Fostering Work-Life
Balance at Merck

Merck's efforts help all employees, including working parents and caregivers, care for themselves and their families as they strive to reach their personal and professional goals.

“The important work of our employees doesn’t start or end with the business day. We are mothers and fathers, siblings and children, friends and neighbors...Providing employees with benefits and policies to help achieve a healthy work-life balance is critical for our company.”

– Celeste Warren, vice president, Human Resources and Global Diversity & Inclusion Center of Excellence

At Merck, we believe that when we offer a supportive workplace, our employees can accomplish anything.

Merck Women on Achieving Career Success

Sometimes women need the help and advice of other women to help them achieve the impossible. So we asked a few Merck employees: “What’s the best advice you’ve received about achieving career success?”

Merck Men on Being a Working Dad

Flexibility, balancing work and life, the chance to have a family that they’ve always dreamed of…hear from a few Merck dads on why Merck is a great place to work.

Merck is honored to have been on the Working Mother’s 100 Best Companies list for over 30 years. We are thrilled to be on the inaugural Working Mother’s Best Companies for Dads list, too. These lists recognize companies that set the standard for mom-friendly and dad-friendly work places.

It’s amazing what people can accomplish when their workplace has their back. From guilt-free downtime, to peace of mind knowing loved ones are taken care of while at work, Merck is there for their employees.

The work we do is too important—inventing new medicines and vaccines to save and improve lives— and the cause is too demanding for anything less than the best.

We make sure our employees can bring it, every hour, every day at work or at home. Here’s how:

Robust benefits

which include extensive health insurance, family-leave assistance which provides six weeks of job-protected paid time off to spend with a new child, personal health coaching, a registered nurse hotline, flexible work arrangements and back-up child care, to financial planning, and employee discount programs.

Merck’s Adoption/Surrogacy Assistance Program

This provides reimbursement of up to $25,000 of eligible adoption and/or surrogacy-related expenses per child, per family, for adoptions and the birth of a child through a third-party surrogate.

Learning and development opportunities

Our Women’s Leadership Program is designed to support the advancement of women into senior leadership. For future leaders, our Manufacturing Leadership Development Program and our company’s CEO-sponsored Global Management Acceleration Program develop employees at all levels and stages of their careers.

Focus on employee health

The majority of our sites offer on-site health clinics which provide an array of medical services. We also offer access to on-site fitness centers at many of our offices around the world.

Child care support

Our company offers several on-site or near-site child care centers that allows employees to be close to their children during the work day. We also provide tuition discounts to several national childcare providers.

K-12 educational guidance

Merck partners with College Coach, an organization with expertise in guiding families about important educational issues.

Paid time-off for volunteering

Every day, somewhere in the world, a Merck employee is doing something to give back to the community via our volunteer program, Merck Gives Back. Each year, we grant 40 hours paid time-off for employees to volunteer at the eligible nonprofit organization of their choice.

For more than a century, we’ve worked in service of humanity

As inventors. As leaders. As pioneers. As working parents. We are transforming lives through a culture of spirited collaboration and applied inquiry. We work relentlessly to improve health outcomes for countless people around the world—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Meet the Hughes family

Merck employees Jim and Judy Hughes used Merck’s family leave / adoption assistance when they adopted their son Dax from China in 2016. “To have a company come back and support us financially and also support us with a leave of absence…it just made me feel like, 'OK, so they really are understanding about what it takes to build a family,'" says Judy.