By Chris Ceplenski, Senior Editor

Carrie Boerio and Karen Hamilton have a message for employers--the number of companies offering adoption benefits is steadily on the rise, and with good reason. Offering adoption benefits, Boerio and Hamilton explained to their audience today at the 19th Annual Benefits Management Forum & Expo in Chicago, Illinois, is smart, affordable, easy, and the right thing to do.

The late Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's International, Inc., was adopted as a child and became a passionate advocate of adoption benefits. Hamilton, of Wendy's International, and Boerio, of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, explained that Wendy's has offered adoption benefits since 1990. At that time, just 12 percent of 1,000 major companies surveyed offered such benefits. Sixteen years later, that number has risen to 41 percent. The speakers explained that across the board (regardless of size, industry, or state) the numbers of employers offering adoption benefits has steadily increased each year.

What are the components of an adoption benefits program? Primarily they include financial reimbursement (usually $1,000 to $20,000 per adoption), paid leave (usually 1 to 6 weeks) and unpaid leave in addition to FMLA (from 1 week to a year or more).

Not sure if adoption benefits are right for your company? Boerio and Hamilton offer four main reasons why you should consider them:

1) It's the smart thing to do:

• To offer the most competitive work-life benefits package
• To gain an edge in employee recruitment
• To enhance your family-friendly policies
• To increase loyalty and productivity of adoptive parents and goodwill among their friends and co-workers

2) It's the affordable thing to do. Boerio and Hamilton explained that there are extremely low utilization rates for adoption benefits. Usually less than 1 percent of eligible employees take advantage of them. Since its inception at Wendy's in 1990, about 4 of 7,000 eligible employees (0.6 percent) have utilized the adoption benefits program per year.

3) It's the right thing to do. Offering adoption benefits provides equity by supporting all employees who are building families. It also recognizes that the adoption process can be time-sensitive and costly, and allows new parents time to bond with their children. Meanwhile, it also helps the 119,000 children currently in U.S. foster care waiting to be adopted.

4) It's the easy thing to do. An adoption benefits policy is not difficult to establish, nor is it time-consuming to administer.

When establishing an adoption benefits policy, employers need to consider things such as the amount of financial assistance they wish to provide as well as amounts of paid and unpaid leave they want to offer. Other considerations include determining eligibility (length of service; full-time, part-time or both, etc.) and specifying what expenses can be reimbursed.

For more information or assistance with establishing a policy/program, the speakers encouraged the audience to visit the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption at www.AdoptionFriendlyWorkplace.org. The Foundation offers a free toolkit for employers, which provides the business case for adoption benefits and tools to make implementation easy.