A generous childcare benefit helped this ice cream company’s employees climb the career ladder

While we all scream for ice cream, at least employees at Seattle-based Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream don’t need to fret over childcare for their screaming babies and children, thanks to a dynamic childcare benefit that dynamically changed the culture and opportunity at the small regional chain.

According to founder and CEO Molly Moon Neitzel, a new generous childcare benefit began with an observation and question: Why weren’t some of the company’s most talented employees moving up the career ladder?

“We’ve realized that lots of young parents weren’t really climbing the career ladder at Molly Moon’s, and I started to see that amazing talent in our company were staying in the entry-level positions, scoopers and ice cream makers, making our starting wages,” Neitzel said.

Neitzel told a room of HR professionals at HR Brew’s Total Rewards Equation event this month in New York City that she had noticed talented employees—many of them young women and parents—across her dozen stores weren’t applying for roles higher on the career ladder “when they were obviously talented and seemed ambitious.”

“I realized it was a childcare barrier,” Neitzel said. “I have two young kids, and I thought about the cost of childcare...What if we just got rid of the financial barrier?”

Rather than partner with a specific childcare provider, Molly Moon’s offered a flexible reimbursement program designed around flexibility to meet the needs of its employees’ unpredictable schedules. The company offers $1,000 per month, per child, from birth through kindergarten as a childcare stipend, and $4,200 annually from kindergarten through age 12 to help cover afterschool care or summer camps.

Employees can use the childcare stipend to pay for a night with a babysitter, arrange care from a family member, or register for daycare or a day camp. They’re required to submit receipts for reimbursement, offered monthly.

The flexibility was intentional. Shift work can make traditional childcare arrangements difficult to manage, Neitzel said, so she wanted her employees to be able to use the benefit however best served their needs.

About 10% of Molly Moon’s roughly 190-person workforce uses the benefit, she told HR pros at the event, but added that essentially all of the employees in the company who are parents use it.

HR Brew previously reported on the first year Molly Moon’s offered childcare benefits, in 2023, when it cost the company $32,000, or about 0.2% of its annual sales, according to company execs.

Neitzel boasted the program generated an average of 128% annually in ROI in the more than three years she’s been offering the perk. She tapped Moms First and Boston Consulting Group to help understand the program’s impact. An internal employee survey and ROI calculator incorporates measures including reducing turnover, productivity, absences, tardiness, and employee morale.

She also pointed to five managers, who began their careers as seasonal scoopers or ice cream makers, on 10–12 weeks summer contracts, and were able to grow their careers inside the company. She also claimed four families were able to grow thanks to the program.

It’s paying off in other ways, too. Neitzel pointed to reduced employee callouts and absences, lower turnover, and greater productivity across the company, which is not limited to employees who are parents. The benefit has evolved into a marker of human-centered business strategies that employees feel in the company culture. It’s also impacted recruiting, which at an ice cream shop in the Pacific Northwest, is already a challenging and cyclical endeavor.

“Once we added this childcare benefit, we got a lot more ‘grown ups’ applying for these jobs, which is really nice because grown ups show up to work differently, and our whole team shows up differently now with more purpose,” she said. “They understand that these are life-changing jobs, and everyone seems more in it to make the world better, one scoop at a time, which is our mission.”