Design Your Paid Parental Leave Policy Before It’s Too Late
We are a 7-person seed stage company and we just put together our parental leave policy. I interviewed a couple of other founder friends to learn what they did because I couldn’t find much online, and I thought I’d share ours to make it easier for other new startups to figure out what policy makes sense for them and to implement a paid parental policy before it’s too late.
If your company has less than 50 employees you technically don’t have to have any rules or policies around vacation or maternity leave. In fact most startups, like ours, have an unlimited vacation policy because it’s easier than tracking paid time off, and we know our team won’t abuse the policy. And most startups, like ours until this week, don’t have a parental paid policy because no one is pregnant and no one is inquiring about it, and also because there isn’t much data on what the norm is.
Create a parental paid leave policy at the same time you get your 409a. You’ll know the fair market valuation of your company AND you’ll be able to attract and retain top talent — women and men — who may not have a little one on the way, but who might be considering it in the next 12 months. Successful startups aren’t solely made up of male 23 year olds anymore, so if you want to be competitive, create a parental leave policy and advertise the hell out of it on your careers page!
Here’s the story for why we decided to create a paid (not unpaid), parental (not just for new moms) leave policy.
One week before 500 Startups’ Demo Day, I gave birth to my first daughter. One of my co-founders (and husband), Gilman Tolle, ended up stepping in to give our demo day pitch as my mom and I took turns watching 1-week-old Joscelin in the lobby.
Surprisingly, our startup life turned out to be pretty compatible with a newborn.
We were still working out of our living room and dining room, so when I wasn’t sleeping or breastfeeding, it was pretty easy to reply to an email thread or sketch out a new user flow for our new app. Since we weren’t paying ourselves salaries yet, I wasn’t eligible for any maternity leave pay from the state of California. I remember thinking, damn — I did this pregnancy thing wrong, I should have had a kid while working for one of the big tech companies, so I could take advantage of their amazing benefits.
And then I thought, Nope — I did this right! I wouldn’t sacrifice the amazing opportunity I have right now to be changing the future of retail and starting a family at the same time — this is perfect.
Fast forward to the present day — Joscelin is 22 months old and after a big pivot and a seed funding round, we have 7 full-time employees. We offer health, dental and vision insurance, stock options and unlimited vacation.
Five of our seven employees are women in their late 20’s and early 30’s. I’m the only mom (so far), but the two men on the team are already dads.
We’re busy as hell, building a startup from the ground up, but I realized that we had to have a parental leave policy in place because it was the responsible thing to do.
When I was at Mozilla, I remember learning that there was no parental leave policy at all. It shocked me because the company already had 400 people and was hiring very aggressively.
But I looked around and realized that women at Mozilla mostly fell into two groups: people in their 20’s with no kids on the horizon, or people who had finished having kids.
One of my co-workers said, hey that’s great — you get to make up your own leave policy. He had a point, but it was still unsettling to me that no one had thought about this yet.
I realized it was time to put together a parental leave policy for Boon + Gable. So I did some homework. California gives 6 weeks of partial paid leave — up to 55% of your salary. On the upper end, Netflix gives up to 52 weeks of full paid leave. Most big technology companies give 17 weeks of paid leave, but they all vary — some of them don’t give moms and dads the same amount of paid time off.
After surveying a few of my friends’ Seed, Series A and Series B companies — and realizing that some of them had policies much more generous than we could afford, while others had a policy but didn’t know exactly what it was, and a few just said “oh, crap, we should get on that” — I put together one largely based on Babylist’s policy. Thanks for paving the way, Natalie!
Here’s Boon + Gable’s parental leave policy:
Paid Leave
Employees (just to be clear, that’s moms AND dads) who have been employed with Boon + Gable for a minimum of 180 days, at the time of birth or adoption, are eligible for an 8 week paid leave at 100% of their salary. It must be taken in consecutive days.
Extended Unpaid Leave
An employee may request an additional unpaid leave of absence for up to two more months. The employee has to request this 30 days before it would go into effect. Approval will be given unless the leave would unduly disadvantage the Company as a whole, or the work of the department or group directly affected.
Reduced Work Schedule
An employee may request a reduced work schedule (minimum of 24 hours per week) for up to one year following the birth or adoption of a child. The employee has to request this 30 days before it would go into effect.
And that’s pretty much it — short and to the point.
Some may think that a paid parental leave is costly, but it’s actually more costly to lose that key hire and have to start recruiting from scratch.
Bill Press, VP of Engineering at Optimizely, built a handy spreadsheet to calculate the costs and benefits of your paid parental leave.
But, I like to think about it this way — your team could pitch in to cover for the employee while they’re on leave, or you can spend those 2 months finding the right candidates, interviewing them and THEN, if you’re lucky and manage to find the right new hire, spending another month ramping them up.
In a best-case scenario, that’s 3 months of time and energy focused on that new hire. If you just paid your current employee to get some rest, bond with their new child, and get excited to come back to work at 100%, then you could have saved a month’s worth of time, energy and focus.
Having a paid parental leave policy at your seed stage startup helps you retain your current employees, helps you attract future talent, and bottom-line: it’s a cost-effective way to grow your team.
Would love to hear if your startup has an awesome parental leave policy — leave a comment below, so people reading this can see where the best places are to work!
Thanks to Natalie Gordon, CEO of Babylist for paving the way with one of the best parental leave policies for seed companies. And thanks to Gilman Tolle, Spencer Chen and Sutian Dong for reviewing drafts.
