plz answer asap

Youve recently started working in the head office of Patagonia, the well known clothing company. You had first learned about Patagonias strong Purpose over Profits mission back in your undergraduate program and since then, youve applied for multiple positions within Patagonia. Your dream has come true! Your first task is to help determine whether Patagonia should continue to offer its onsite daycare facility and program for children of head office employees.

There are approximately 500 employees working at Patagonia's Ventura, CA head office. Those employees have about 150 daycare age children in total, with about 100 currently enrolled in the onsite daycare program. Patagonia is a leader in many human resource-related issues including being one of the first to offer fully paid parental leave and subsidized off-site daycare. Parental leave is available to both mothers and fathers and provides up to 16 weeks of fully paid leave following the birth or adoption of a child. Subsidized off-site daycare provides a financial subsidy of up to $300 per month per child. The subsidized daycare program has been in place for almost 10 years and was only meant as a temporary solution while Patagonia built and developed an onsite daycare program and facility.

Your supervisor has come to you with the following request,

We need to develop a recommendation regarding the onsite daycare facility. The board of directors appears to be quite mixed on their opinion of onsite daycare. At the last board meeting, about half of the board members asked me to consider closing down the current facility. Their main arguments were around the financial cost of on onsite daycare facility and also that offering daycare is not within Patagonias mission or area of expertise.

Oddly enough, the other half of the board were strongly in support of the current facility and program and were even suggesting that we should expand the facility to be able to accommodate all the eligible children. There will certainly be many disappointed employees if we close the program. Those parents could take advantage of our subsidy program for offsite daycare but I suspect that we would lose a few good employees over this issue.

The idea of expanding the current facility is certainly an interesting one. Wed need to hire more staff of course and do a renovation on the facility. It would be tough to find enough interior space; we may have to relocate some of our IT infrastructure to make space. The onsite daycare facility has been a popular topic for our board of directors for many years because its expensive. The board believes that those financial resources could be better spent on other employee benefits. Recent accounting analysis indicates that the onsite daycare costs at least $850,000 a year to pay salaries and operating overhead like lighting and supplies. Ive provided a link to a recent article regarding benefits and costs of onsite daycare for you (Links to an external site.).

Can you help me with this decision please and provide a recommendation for this problem?

This information is loosely based on Patagonias actual Ventura, CA daycare facility. Information has been fictionalized for educational purposes.