A Conversation with Mike Petters, Executive Vice Chairman of the Board, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and CED Trustee

When you take care of employees, everything else will take care of itself. This is the philosophy of business leader Mike Petters, Executive Vice Chairman of the Board at Huntington Ingalls Industries and CED Trustee. Huntington Ingalls is the largest military shipbuilding company in the country.

“As a business, you need to pay attention to your employees, and you need to understand the dynamics in their lives that are affecting their engagement.” Petters shared this insight in a recent podcast interview with CED about employer child care supports for working families.

Long before COVID-19 further revealed the link between workforce participation and access to high-quality child care options, Petters witnessed challenges faced by employees with caregiving responsibilities. He said he views early learning opportunities as both a determining factor for parents to work and an investment in the future workforce as well as the security of the nation.

“Child development is an expensive proposition,” Petters asserted. “When you’re in the business of workforce development, which we are, you see that education and development are the path for folks to change their trajectory in life. If you really, really believe that then you need to find ways to help invest in those areas for your employees… create opportunities for your employees and their families to do that… because child development is so expensive our employees struggle frankly to find good opportunities.”  At Huntington Ingalls, Petters invested in this belief by declining his salary to establish a needs-based scholarship program for employees and their families to help pay for child care and postsecondary education costs.

The scholarship program is just one of many employee supports that led to Huntington Ingalls Industries’ rank as #11 among large companies on the Forbes America’s Best Large Employers for 2022 list. The company’s commitment to taking care of its employees was also demonstrated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressure it placed on working parents. Petters explained, “If an employee has to choose between working and taking care of their kids and you put them in that position, they are going to choose to take care of their kids, at least the employees that you want to keep… so you need to make it possible for them to be able to do that.” Huntington Ingalls instituted liberal leave policies during the pandemic so that employees could attend to caregiving responsibilities while maintaining job security.

“We felt like we were going to make a big bet on our employees, if we gave them the opportunity to take care of their families at some point, they would then take care of our business. Here we are… almost two and a half years later and I think we can say with confidence that actually happened,” Petters reported.

As far as public policy, Petters expressed the need to encourage work as a vocation and remove roadblocks that prevent people from choosing to work. He views the issues as intertwined and ultimately a measure to ensure national security.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.