Want to lure people back to the office? Give them on-site child care.

Even before the covid-19 pandemic, the supply of child care in the United States was dismal. And for many families, if care was available, it wasn’t affordable. Yet most employers treated a lack of child care as an individual problem, rather than as a systemic one that risked undermining the labor market.

Then came the extended closures of schools and day cares — which made clear the extent to which the whole economy relies on care work.

Without safe places and people to entrust with their children, millions of American workers faced terrible choices. Those who could work from home could try to juggle parenting with professional demands, while feeling they were failing at both. They could leave their jobs entirely. Or they could risk leaving their children inadequately supervised and hope that nothing terrible might happen during a shift.

These choices were infuriating because employers could have invested in making them unnecessary. Ample precedents for the feasibility and value of on-site day care exist, from hospitals to the buttoned-up world of corporate finance, to the crunchier world of outdoor sports equipment.

Goldman Sachs, for example, operates backup child-care facilities and a permanent day-care center. And at Patagonia, which opened an on-site day-care center at its Ventura, Calif., headquarters in 1983 and at its Reno facility in 2017, the company’s pandemic response and return-to-office plans were guided by the existence of its child-care program.

Sheryl Shushan, the company’s director of family services, told me that when nonessential workers were allowed back in the California office, Patagonia prioritized parents, starting with breastfeeding mothers, to get them access to care. This parents-first approach allowed the company to keep the number of people in the office low enough to give returning workers their own offices to decrease the risk of infection.

This strategy has worked: The company’s program now serves 92 percent as many children as it did pre-pandemic, getting both those kids and their parents back to its Ventura campus.

But on-site day care has the potential to do far more than getting butts back into seats.

Patagonia has not been exempted from the so-called Great Resignation. But Shushan says she’s heard anecdotally that Patagonia’s child-care program provides a major incentive for parents to stay with the company. Replacing a departing employee can cost as much as twice that person’s annual salary. Patagonia has long argued that fully 21 percent of the cost of running their child care facility is recouped through employee “retention and engagement,” especially among women returning to work after having children.

Shushan argues there are downstream benefits, too. Private investment in the child-care field can help bolster the profession at a time when day-care workers are fleeing the workforce. That’s good for everyone, even employees who don’t benefit directly from on-site day care. A more stable supply of child care means a more stable supply of employees in every other line of work.

At least some companies recognized what was happening during the pandemic and acted accordingly. A spokeswoman for the corporate child-care giant Bright Horizons told me that the company opened 23 on-site child care centers during the pandemic. But in between the truths the pandemic revealed about the state of the workforce and the desperate efforts by corporate leaders to get their white-collar employees back in physical offices, it’s amazing that on-site care hasn’t expanded even more rapidly.

There are challenges to opening day cares at unrelated businesses, including questions of legal liability and hot competition for child-care workers. Not all companies have the scale to make on-site day care financially viable, and not all workplaces have the free space for such offerings. But the existence of major contractors such as Bright Horizons — and the abundance of office spaces begging to be repurposed — certainly remove some of the obstacles.

The return to in-person work has revealed a gap between the culture company leaders believe they’ve created and the one many rank-and-file employees experience.

Telling workers it’s essential to be in the office isn’t enough to make it feel that way — especially when employees are juggling child drop-offs and pickups or trying to find time to pump breast milk for someone else to feed their babies. Providing on-site care upends that equation: Suddenly, being at the office sounds much more appealing than working around a nanny or fitting trips to day care into the workday.

On-site day care is also an acknowledgment that companies need their employees — and are willing to support them. Smart employers will recognize that helping workers with child care isn’t just a perk; it’s a mutually beneficial investment.