you actually have that person ramped to capacity right, and this varies by position, by industry. But to factor that in right. So time to hire, how long are you down that resource right, and then how long, once you find that resource, are they up to speed right and proficient? Right? They hit that kind of first plateau of proficiency and onboarding. You add those two timeframes together, you know the weekly cost and you can multiple those. You can get your exit cost. Now this can vary wildly, right Like across different positions and seniority, but it's good to have a holistic place to start and I think this is like the simplest way to look at it through that view.

Speaker 2:

Yep. So for those that are watching on YouTube, the formula here average annual salary divided by six weeks, that'll get you your weekly average salary and you multiply that by the number of weeks to find a new hire, plus the weeks to 100% productivity. Multiply those together to give you an employee exit cost. Another way to do it that I've seen is you simply take 50% of their salary. Now I've tested this Doug with the model and formula that we have versus what I've been given from clients and prospects and folks in the industry, and it's actually roughly about correct, and so the formula way is an interesting way to do it. I think it gives somebody a little bit more. It gives somebody a little bit more. What's the word? Well, on the other hand, help me out here A little bit more detail, a little bit more flexibility.

Speaker 1:

And right like you tweak things, you want to have it as a weighted average. Right Like you can run as many lines of this as you need to for different levels of position. So it helps. Now to your point. Right, the broad stroke may get you in the ballpark and that may be good enough. So I think a lot of it comes to variability.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, another way. I've seen people do it too. So first option, three different ways. First ways formula there's a formula we put together. The next way is the general 50% of salary. The next is the cohort percent of salary. So it's basically the general, which is 50% of salary. But you're now taking into account that, the simple fact that it costs more to replace a senior level employee versus a frontline employee, and so the way that we've seen this be done is take your cohorts of employees, generally entry level, mid-level, senior level In a restaurant industry it may be front of house, back of house, store management, corporate employee and then you would take the average salary of each of those position and then you would have a sliding scale of the percent of salary to replace.

Speaker 2:

And I'll give some examples At the high high end, to replace, say, a senior C level, it could be almost 400% of their annual salary. On the entry level, what we've typically seen is between $2,000 and $8,000. So that may be like 25%, 30% of salary. Mid it may be 100%, 80%, 120%, and so this just allows you to take each of those cohorts and break it out. First off, break it out and then you could do an average across them. But this is kind of another way to look at it, to be a little bit more detailed than hey, we're just going to take 50% of salary, and so one of these ways is ultimately get into a number. Now, a shortcut is, if you have this number already, that's great, you can use that. I would maybe also do it these other ways, so that you can kind of have a scenario by saying hey, we factored it three different ways. We took a general approach, we did a formula base, we did cohort and then we also used our number. And they're in and around the same. One thing I've learned talking with C levels is they love scenarios, they love ranges instead of exact numbers. Keep that in mind. Second step, then, is to get your current turnover rate and then so your second step after you. Now you have a turnover cost if you want to get your current turnover rate, and then you want to get a turnover rate for organizations that, after they implement a childcare benefit, what is the decrease? And I'll give a couple of examples You're going to need these basically three numbers in order then to calculate what an ROI would look like, and again, those on YouTube.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to be able to show you this, and so I will switch over to a spreadsheet that I put together, and there's two components to this. First is just the data and the core calculations, and I used our formula model. If you want this copy of this, I am happy to send it to you. I'm going to walk through kind of how we've thought about it. So this model is essentially, let's just say, we have an organization, they have two locations, and so what we've done is we've broken out each location and then we did all locations. So in this case you're going to have each of the formula elements on the left.

Speaker 2:

So the average annual salary at location one, with 52 weeks per year, which gives you an average weekly salary of $961. We're estimating that weeks to find a new hire is 6.4. And then weeks to 100% productivity is 12. So that means that the total weeks to productivity is 18.4. And so the simple formula is basically total weeks to productivity times your average weekly salary. That gives you $17,692.31. So that's using the formula.

Speaker 2:

Now if you just said, hey, it costs 50% to replace the employee, well, 50% of $50,000 is $25,000. So you can see, you're in and around $18,000 to $25,000. It's not exact, but it's very, very close and so I did that out of location. You can do that at all locations if you want to get really, really granular. Or you can do a model where it just looks that all locations are all employees. So in this case, in this example, the average salary was 63,000. That puts the average weekly at 1,211. The weeks to hire across the organization was only nine. The weeks to productivity is still 12, so the total weeks to productivity is 21. Employee to cost is 25,000. If you just say the general approach 50%, that's 31,000. Again, you're relatively in the range of doing it this way.

