Workplace family planning benefits are fortunately becoming more prevalent and more comprehensive. One of the first significant milestones dates back to 1993 when the Family Medical Leave Act was passed, providing job protection with unpaid leave for health and family matters. Still, family benefits had a lot to advance and fortunately we are starting to see trends to support this. States and cities have begun to adopt Paid Family Leave policies, providing financial assistance for needed time off.
For some fortunate employees, forward-thinking companies have started to implement even more encompassing policies and benefits. These range from pre-family planning, to fertility care, fully paid family leave for both parents, and most recent addressing the needs of the fourth trimester, or the time from childbirth through an infants’ three-month birthday.
Below are five innovative family planning benefits that are offered to employees at some of those forward-thinking companies. The list is certainly is not exhaustive, but paints a really good picture of the type of services that are now available for companies to provide to their teams.
Celmatix – Family planning workshops to educate employees and drive proactive reproductive health management. Their programs help to guide decision making for family planning now, or in the future. They also have products to support genetic testing and a data analytics platform to help optimize patient management and counseling.
Lucy – Support services for parents and parents-to-be. All users receive a comprehensive welcome kit and engage in a maternity/paternity welcome call. They help employees transition from work to becoming a parent and back to work. They also provide 1-on-1 sessions with experts in birth preparation, parent & career support, newborn care, lactation consultation, sleep and more.
Carrot – Services to support employees general and financial needs for fertility care such as egg freezing, IVF or LGBTQ+ family-building. Allows companies to self-fund a fertility program.
Pre-conceive – Classes and consults in fertility, pregnancy, & parenthood.
UrbanSitter – On-demand babysitters and nannies with social connections to reflect past performance and breadth of experience.
Although not all companies have the budgets to support the implementation of comprehensive family planning services, there are many complimentary resources that are available to share with employees. One of the most well-known is Planned Parenthood. Although they get a lot of publicity for birth control, they actually have a wealth of information available for family planning. Resolve, operated by the National Infertility Association, is also a useful information center for everything fertility related.
An important first step is to make family planning a priority for your organization and then you will be able to match a solution that fits within your company’s budget. Our Wellness Team is available to share more information about Family Planning services and tools. Please contact us here to learn more.
