The school situation this fall is anything but normal. Parents are anxious, many facing months of full-time or partial at-home learning. How will they juggle remote work with their children’s need for help with their virtual schooling? Will they have to choose between their jobs and their kids?

The answer needs to be "no," and it’s on employers’ shoulders to make sure parents can continue to succeed at work and at home during these chaotic times. By providing support to employees, companies also win in the long-term with better retention of top talent and a more positive, productive culture.

This is an issue that affects the millions of parents who make up about one-third of the U.S. workforce, half of whom are currently without childcare. And it hits the more than 25 million working mothers especially hard, as they are more likely than dads to leave the workforce when childcare needs can’t be met.

In other words, this is nothing short of an HR crisis in the making. Yet research from the Society for Human Resource Management shows that most companies are severely lacking a plan to support working parents.

Those plans must include granting employees greater autonomy and flexibility. My company has been operating under an "office-optional" model for 20 years, and I’ve seen firsthand the benefits of taking this approach. Our anecdotal evidence is backed up: Typically, remote workers are more productive when they’re untethered from the office, research shows, even putting in more hours on average than traditional workers.

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