BANGALORE (TIP): Suman Kumari will soon be joining the new moms club. Her little bundle of joy is due to arrive in January. The assistant manager in SAP is working through her pregnancy, shrugging off all doubts about juggling motherhood, work and home. SAP has assigned her a cab to bring her to work and take her home. It has even assigned her an official buddy at work under its ‘Run the Mummier’ programme.

“My buddy Rashmi has a five-year-old daughter. She’s a great sounding board at work to discuss my mood swings and emotional down times. She talks me through the slightest of discomforts I go through,” Suman says. Hers is a nuclear family. “For me, it’s family and SAP. I feel secure and confident, given that I have so much help at the office,” says the 34-year-old. Vast numbers of working women in India drop out of work, in most cases because of pregnancy and motherhood.

But now, with increasing pressure to retain talent and greater consciousness about the need for diversity at workplaces, companies are offering unusual perks and incentives and creating unique programmes to contain dropouts among women. “Employers in India are increasingly recognizing the importance of creating a work environment that supports a healthy work-life balance and integrating policies and programmes to assist employees through crucial milestones in life such as child-birth,” says Manoj Biswas, lead for HR in Accenture India.

Accenture runs a unique programme called ‘Hours That Help’ where employees can donate their unused vacation time to their colleagues who are in need of additional paid leave to attend to critical medical or personal matters. “Often, this option is used by new parents to attend to any critical or urgent childbirth related matters,” says Biswas. Accenture also offers security escorts and dedicated medical cabs for expecting mothers. Google India offers a baby bonding benefit of Rs 13,650 (around $250) to young mothers soon after the child is delivered. “There’s a Rs 1.5-lakh insurance cover towards delivery-related expenses.

Also, if the baby is sick or diagnosed with a problem, the new born is covered under the Rs 5-lakh general insurance scheme extended to the family,” says Anita Nambiar, benefit lead at Google India. The company offers a Rs 75,000 infertility cover. In case of adoption, Google bears the entire adoption expenses against bills that include the legal charges and fee charged by the agency. “The adoption benefit is extended to domestic partners that cover lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders,” Nambiar says. Bhuvaneswar Naik, VP of human resources at SAP India, says there is clear evidence that maternity and childcare benefits translate into higher retention, helping firms also to develop strong women leadership benches.

“In SAP in 2007, 61 women employees on their family way went on leave and only 19 stayed back. This meant 69% of them didn’t return from their maternity leave. In 2012, 134 went on maternity leave and 128 returned to work,” he says. IBM runs a programme to train in-home caregivers or nannies on the nitty-gritty of childcare. In-home care by a maid or nanny can be a flexible and affordable arrangement, but it may also be very unreliable because they lack knowledge about childcare.

In a 2010 Global Work/Life Issues Survey conducted by IBM, parents using in-home services reported the lowest satisfaction rates compared to parents whose child was cared for by a relative or in a childcare centre (49% for in-home vs. 70% for relative care and 63% for centre-based care).

Till now, the company has organized 15 workshops across different locations in the country in 2011 and 2012. Yahoo, whose CEO Marissa Mayer was appointed earlier this year when she was pregnant and who returned to work within days of delivering the baby, runs a volunteer-driven Women in Tech (WiT) group that supports women across the talent pipeline and enables them to successfully enter and remain in the IT workforce.