Each day at our stores, distribution centers, and offices around the world, our approximately 22,000 employees strive to meet our vision of serving the needs of all families with young children.
Without the passion and commitment of our diverse work family around the world, we would be unable to deliver on this commitment, or to contribute our talents and resources to nurture the health and wellbeing of children and families in our local communities. We seek to provide our employees with an inclusive and fulfilling work environment and to ensure that workers across our supply chain are treated with fairness, dignity, and respect.
Our Inclusive Culture
To succeed as a business and to positively impact families and our communities, we must first and foremost create and maintain an inclusive, supportive workplace culture that fosters highly engaged employees. We believe deeply in developing our employees and offer numerous formal training opportunities as well as ongoing informal on-the-job learning.
Enabling Continuous Growth and Opportunity
We invest in our employees and encourage them to plan long-term careers with us. Our approach to providing meaningful advancement opportunities starts with robust onboarding, ongoing education, and mentoring programs for employees. Along the way, we set clear objectives and expectations and provide feedback to help employees achieve their own particular goals.
Our on-the-job learning processes and formal development programs include:
- Mentoring, reverse mentoring, and executive development programs that nurture emerging talent and facilitate cross-generational knowledge sharing, benefitting employees at all stages of their careers.
- Development days, when employees step away from their day-to-day responsibilities for curated professional growth opportunities.
- Online courses and formal development programs designed to enhance personal leadership skills, business acumen, and people management skills, as well as specialized development resources for our retail store, distribution center and office employees.
- Each year, we award 20 scholarships to Carter’s employees and children of employees to attend an accredited college or university.
Supporting Employees
Through Benefits
At Carter’s, we recognize our employees play many different roles outside of work, as parents, partners, caregivers and friends. While we provide standard programs, like health plans and 401(k)s, we also design our benefits to support employee well-being inside and outside of the office, with a special emphasis on what we know best: caring for children.
From time off and reimbursements for those welcoming children into their lives, whether through birth, adoption, or surrogacy, to resources for parenting, discounts on daycare tuition and back-up care, our benefits support employees in building and looking after their families.
Maternity and Post-partum Support
Carter’s is proud to be the first children's retailer to provide Maven, a virtual resource dedicated to women’s and family health. This innovative platform connects working families with experts and other parents to help them navigate everything from maternity and fertility concerns, to new parenthood, to returning to work after having a new child. With a network of doctors, including pediatricians, OBGYNs, and mental health specialists, available for video chat, Maven gives our employees the support they need anywhere, anytime.
Important note: This communication provides high-level information about benefits that may be available to employees at Carter’s. Eligibility for benefits is based on work location, employment type, tenure and other factors. Employees should refer to official plan documents and policies for details.
Fostering a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace
We are committed to ensuring that our workforce reflects our diverse world through a range of efforts to broaden diversity and ensure fairness across our global enterprise. That is because we believe the wider breadth of skills and perspectives we encompass, the more we will succeed, and because, in keeping with our core values, it is essential that each employee feel equally welcomed, valued, and respected. We uphold this inclusive culture by striving to recruit, support and reward employees from diverse backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, age, veteran status, or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.
Our Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Steering Committee, a cross-functional team charged with guiding and implementing the organization’s D&I efforts, is comprised of senior leaders from across Carter’s. It oversees our efforts to establish and improve inclusive policies in four key areas of our management processes: leadership, strategies and processes, programs and benefits, and policies and compliance.
Our recruiting process includes working with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to attract diverse new graduates, educating interview teams to address unconscious bias and building diverse interviewer panels. We ensure accountability by measuring the performance of our recruiting teams in presenting diverse candidates. We work to ensure pay equity throughout the year through evaluation at the time of hire, during the annual and mid-year performance review process, and at the time of promotion.
We conduct regular employee engagement and culture surveys globally to measure engagement drivers and identify critical areas for improvement. We also provide cultural training for expatriates and employees who regularly work internationally.
One of the ways we are enhancing diversity and inclusion at all levels, from the stock room to the board room, is by developing a pipeline of successors for key positions through recruiting, formal succession planning, and development strategies. While we have opportunities for further improvement, we are making progress: as of early 2020 women currently make up 30 percent of our leadership team and 33 percent of our board of directors. More than 50 percent of our leaders at the vice president and director levels are also female.
We continually measure and monitor diversity metrics including pay equity, retention, new hires, internal promotions and identified successors. Our D&I education equips employees with the tools and support needed to further enhance a workplace culture of inclusion. Our training programs include mandatory annual Code of Ethics training that addresses workplace harassment and discrimination education, and our multiyear plan for unconscious bias awareness and inclusive leadership education.
