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8 Unlocking the Potential of Parents in the Contingent Workforce | Custom Research Powered by SIA |© Crain Communications Inc | All Rights Reserved | September 2022 SECTION 1 The Business Case for Parents in Contingent Work Why does it matter whether companies work to attract parents to their contingent workforces? Our research segmented survey respondents into two groups: • Leaders, who follow one or more advanced practices regarding contingent parents, and • Followers, who do not pursue any of these practices. Each represented roughly half of the organizations interviewed. In fact, although the definition of Leader was an organization that follows at least one practice, the Leaders in the survey generally follow more than one. On average, Leaders rated their organization as "extremely capable" on 3.7 out of 14 advanced practices identified through in-depth expert interviews. These practices fell broadly into four categories: opportunity, empathy, training, and flexibility. They are explored in more depth in Section 6: Key Capabilities of Advanced Practitioners. Using performance to build a business case The key to the business case for building a more inclusive workplace for parents: Leaders outperformed Followers on every measure of success. These measures include return on investment for their contingent workforce program, attraction of quality candidates, and redeployment of candidates at the end of their assignment. "You hear all these companies saying, 'Bring your whole self to work,'" said a contingent workforce program manager at a tech company. But if a company doesn't appear to value parents or understand their needs, it's hard for these workers to ask for the flexibility they need. "They are looking for companies that understand their situation, have empathy, and allow for some kind of flexibility in the workday — an understanding culture that allows them to do what they need to do and also do their job." Leaders, whose companies are taking concrete steps to attract and retain parents among their contingent workforce, had a number of advantages. The largest gaps between Leaders and Followers came in ROI and the impact of parents. More than 30% of Leaders receive a high ROI from parents in the contingent workforce, compared with just about 6% of Followers. Likewise, 28% of Leaders — but just 5% of Followers — find parents to be a high-performing addition to their workforce. The Business Case for Parents in Contingent Work When you hire a mom, "you are not just doing a transactional piece of business, you're changing someone's life." – Contingent workforce program manager at a tech company