Every so often, a gaggle of middle-aged visitors drifts through the Santa Monica, Calif., offices of Cornerstone OnDemand , a cloud software company. They stare. They point. They take photos.
Watching people talk on the phone and tap out emails might not sound exciting, but it’s a delight to this crowd. They are parents watching their children at work.
“It’s almost like we’re in a zoo, and we’re the animals,” says employee Kristy Gould.
All across the country, parents are turning up at offices to see what their adult offspring do all day, often as part of “Bring Your Parents to Work Day” events. Companies see it as a way to please young employees who are close to their moms and dads.
“The workplace is the new soccer field” for parents who want to see their children perform, says Liz Ross, chief executive of Periscope, a Minneapolis-based creative agency that hosted an event. One set of parents turned up in matching T-shirts that read “Josh’s Dad” and “Josh’s Mom.” Her own father, Ms. Ross says, has taken a photo of her at her desk in every job she has ever worked.
Prosek Partners, a New York-based communications consulting company, has a young staff, so it hasn’t yet needed a Take Your Child to Work Day, a staple of big companies. But it does have a parent day.
“Family is part of the workplace,” says partner Karen Niovitch Davis, 45 years old. “It’s all blurred now.”
Hosting parents, however, can be a lot trickier than hosting pint-size office interlopers, who can be corralled with coloring books and children’s games.
“You have to hope the stock is up on Bring Your Parents to Work Day,” says Kimberly Cassady, Cornerstone’s chief talent officer. At a recent event, a father grilled the CEO about why the company’s shares had slipped.
Adam Miller, the 49-year-old chief executive whose own parents often travel to watch him give client presentations, launched into an explanation of the company’s business model.
Clark Savage, whose daughter is a Cornerstone social-media strategist, visited her workplace during one such event. He says the open-plan office with candy dispensers would never work at his own accounting practice. “I couldn’t function or survive,” he says. The CEO’s office, with its walls and nice view, he admits, did catch his eye.
For some employees, having their parents wandering around their offices is profoundly anxiety-inducing.
Joann Pittman, 50, an executive assistant at Ozinga Bros. Inc., a concrete supplier based outside Chicago, recalls cringing as she watched her elderly parents try to chat up the company’s president.
From across the room, as the minutes ticked by, she says, she could sense the president’s interest waning. “Uh-huh,” he kept saying.
Unable to bear it, she hustled her parents away. The president gave her a sympathetic smile. “He was, like, ‘don’t worry about it, Joann,’” she recalls.
Her 75-year-old mother, Doris Miedema, says she was proud of her daughter and enjoyed the day. “I was nervous, knowing all the head honchos were there, but it wound up just fine,” she says.
In Houston this summer, Lindsay Williams, 35, looked up from a client meeting she was running to find her mother snapping photos of her and posting them to Facebook. “Super proud,” her mom wrote. Her daughter, an account manager at internet-marketing firm TopSpot, rolled her eyes.
“I can’t believe she did that,” says Ms. Williams, who had asked parents sitting in to maintain a low profile.
Prosek Partners’ Ms. Davis says she was so worried about her parents embarrassing her that she laid down some rules: Don’t be the first ones there, and no questions.
Bring Your Parents to Work Day first caught on among advertising and tech companies, where many employees say their parents have trouble understanding what they do. Now around 1% of U.S. employers have such days, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, a trade group.
LinkedIn was an early advocate. Bringing parents to the office “allows people to be very real,” says Christina Hall, chief people officer at LinkedIn, which is hosting activities including an office scavenger hunt at its event for parents on Nov. 16. Also on the activity list: encouraging parents to update their LinkedIn profiles. Nationwide, 3,700 parents have signed up.
During a previous parents day, Ms. Hall recalls, one father expressed concern about the company’s fiscal health after seeing the exposed duct work on the office ceilings. “I guess the industrial look doesn’t work for everyone,” she says.
Periscope receptionist Devra Bourne, 50, had her mother join her behind the front desk. Her mother didn’t mind the tedium of watching delivery workers come and go, though there was an awkward moment when the firm played a clip of a sexual-innuendo-heavy candy ad the company had produced. It included the line: “tiny package, huge release.”
Her 75-year-old mother, who is hard of hearing, didn’t appear to get the joke, Ms. Bourne says.
United Airlines customer-resolution manager Marcus Marshall brought his parents to work in Chicago last month. Fifty parents listened to company leaders discuss childhood family vacations and their favorite onboard snacks.
Mr. Marshall says it was important for his parents to see his workplace. “I spend a lot of time there,” he says.
He says parents went away more appreciative of the work he and others do to keep airlines running. “They might have felt: I’m never going to complain anymore if I have a problem,” he says.
Write to Te-Ping Chen at te-ping.chen@wsj.com