Corporate Efforts

What some companies are doing to accommodate nursing moms by Robina Riccitiello

Breastfeeding is becoming an accepted - and sometimes encouraged - part of the work place, thanks to a number of forward-thinking companies that have taken steps to make a new mother's return to work a positive experience.

Corporate lactation programs were unheard of a decade ago, but now hundreds of companies have them and many, many others are looking at starting nursing-friendly programs. The programs vary widely, but the common goal is to ensure that a mother returning to work can continue to breastfeed, for her baby's well-being and for her own peace of mind.

"It's a really tight labor market. Anything a company can do to add benefits to an employee's working life helps to attract people and to retain people," says Cathy Murphy, director of compensation and benefits at Genentech, a South San Francisco biotech firm. "We spend lots and lots of dollars getting people trained in our ways of doing business. It's a cost-effective benefit to have them return to the same job as happy, contented workers."

At CIGNA Corp., the insurance and benefits giant based in Philadelphia, more than 1,000 women have participated in a program that encourages women to breastfeed for as long as they can. Lactation rooms are available - or soon will be - at 250 CIGNA sites across the country. Recognizing that women make up about 75 percent of CIGNA's 41,000-strong work force, executives decided to expand their family-friendly policies so women would want to return to work after having a baby.

"We want them to continue to work with us and be productive and we recognize that, for many women, continuing to breastfeed when they return to work has been an obstacle," says Victoria Dickson, a nurse practitioner and director of the CIGNA Working Well program.

Research has shown that breastfed babies tend to be healthier and the American Academy of Pediatrics recently began advising women to nurse their babies for at least a year. Dickson says CIGNA officials recognized that encouraging women to breastfeed could have a positive effect on both the mother and her child - and the company.

"If babies are healthier, the mothers will be healthier and will have less absenteeism. It makes sense from a health and productivity standpoint," Dickson says.

Preliminary results of a study CIGNA is conducting with UCLA show that 70 percent of the CIGNA employees who go through the Working Well Moms program are still breastfeeding at six months and a third are still nursing at one year, Dickson says. By comparison, only 20 percent of the employees who planned to breastfeed, but did not participate in the program, were still nursing at six months and only 2 percent kept nursing to one year.

CIGNA spends about $80,000 a year providing lactation rooms and pumps for women across the country and spends about $200 for each employee that takes part in the Working Well Moms program.

CIGNA employees "absolutely love the program," Dickson says. "We have qualified experts who can help guide them through some of the hurdles of returning to work, like pumping and storing milk. We think that translates into health and productivity, but also a general feeling of well-being and less stress about being back in the work place."

Anna Erickson White, a partner at the San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, is breastfeeding her second child and plans to continue pumping and nursing when she returns to work when the baby is four months old. Erickson White breastfed her older daughter, who is now five, for 11 months, through a combination of pumping and visiting her daughter's nearby day care center, where she could breastfeed during the work day.

"It takes a little bit of time out, but generally it didn't get in the way," Erickson White says of the pumping process, noting that her secretary also continued to breastfeed her sons - and pump at work - after returning from maternity leave. "The firm is very supportive of working mothers."

In fact, Morrison & Foerster - as well as Genentech and CIGNA - made Working Mother magazine's list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. Nearly all the companies on that list offered lactation programs and many also offered access to a lactation consultant or an information hotline.

For the uninitiated, a lactation room is a private room where a woman can go and pump her breasts one or more times a day. Pumping throughout the day allows mothers to keep up their milk supply and also enables them to save and take home the nutrient-rich milk they have pumped. Many lactation rooms have refrigerators or the companies make another refrigerator available for the breast milk.

In general, each lactation room has just one pump that can be shared by several mothers at different times during the day. Each mother has her own set of plastic accessories that only she uses. The pump itself attaches to the accessories and does not need to be cleaned between uses because only the accessories come into contact with the milk.

Besides offering a lactation room, some companies offer educational programs before the baby is born. Others have nurses or lactation consultants available for their employees.

Arthur Andersen, the Chicago-based accounting firm, has a nurse available at some sites to handle breastfeeding problems and the company has a hotline for nursing mothers to get support or advice. The company provides lactation rooms at most of its offices and supplies pumps in many of them, says Julie Hallinan, a spokeswoman for the firm, which also made Working Mother's Top 100 list.

"Why do we feel it's useful? We want to help everyone, not just working mothers, help integrate their professional and personal lives," Hallinan says. "We also have a number of programs in place that help us enhance our recruitment, retention and advancement of women in the firm and the lactation program supports that," she adds, noting that about half of Arthur Andersen's 25,000 employees in the U.S. are women.

Johnson & Johnson has lactation rooms and an on-site day care center at its New Brunswick, NJ, headquarters. Johnson & Johnson has a company-wide breastfeeding program with lactation rooms at most of its sites across the country and access to lactation consultants.

"It's just one of a whole host of benefits and programs Johnson & Johnson has had in place for many years to help our employees balance their work and family needs," said a spokesman for the company, which was also on the Working Mother Top 100 list. "It helps in recruiting people and it helps in keeping people here."

At Genentech, pregnant employees are visited at home before and after they have the baby, and they also can have a breastfeeding specialist visit them, Murphy says.

"We do everything we can to encourage moms to work themselves back into the workforce at a pace that works for them and the baby," says Murphy, who added that when she was a new mother, "you had to be back at a certain date or risk losing your job."

Genentech offers employees help getting daycare and also operates a 250-child day care center near the headquarters office. The company also has lactation rooms and its insurance plan has special services for pregnant women and new mothers.

With CIGNA's Working Well Moms program, pregnant employees are contacted by a lactation consultant before they have their babies, shortly after birth, every two weeks for a set period and then monthly, Dickson says. For pregnant employees, CIGNA offers seminars, tips sheets and a 40-page book on breastfeeding. For participants in the Working Well Moms program, CIGNA also supplies the accessories needed to use a hospital-grade breast pump and a carrying bag with a cooler to bring the milk home to their babies. Women who travel for CIGNA can buy a "Pump In Style" - a breast pump in a briefcase-like bag - for a discounted price.

Gymboree, the children's music and clothing company, has lactation rooms - Gymboree calls them Gym Mom rooms - at its Burlingame, Calif. headquarters, where 250 people work. The company doesn't offer lactation rooms for its 6,500 store employees, because mall real estate is too expensive to set the space aside, says Gymboree spokeswoman Jordan Goldstein. But store employees have the benefit of being able to arrange flexible schedules so they can plan their time around their children, she says. At headquarters, the company also offers preferred parking and pagers to expectant mothers in their last trimester.

CIGNA officials hope the yearlong study with UCLA will document clear cost-savings, in terms of healthier babies and fewer absences by nursing mothers. The study, due to be released next month, also will look at how CIGNA's Working Well Moms program affected the mother's and baby's illness rates, the mother's absenteeism, how long she chose to breastfeed, and productivity rates relating to absences.

For the CIGNA study, researchers are trying to gauge how much impact the program has on breastfeeding rates. Preliminary results show that even women who were not sure about breastfeeding went on to nurse for several months after taking part in the Working Well Moms program. Forty-three percent of the women who took part in the program, but said they were "uncertain" as to whether they wanted to breastfeed were still breastfeeding when they returned to work six to eight weeks after birth. Of the women in the control group, who did not participate in the Working Well Moms program, none of the women who said they were "uncertain" were breastfeeding when they returned to work. Two-thirds of the program participants who rated themselves "somewhat committed" to breastfeeding were breastfeeding when they returned to work, while less than a quarter of the "somewhat committed" women who didn't try the Working Well Moms program were still nursing six to eight weeks after birth.