It's time to review your paid leave policy and ask: Are you doing enough for working parents?
Without a federal paid family leave program, employers have had to shoulder the administrative and financial burdens of
"A lot of companies will say this is something that is a niche issue, but they're ignoring the fact that 30-50% of your employees are in their family building years and actively thinking about building or expanding their family," says Dirk Doebler, CEO of
Read more:
Currently, just 23% of employees have access to paid family leave; the average time off a mother takes after the birth of a child — paid or unpaid — is just 10 weeks, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet those weeks can turn into years away from the workforce. Thirty percent of women without paid leave
To mitigate that, Parento works with employers to establish an insurance-based paid parental leave program of up to 16-weeks off at 100% pay. The platform also provides coaching support for working parents to help them before, during and after their leave, improving retention of working parents, and helping employers meet DEI goals.
Doebler recently spoke with Employee Benefit News about the current state of
Without a federal policy for paid family leave, what are some of the shortcomings that you see in employer-provided parental leave benefits?
With the pandemic's impact on working parents, and especially working moms, it shed a new light on the challenges that parents face in the workforce. But we see that companies say that parental leave is just giving parents paid time off when they have a kid. We see a lot of paid parental leave policies that are two or three weeks long. That's not really a parental leave policy. That's a PTO policy.
There's a lot of focus on moms giving birth, to the detriment of adoptive and foster parents. That's understandable, because moms are going through this difficult medical event. But it ignores the broader reason for parental leave, which is to give employees time to bond with their child, to adjust to this life, to work through the numerous challenges that new parents face so they can return to work without having to worry about whether they're going to be a good parent or not. And a lot of policies forget that dads, adoptive parents and foster parents still struggle with a lot of those challenges and need that additional time as well. That impacts birth moms too, because then it's treated as if you don't need the help when dads don't get that time.
Read more:
The benefits of offering paid family leave are clear — what's preventing employers from providing these programs?
Employers are struggling with how to budget for employees to not work for several months. Before I founded Parento, I spent a lot of time as a former CFO understanding the ROI of offering paid parental leave, and what are the risks of employees not coming back to work or returning part-time. What we found is that the cost savings of offering paid parental leave is dramatically greater than the cost of parental leave. You're going to save significant sums of money. The problem is that those savings are spread across a variety of areas. For example, turnover is very expensive, but it's a hidden cost. So how much is replacing that director or VP going to cost you as an organization, both in recruitment costs, but then lost productivity and all these other things? It's not easy to quantify that even though it does have a real dollar cost.
How is Parento solving for some of these challenges and also educating employers about the benefits and long-term savings of offering paid leave?
Parento spends a lot of time with companies to help them understand the importance of properly budgeting for parental leave and not treating this as if it's PTO. We work with the employer directly to set up the paid family policy. We give them the handbook language and then insurance underwrites that policy and covers what's written in that policy. Then when the employee takes leave, the company files the claim with us. At that point, we then engage the employee and we walk them through filing for Short Term Disability or state PFL. They also get 12-16 one-hour sessions with our parent coaches, who talk to them before, during and after leave on a weekly basis. They have emotional support, parenting support and career support during that process.
Read more:
From the employees' experience, they don't even know there's insurance because insurance reimburses the company and they're just cutting the standard payroll check for that employee while they're on leave. So the employee's experience is substantially better and more streamlined. All of our policies by default are gender neutral, child bonding leave. Anyone who is full time and has whatever the company requires for the length of service is automatically eligible to take paid parental leave. That makes a huge difference to so many people.
Why is this full-service support so necessary for bringing paid family leave benefits to more organizations?
I think what really frustrates me is how everyone agrees that paid parental leave is really important and really good for society, yet so many companies aren't willing to invest in it without a very lengthy, drawn out process. Paid parental leave makes a huge difference for families, household income and careers. This is something that is going to be ubiquitous, but I think it's primarily going to be through the private market at this point. It's so powerful from a retention and recruitment standpoint that once you offer it, your competitors are going to have to offer it. It creates this positive feedback loop that more and more organizations are going to invest in and implement, and it's just going to accelerate adoption.
