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Child care problems affect nearly half the American workforce.

One in two workers is a parent, and of those, one in five is single. If they’re married, there’s a 75 percent chance both partners work.

And with the parents away at work, someone has to watch the kids.

In recognition of that, businesses are increasingly creating “family friendly” policies that work around the child care problems those parents face. If they want to attract and keep workers, they have to.

“We know that everybody out there has lots of options,” said Cathleen A. Schmidt, president and CEO of Citizens Bank New Hampshire.

She said the bank’s family friendly policies are a way of making it the best option, not only to potential employees, but current ones as well, she said.

“We’re looking for the very best people to work for Citizens and once we’ve identified them, we want to keep them on board,” she said.

Timken Super Precision, Keene’s second largest employer, runs its machines 24 hours a day. Child care can be a “huge concern” for its approximately 900 employees, both on and off the standard work day, said Human Resources Manager Renee Pecor.

“A lot of what we hear is the cost of child care and so many of our employees will work different shifts than their spouses so they can provide care for their kids,” she said. “If you want to keep these folks as employees, you have to be more flexible.”

Employees may take sick time to care for an ill child and can arrange their work schedules around their child’s pick-up and drop-off times at day care, she said.

Citizens Bank New Hampshire helps defray the high cost of child care for its lower income employees, giving up to $5,000 annually to workers in families earning less than $38,000 a year, Schmidt said.

The bank tackles child care problems less directly — by letting managers schedule around employee needs, with shorter work days and weeks, and even a summer leave-of-absence program for when kids get out of school, she said.

Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene eliminates the child care middle man, mitigating the cost and shortage by running its own center, which is open only to hospital employees.

The recently expanded Children’s Learning Center is owned and subsidized by the hospital, allowing its employees to pay less for care, said Julie F. Green, vice president of human resources.

The hospital also allows for flexible schedules, and employees may put cash accrued on their cafeteria plan toward personal days, Green said.

Not all companies are as progressive, or even aware that child care can be a problem for their employees, said Thomas K. Link.

In 2001, he helped lead a child care task force that, among other things, tried to alert businesses to the child care problems their workers often face, said Link, who is also the spokesman for Cheshire Medical.

He said it worked most of the time.

“As businesses realize that to recruit and retain employees child care is a large and important issue, they’ll be more willing to support it,” he said.

Note: This story ran as a sidebar to the A1 story "The day care dilemma."