Speaker 1:

So now that you know, Right, like you do have some variability there. Right, there's granularity in it and it's easy to kind of tweak that for different positions. Right, it's good to look at both together.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you can even then say, okay, well, let's take the average of both locations If you don't have all locations. The average of both locations was actually about 23,000 exit costs. So again you're in and around the range. Again, keep in mind, good advice that I've gotten is, when we talk with executives, they love thinking in scenarios and they love thinking in ranges. So now that we have our exit costs, I'm now switching over to the ROI calculation, and so the way that I broke this out was in many cases, employers, especially now, they've never done a childcare benefit. They aren't sure the value of it, and so they're a little bit skeptical about putting their whole foot in the water. That's the saying I hear. They want to take a little bit less risky approach and they want to do some level of proof of concept, the proof of value.

Speaker 2:

So, I put together a scenario here where, let's say, you work in an organization that's a little bit, they want to see some results before fully investing.

Speaker 2:

That's typically the trend that I've seen is yes, we'll certainly invest in this. I just want to see and so there's a couple of components that you're going to want that I broke out here. So kind of above row 13 here, that's the pilot analysis proof of concept. And then I put, well, hey, maybe we're going to expand this by 10 times. So in this case, this is an organization that has 25,000 employees. Let's say that the pilot proof of concept is 2,500. So here's how you think about it.

Speaker 2:

There's two different sections here without a childcare benefit and then with a childcare benefit. So you're going to want to map both sides of it. The reason why you're going to do this is because the idea behind this is you're going to have a turnover rate, and in this case we have it at 39% Without childcare benefits. You have a current turnover rate. The flip side of that is you can expect, when you launch a child care benefit, that that turnover rate is going to go down. This is something that Doug and I have seen it kind of ranges based off the industry, but I'm actually giving an example of a client that we work with that saw their turnover drop from 39% to about 9%. You're going to want to know what is your current turnover percent now.

Speaker 2:

And then, if you're evaluating the child care benefit, what are they claiming that they're going to be able to reduce their turnover by? I think in this case it was like 7x. So here's how to do the math. You have 2,500 employees without child care benefits. Let's say 10% of them opt in. That means you're going to have 250 employees opt in. They normally would turn over at a 39%. That means the number of employees expected to turn over is 39%. Is sorry, 39%? This Okay, it's 98.

Speaker 1:

We're dealing just with the cohort, like the people in need. So when we look at organizations, the ballpark is around a third of employees have children under the age of 12. It varies by industry. We're going to see it higher in healthcare. We're going to see it lower in manufacturing in some places though not always, Yep, but it'll be a little bit different. So that's the cohort. We're measuring this on.

Speaker 2:

Yep, and I'm just making some quick little changes here because I want to also show you here that when you're in this template, you can make changes. So we have 2,500 employees. We think 10% are going to opt in again. This is low. When you actually add a subsidy it goes significantly higher. Let's say 39%. That is the company's turnover rate as of today. So therefore, out of the 2,598 are going to turn over again, based off of our formula, it costs $25,442 to replace them. That means that these employees cost the organization about $2.5 million.

Speaker 2:

So now you have to contrast that with okay, if we have a child care benefit, what was the impact on turnover? Again, this is a real-life organization where they was able to see their turnover drop from those that opted in from 39% to 9%. So now you do the same math where you say okay, well, those that have the child care benefit, the same amount of people are going to opt in 250, but those that opt in and utilize the child care benefit are actually turning over at a lesser rate. Then you put 9%, which means only 23 employees would turn over. The cost to replace is the same. Now what this is saying is that we're not saying that child care benefits wipes out turnover completely. We're saying that those that do opt in to child care benefit are turning over at a lesser rate and for all the variety of reasons, you're actually helping support their foundation. And so there still is-.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, across industries and organizations, typically between the range of four to eight, acts that population. When we put a program in place, they stay. Supporting the family is such an important part of this and on the business side, it drives the ROI. So there's a lot of data out there to showcase that this is it, and we've seen it ourselves in continually running these studies.

Speaker 2:

Yep. So without a child care benefit the turnover replacement costs about 2.5 million. With a child care benefit, the turnover replacement costs is about 572,000. So the net savings is about 1.9 million. Now, in order to really figure out the ROI and there's a couple of different ways to factor ROI, whether it's a percent, it's a return on investment percent. Another way I love doing it is a return on every dollar in Beth.

Speaker 2:

And so on the right side here we just make some assumptions. Let's assume that the program costs $100,000. And so one other thing we've already talked about is that for a lot of employers in the US they get a tax credit. So for a program like this you can get between 10 and 25% back. It's Form 8882. And so the after tax credit program costs is $90,000. So you take your program costs for the pilot minus by the estimated tax credit, that's going to give you $90,000. So this is going to then give you a net turnover cost savings. So this is your savings from turnover, by measuring again those with the child care benefit and those without, and then adding or subtracting the cost that it costs to run the program, and then it's a division. It's a division problem here, and so what we're actually seeing is that if the program costs $100,000, and again, this is anything in the spreadsheet in yellow is actually editable. So if you want this, feel free to ping us.

