How To Support Working Parents with Carly Zakin

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Carly Zakin. Carly is the co- founder and CEO of theSkimm. If you have ever read the Daily Skimm, like I know millions of people who do, that came from the mind of Carly and her co- founder. So Carly, great to see you.

Carly Zakin: Great to see you, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk about the new initiative that you've launched recently, #ShowUsYourChildCare. So obviously, the childcare crisis is not a new issue for working parents, but you're really spotlighting that it's not just a social issue, it's an economic issue, it's a business issue. So I'd love for you to give a super quick description of the initiative and then tell our audience three things that every CEO needs to know and can do to better support working parents.

Carly Zakin: Sure. Well, thanks for having me on the show. Happy to be here. So #ShowUsYourChildCare actually stemmed from something we did last year called# ShowUsYourLeave, which is still going on, but basically raising awareness around the lack of, first, paid family leave, and now the lack of actually childcare support. And so at first, both of these initiatives started as our community telling us what wasn't working for them and sharing their stories. And we took both of those initiatives and really turned it into a call to action for employers to actually show us what their policies look like in a very transparent way. And #ShowUsYourChildCare, my co- founder Danielle and I launched in partnership with Moms First and Reshma Saujani. So really excited to be able to talk about that today. As for what are the three things that every CEO should know about this? I think it's hard to narrow down to three, but I think what I would say is-

Matt Blumberg: You can do more than three. It just needs to-

Carly Zakin: No, I Skimm. I'm going to Skimm it for you. I just got to get my talking points. All right. So one, it's an issue that adversely affects women. It's pushing them out of the workforce. We cannot say that we care about women in leadership roles if we are not actually helping them stay in the workforce. And two, we all know how costly recruiting becomes. You're actually taking on a burden of cost for employers when you have to then replace those women. So none of that actually makes sense. We need to look at this not as a personal problem for women, or I would love to talk to you about why this is a moral issue, but it's not. It is an economic issue. Women are influencing 95% of household decisions. They influence over $3.5 trillion annually in spend. If we push them out of the workforce, we are really putting our economy at risk. If we discourage them from having children, we're going to end up in a society with a declining birth rate. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in that one.

Matt Blumberg: Yep. Right. It turns out growth is good, not just for people but for countries.

Carly Zakin: Yes. So this is an economic issue and one that every business should pay attention to. And finally, I would say the third thing that every CEO should be aware of is that in order to make systemic change, we need our male counterparts to join us in this conversation and this fight. And this isn't just me saying that as a female founder and CEO, this is me saying that as somebody who we have talked to our community, we have talked to the millions of women who Skimm, who represent today's workforce, and one of the top things they care about is actually saying, " I need my male counterpart to help step up and advocate for this change."

Matt Blumberg: Right. So what's something actionable that a CEO can do? Look, I understand if you're a Fortune 500 CEO, you can put childcare centers in your office parks. If you run a startup or you run even a scale up, a growth stage company, a company the size of theSkimm, a few employees, how do you action this for your employees?

Carly Zakin: So there's a lot of different ways. At theSkimm, we really, especially post- COVID, really started to redefine culture as not just what does our office look like, but actually what are the policies that you use to support your employees? So I'll tell you a few things we do at theSkimm. One, we stopped calling leave maternity leave, we call it paid family leave. And we expect and encourage anyone having a child, however that child is born, should take their full leave. And that's a huge part of this. And so at theSkimm, we offer all parents 18 weeks. We are a company that, as you said, is a startup. We're not a Fortune 500 company. We can do that; other companies can do that. One of our benefits that we actually have as part of our benefits plan is working with a company called Vivvi, which is an amazing company. I think you share an office space maybe with them or they're in your building, coincidentally. But they offer amazing childcare support that our employees love and really take advantage of. And then finally, the third thing I would say that we do is we offer things like unlimited time off. We offer things like making sure that we have a hybrid and flexible work policy. These are things that help our working parents stay working and also are able to be home. And I think making adjustments like not just making a happy hour at five o'clock, but turning it into a lunch, because guess what? People have to go pick up their kids. And so all of these things are both little and big ways that you show your employee population, " I get it. You have this to deal with as well."

Matt Blumberg: That's right. And those are things that you can do when you have two employees.

Carly Zakin: Exactly. This is not such a resource heavy initiative here.

Matt Blumberg: I'd love off to the side, an introduction to the CEO of that company.

Carly Zakin: I would happily do that.

Matt Blumberg: Thank you so much, Carly, for being here today. This is a really important issue to highlight and super actionable for CEOs. So thank you.

Carly Zakin: Thank you.