Parenting at Work

Summary Most organizations diagnose low benefits adoption as a communication failure. Amrita Bhaumik, VP of HR at Team Car Care — one of the largest Jiffy Lube franchisees, operating over 450 stores — has a harder diagnosis: the programs were never designed for the people being asked to use them. One-size-fits-all benefits are a budget choice. The workforce paying for that choice is the one that d...

Summary When Crunch Fitness's head of people and culture returned from parental leave in 2007, the CEO gave her a choice: delegate most of her role or come back early. She came back—but on her terms. Two days in the office. Three at home. And she never went back to five. That decision, made during the 2008 financial crisis while bonding with her newly adopted daughter, became the foundation of her...

Summary Every year, more than 150,000 early childhood educators leave the profession—a churn rate that directly impacts the 11 million children who depend on stable, high-quality care. Jessica Harrah has spent 20 years at KinderCare, the last decade as Chief People Officer, building systems that treat childcare not as a perk but as baseline infrastructure. Her defining moment came at an anniversar...

Leading with Empathy: Zeta Global’s First CPO on Feedback, Flexibility, and Parenting Summary What does it take to build a high-performance people function from scratch while raising a family?  Candice Chafey, the first-ever Chief People Officer at Zeta Global—and former CPO at Bridgewater Associates and Lehman Brothers—joins Parenting at Work to share how she designs culture and benefits with emp...

Parenting Meets Production: A CHRO’s Playbook for Parental Leave, Safety, and Frontline Flexibility Summary How do you offer flexibility when your business runs on shifts and machines can’t sit idle? Monica Anderton, Chief Human Resources Officer for DS Smith’s North American Packaging & Paper Division and a 2025 Top CHRO Voice in Manufacturing, breaks down what family-friendly HR looks like o...

People Before Policy: CPO Laura Harmon on Flexible Work, Caregiver Leave, and ERG-Led Benefits Summary What happens when your policies promise flexibility but your managers don’t allow it? Laura Harmon, Chief People Officer at One Workplace and longtime HR leader at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Allstate, and Signet Health, explains how to close the gap between policy and lived experience. Shaped by her o...

From Five-Star Hotels to Childcare Nonprofit: Authentic HR and Real-World Benefits Summary What happens when a luxury hospitality veteran applies a five-star service mindset to a mission-driven workforce? Lisseth Zouhbi, Chief Human Resources Officer at the Child Care Resource Center in California, shares how she translates decades in brands like Rosewood, Langham, and Fairmont into an employee ex...

Summary What if the real job of benefits is to remove stress—and create relief—when life happens? Serena Filson, Vice President of Global Total Rewards and HR Operations at Certara, shares how she architects compensation, benefits, wellness, and HR tech to be both fair and deeply human. With 25+ years in HR, including taking Certara public in 2020 and leading M&A integrations, Serena explains...

Summary What does people-first leadership look like when most of your workforce can’t work from a laptop? Jason N. Lioy, Chief People Officer at Dawn Foods and member of the Forbes Human Resources Council, leads 3,500 team members across plants, distribution centers, and offices worldwide. He shares how parenting—especially raising a son with special needs—shapes his “lead with heart and ears” phi...