Abbott Laboratories is apparently a great place for working parents.
So says Working Mother magazine’s annual 100 Best Companies list. The North Chicago-based pharmaceuticals giant was the only local company to make the Top 10.
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Several other Chicago-area companies landed on the list, which surveys workplaces on 450 questions including leave policies, workforce representation, benefits, child care, advancement programs, flexibility policies and more.
Other local firms on the list include: AbbVie, Allstate, Astellas Pharma US, A.T. Kearney, Grant Thornton, McGladrey, Northern Trust and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
A glimpse at some of the workplace policies that landed these Chicago-area firms on the list: A.T. Kearney offers 8 weeks of paid maternity leave; at Grant Thornton, 100 percent of the employees use flextime; more than 50 percent of the workforce are women at Astellas Pharma; at McGladrey, 95 percent of employees telecommute.
On average, the companies on the list offer eight weeks of fully paid maternity leave, up one week from last year, the magazine said. They also offer, on average, three weeks of paid paternity leave and five weeks of paid adoption leave for caregivers. All of the companies on the list offer flextime and telecommuting and a majority offer job sharing and compressed work weeks. Most — 69 percent — offer management or leadership training, up from 62 percent last year.
Since this is Abbott’s 15th consecutive year on the list, it will be inducted in Working Mother’s Hall of Fame next month.
“To be recognized by Working Mother is a testament to the power of working moms and their ability to build extraordinary careers and extraordinary families,” Stephen Fussell, Abbott’s executive vice president of human resources, said in a statement.
The 2015 Best Companies employ almost 2.1 million people, in 15 industries at more than 32,000 work sites worldwide. Almost 46 percent of those workers are women, the magazine said.
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