Commitment to Childcare Boosts Worker Retention Rate

Read the branded version of the case study here.

Established in 2007 and certified by the Ethical Supply Chain Program (ESCP) in 2008, BestTop Toys supplies major brands like Target, McDonald's, Disney, MGA andUniversal Studios.

 It employs more than 2,300 people at its Yingde site in Guangdong Province, southern China, and was one of the first factories in the world to commit to our Family-Friendly Factory’s childcare spaces program. It is also one of the four factories we work with globally that provides after-school care all year round for workers’ children.  

 We caught up with Head of the Compliance Department, Huaping Xiu, who is responsible for all matters related to social responsibility and worker well-being.

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The challenges: Parental worries and workforce productivity

Many of the employees at Best Top Toys are from remote areas and came to Yingde specifically to work in the factory, due to the limited job opportunities or lower wage levels in their own communities.

With their hometowns often hours away, parents either brought their young ones to live in the city or migrated alone, leaving them to be looked after by grandparents or other family members. Some of these 'left-behind' children travel to Yingde in summer to stay with their parents during the school holidays.

The one constant for parents who are separated from their children, either for months at a time or during working hours from day to day, is the concern they have for their youngsters' well-being, especially over summer when they aren't in school.

Huaping says: “We were finding that even the parents of kids who have moved to Yingde were worried about their children’s safety, as they were having to leave them at home on their own when they came to work. We were increasingly seeing staff asking their supervisors to allow them to go home to check on their kids.”

As well as high stress levels for these parents, this brought a negative impact on the business, affecting productivity, worker satisfaction, staff turnover, product quality and injury occurrences.

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The solution: Partnering with ESCP to provide on-site childcare

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Huaping and the senior management wanted to solve these problems but didn't know how.

“So, we approached ESCP,” he says. “They helped us to conduct a survey on the needs of our employees. This helped us to identify the most pressing issues and then work with ESCP on the best ways of addressing them.

“One of the recommendations from the ESCP team was to offer on-site childcare, which isn’t something we’d done before but could see the benefit of. We received expert guidance on how to go about this, including things like site safety, adhering to relevant laws and regulations, and ensuring we created a space where children could be both properly educated and take part in interesting play time activities.

“Thanks to this support, in 2016 we set up a new space within the factory called theWorker Family Center, where employees’ children are taught by full-time teachers, where their safety is guaranteed, and where they learn valuable social skills by being with other kids.  

“It’s open to all children, including those who are still in kindergarten, and runs for nearly two months. Best of all, it costs workers nothing, which is a massive help for them as childcare fees can be so expensive.

“Parents now feel reassured when they are at work. And because the center is in the factory, they can visit their children during the working day without having to take a lot of time off to travel home and back.”

As with all ESCP childcare spaces, the Worker Family Center follows UNICEF policy guidance, guaranteeing the highest level of care; it is practical to implement, and tailored exactly to the specific requirements of the factory and its employees.

 “ESCP maintains excellent two-way communication with us,” says Huaping. “We can express our opinions to the team, and they provide suggestions to us. We’ve found that other programs usually just convey their requirements, rather than listening to the factory's needs, and there aren’t the same feedback channels provided.”

Running for each of the last nine summers, the initiative has gone from strength to strength, the number of participating children increasing from 30 in its first year to 118 in 2024. And, as a result of the success, Best Top Toys extended the scheme beyond the summer months to operate all year round.

Huaping says: “Children can now come whenever parents need them to be supervised. We provide after-school activities from 4pm and have buses that pick the children up from school and drop them at the center, while they wait for their parents to finish work.”

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The benefits: Better staff retention, efficiency, loyalty and well-being

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Huaping is unequivocal about the positive effect of this focus on worker well-being: “Employee satisfaction, productivity, efficiency and harmony have all increased, while our turnover rate is around a quarter of what it was [5.2% in 2023 compared with 19.7% in 2016],” he says. “The number of injuries and defective products has also fallen.”

An impact assessment of the measures underlines the benefits, with 95% of employees stating they were more motivated at work and 96% finding this family-friendly approach ‘very helpful’ or ‘helpful’ to them in caring for their children.

Huaping adds: “Parents’ loyalty to the company has also been strengthened. When recruiting staff, we’re finding that the factory has been recommended to applicants as a great place to work by relatives and friends who are employees here.”

The company has introduced further family-friendly initiatives, such as putting on shuttle buses to take workers and their children back and forth between home and the factory, as well as providing help for migrant parents in accessing local schooling.

This investment in addressing workers’ needs is making life-changing differences, says Huaping:“The benefits outweigh any financial costs. Around half of the children on our summer childcare program used to be categorised as ‘left-behind’ but are now living with their parents in the local community. Many of them have moved here directly because we’re a Family-Friendly Factory. We’re really helping to bring parents and children closer together, and this makes us incredibly proud.”

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