Designing a paid-leave parental policy is key to employee attraction and retention. According to a Deloitte survey, for 60% of employees a better parental leave offer is at least “somewhat likely” to make them choose an employee over another, and longer time off after childbirth lead to more loyal and productive employees. However, while tech giants like Google and Facebook can afford generous paid leave options, it may be difficult for a startup to reduce headcount by 1 person for several months.
<aside> 💡 In designing your parental policy, you can take inspiration from best practices by AccuRx, a early-stage healthcare communication platform which made its policy open-source
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Alternatively, you can start from a standard template (see here) and create your own parental policy. If you choose this path, we advise you to follow these guiding principles:
Don’t emulate tech giants. The lower your headcount, the more difficult to offer longer paid leave. However, it could be manageable to complement an initial leave with a reduced-hour period in a work-from-home setting. As explained in the article below, if you can’t live up to what you’d like to offer, be open about it
How Our Early-Stage Company Defined Our Parental Leave Policy
Be representative of modern families: Ask whether your employee is going to be the primary carer (the one to spend the most time with the child), without assuming it on the base of gender. Extend your policy to include adoptions, surrogacy, and same-sex couples
Set out a policy in advance, and communicate it clearly. Not having a parental policy causes stress to expecting employees, and scares off prospects from asking details about the policy.
Plan hand-off in advance, be flexible on return date, and communicate effectively in between. Before the leave, plan ahead and get buy-in from those who will be covering projects and tasks. If you are planning on hiring a Fixed Time Cover, hire them in time for the hand-off. Design upfront some periodic touchpoints to keep the employee up to date on the business progress, if they are open to it. Finally, be aware that lots has change in the parent’s life. Proactively check-in periodically and be open about changing the return date or offering flexible arrangements (e.g., reduced time, WFH).
You must at least comply with statutory requirements:
‣ | summary of statutory parental leave in the UK from AccuRx, an early-stage healthcare communication platform
Monitor the success of your policy. As you would do for a product decision, set out success criteria to track over time, incl. actual cost vs. budgeted, retention upon return, and feedback from users.
Run a cost analysis: Consider the financial impact of different percentages of the workplace taking leave, including the cost to recruit for a cover. Insert a pay back clause in the event that your colleague doesn’t return or leaves soon after. When considering costs, remember that you have to to pay at least statutory pay, but you will be able to claim back that amount the government. Diversity VC has created a cost model that can be useful as a starting point for your analysis