Employer research on caregiver support has generally focused on a narrow question: does a given benefit, parental leave, childcare assistance, keep employees from leaving. That is a meaningful question, but it is not the same question as whether those employees continue to advance within the organization. Retention and advancement are related but distinct outcomes, and conflating them risks overstating what a benefits package alone accomplishes.
Nicklaus Children’s Health System, one of the companies named this month as the Most Loved Workplaces® for Parents and Caregivers with a workforce that is about 75% women, offers a useful structural example because it pairs both layers explicitly. Named caregiver benefits, childcare assistance and paid parental leave, address whether an employee can remain employed through a demanding life stage. Separately, mentorship and leadership development programs specifically aimed at advancing women’s careers address whether that same employee continues to move upward afterward.
This two-layer structure matters because a caregiver benefit, on its own, can plausibly produce a workforce that is retained but plateaued, women who stay with the organization but do not advance into senior roles at the same rate as their tenure would predict. A leadership development layer, absent underlying caregiver support, faces the opposite problem: advancement pathways that a workforce cannot access because retention itself is the barrier.
The organization’s approach to continuously revising strategic plans based on direct employee feedback is also relevant here. A static benefits package, however well designed at launch, does not necessarily remain well matched to a workforce’s needs over time. An organization that treats its caregiver and advancement support as an ongoing feedback loop, rather than a fixed policy, is structurally better positioned to catch and correct that drift.
For researchers and practitioners, the implication is that employer brand and workforce research in this category should measure both dimensions separately, retention outcomes and advancement outcomes, rather than treating a caregiver benefit’s existence as evidence that both problems have been solved.
Further research from Best Practice Institute will examine whether organizations pairing named caregiver benefits with explicit advancement programs, as Nicklaus does, show measurably different promotion rates for women compared to organizations offering caregiver benefits alone.