Speaker 2:

And so then this is saying that at this price and at these returns, the return on investments is about 1,920%, which is also meaning for every dollar invested, you're going to see a $20 return. And now if you actually look at columns L and M again, executives love looking at scenarios and then also looking at ranges, and so what we put here was then we'll take 75% of that. Let's say that there's a margin of error of 25% or even 50%. There's still a lot of significant return on investment. So even if you said, you know what, I just don't believe these like, let's cut it in half. Even cutting it in half, you have a 960% return on investment for $10 for every $1 investment. This is one way to get to some pretty detailed numbers on expectation.

Speaker 1:

Now we came to the practice of reducing this because we get a challenge.

Speaker 1:

You're always going to have a conversation.

Speaker 1:

We present ROI, it's going to be okay what's not in here, and ultimately we want to make sure there's buffer.

Speaker 1:

We know that there's things that can be correlated, maybe not caused by the program, but we're focusing just on turnover cost in the program. But the thing that I think is important to call out, right again, we can reduce this down, but it is more likely that we are understating the impact than overstating the impact. And the reason why is this is not going to take into account, right, the impact on, or at least all of the impact on, absenteeism right, and helping with childcare and what I can do for the same cohort, presenteeism right, like the social aspects of it. You know, employee satisfaction, internal, external branding of giving support within the community, reducing time to hire all of these things like we've seen be in box of these programs and then all get factored it. So this is looking at just through one lens and the impact that it has. So it's incredibly compelling in my mind, even when you start to reduce that, because there's probably more things you could add in, but it's just not easy to get to.

Speaker 2:

And so for this analysis again, I took this as this first section up here is an organization, 2,500 employees. What would that look like? But if the organization was much larger and you wanted to break it out into two sections, you would do 2,500 employees. This is for your pilot. The goal of the pilot is really to get the data to prove that turnover can drop once you add a program like this and you have some kind of hypothesis here on the numbers.

Speaker 2:

Now the other scenario you'd want to show and have an anchor to is well now, if those numbers hold true, what does it look like across the organization? So, going from 2,500 employees, 2,500 employees, if you hold that the opt-in is still 10% and the turnover is still going to be the same, then you just run the math. The program obviously I just put here as it would cost 10 times the amount, but again not sure what it would end up being you would deduct tax credit to give you an after tax credit program cost. Therefore, then you're going to get your net turnover cost savings and in this model it's basically saying the net turnover cost is about $18 million or a $1 million investment Disclaimer here I don't know what the cost would actually be for a program like this. It is something we can figure out, right, doug.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we certainly can, but it just goes to show that the scale is there right, and I doubt it.

Speaker 1:

I think the big things to take away is again, consistently right One of us, but also in our own experience we've seen this right an incredible impact on turnover among this cohort of working parents and our organization, but also help with a lot of things outside of that right when we talk about even absenteeism, right Time to hire but this is a, I think, the easiest one to understand. Organizations are typically comfortable with the concept of turnover cost and uncomfortable with the number that's associated with turnover cost, and it's a great thing to attach to and get a great, you know, a lot of independent data up there as well showing the impact and how meaningful this is for working parents, especially in frontline populations.

Speaker 2:

Yep. And so when looking at this 25,000 employee group again, if those turnovers numbers are accurate, what this is basically saying is that, at an employee at the cost of 25,000 and at a turnover of 39,000 or 39%, I mean, it's costing the organization $24 million.

Speaker 1:

So if you can save, any.

Speaker 2:

What's that?

Speaker 1:

That's the uncomfortable number.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's the uncomfortable number, yep, and then you know if you can reduce it by any way, shape or form, you're going to be saving the organization money which we already know. Providing childcare benefits will do that proven, we've proven it. And so in this this is an example $19 million saving I mentioned. I did a program ROI analysis and I just said $1 million. I just actually increased it and said, well, let's just do five, though it's still a significant return on investment 800% or $9 for every $1. And then again shop that in half 400% return on investment, $4.50 for every $1.

Speaker 2:

One thing kind of to wrap this up to is it's important to know and it's something that you know, it is a challenge to get to, but at what level of return on investment is actually going to interest your executives. Now, again, there's the emotional tie to this, which is this is the right thing to do. It's a social and moral imperative, it's something that's foundational to all of our employees that have kiddos. But if you need to do it on a numbers basis, this is a spreadsheet that we put together that's going to help you at least start building that, and a lot of it is editable too, so you can just go in anywhere that there's a yellow, just fill in some numbers and you're going to start seeing the impact that this could have. So I will make sure to link this in the LinkedIn article and make it visible to everybody If you want us to walk you through this as an example for your organization. Doug's calendar is wide open.

Speaker 1:

And open up the time in the world man.

Speaker 2:

And we really appreciate you listening. So let's cue the music and goodbye from Connecticut.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Kansas City.

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