What Parental Leave says about your company

Parental leave is a topic that hits close to home for me right now. I am excited to soon be welcoming my first child into the world. I am lucky that my company offers 6 weeks of full paid parental leave with the option of a flexible back to work schedule. Now, this may seem very little in comparison to Google or Facebook, but the startup I work for only has fourteen employees across two countries. This is a stark comparison to the tech giants of Silicon Valley that employ thousands of people. Now, this says to me that my company cares about my future and the future of my family. The founders are willing to lose one of their employees for 6 weeks so I can spend that time with my family.

If you have ever worked for a startup, you know that everyone carries a lot of responsibility. Compare that to a company that has thousands of employees doing fairly similar tasks. If one were to leave for a few weeks, or a few months, it wouldn’t really cause a lot of stress for the company as a whole. So, for my bosses to enact a policy that allows me to unplug and spend time with my newborn and wife, really shows that they care about my well being and the well being of all my team members. This is a real sacrifice on their part; it means that they, the founders, are the ones who are going to have to pick up the slack.

Many of the larger companies started giving parental leave because it was a way to attract candidates, and retain talented employees. Google extended their parental leave as a way to lower the attrition rate of new mothers. For Google “it turned out this program cost nothing” (Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!) because it can cost up to 3 times an employee’s salary to hire and train their replacement. So why did it take Google’s female employee population quitting at two times the rate of their average for them to realize something was wrong? That, in my opinion, is a problem. If a company only cares about the data and bottom line, then employee wellness is more likely to be discarded as soon as it is an unnecessary benefit.

Companies need to look at benefits in another way, not just to attract and retain employees, but also to create real wellness in their workplace. The question that sits in my mind, is what happens when there is no longer a recruiting war in tech? Will these policies fall to the sidelines? If a company’s only reason for putting a benefit in place is to attract candidates, what then happens when they become overloaded with qualified candidates? What is to stop them from cutting out those previous benefits? Compare that to a company who decides to take care of its employees because it knows that team wellness is important and it is the right thing to do. Of course these types of benefits always help in attracting great candidates and retain employees, but if that is their only purpose, then what does that really say about a company’s values?