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00:00Now the pandemic is causing an unprecedented childcare crisis in the United States as schools grapple with reopening plants and daycares shut their doors and keep them shut. Parents are left to figure out how to do their jobs with their kids literally underfoot. Bank of America says it has a plan to help its employees. Joining us now is Sherry Bronstein head of H.R. at the bank. Sherry talk to us about what you're extending because it really caught my eye the amount that you're giving your workers at the moment to be able to try to find some sort of balance . Yes. Thank you for having me. Just like you said you know we are as we go through this health care crisis. We are trying to ensure we don't also have a child care crisis and our employees need support so that they can serve our customers and clients every day. We've provided over a million days of care so far . Accounting for more than one hundred million dollars in reimbursements to our employees. And that program was scheduled to end on August 15th. So starting next week we've made a decision under Brian's leadership to extend to eligible employees daily child care reimbursements of 75 or 100 dollars depending on their compensation threshold. And that's really so that teammates can continue to hire their own child care. They can hire friends or trusted caregivers maybe someone who worked at a child care center that's not open right now that they know while they're working either at home or in the office. And that's for children up to 12 as well as if you have a child with special needs up to 21. So we thought that was just really important to extend that monetary benefit to the to the majority of our of our teammates so that they can do what they need to do to to help us meet our customer's needs. Yeah sure. And obviously there's a lot of concern here about how long this may drag on and sort of the imbalance that exists for a lot of parents out there right now and trying to juggle the child care needs and of course their own careers. What are you hearing from your employees with regards to what they're asking you and your company to do to sort of I guess help them I guess bridge the gap to whenever that gap finally closes . Yes. So we we extended the benefit I just talked about till the end of the year. You know we're taking this in phases. You know we think that the fall is going to be you know pretty chaotic as you said. And so we've extended that monetary benefit. But we also talked to our parenting caregiver network which is about 10000 of our teammates. And we said what else do you need. And it really outside of the monetary support fell into three categories. One was access to child care and supervision. So working with bright horizons we've secured you know priority access to center based care where it's available but also for school age children accessing learning hubs whether it's Matheny the Ms. Sylvan learning distance learning. So we we're trying to bridge the gap that we know is going to be challenging. So that that's one. The second thing is just continuing to provide resources for children knowing again it's gonna be a varied environment. So for school age children also just providing additional educational resources. We have a partnership with Khan Academy and we're actually going to be expanding some of our own training and development opportunities that we do for our own team to the children. We're going to call it Bank of America Junior Academy. So we'll be providing some afterschool content as well. And then the last thing was really just education. I had one of my own team say to me gosh I need a PHC to figure out where my four kids are going to school in the fall. And so we've been running seminars working with educational experts just trying to help all of our working parents understand exactly what they're dealing with and knowing that it's going to be a very fluid situation. Sherry I know that you're at Bank of America which is great that it's a big corporation which has these resources and the flexibility . Given your experience within H.R. and you mentioned Khan Academy for one how do you recommend that maybe smaller firms who don't have the resources to give 75 or 100 dollars. How would you recommend or what are some ideas to navigate this crisis . Yeah. So I think you know really being creative. So thinking about again what are the online resources that are available that can help with with tutoring. Thinking about how to organize again care while we would love to go back to more you know to more formal ways of you know in in you know in center care. That's gonna be possible in some parts of our country . And it's not going to be possible in other ways. So thinking about ways to safely hire maybe college students that are taking a gap year and just really trying to get creative. But you have to think about what's the monetary aspect. How do you help. They are to the best of your ability what's the access and how do you get creative there. And then whatever you can do to help your your working parents with the education component. And those those are the kind of a couple of different aspects I think no matter how big or small you are . You can really really help support your teammates with .

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BofA to Give Parents Backup Childcare Payments

Sheri Bronstein, Bank of America Chief Human Resources Officer discusses the company giving parents backup child care payments through December. She speaks with Caroline Hyde, Taylor Riggs and Romaine Bostick on "What'd You Miss?" August 14, 2020 (Source: Bloomberg)

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