If you are the business leader of a small to medium size business, you may care less what the fortune 100 tech companies offer their employees, but you should....
Tech companies, famously on the forefront of creative and
generous benefits and perks, have recently been pushing the envelope in the
area of new parent benefits.
Netflix announced in early August their new maternity and
paternity leave policy, allowing new parents to take unlimited paid parental
leave during the year following the birth or adoption of a child.
Microsoft
increased their paid maternity leave allotment from 12 weeks to 20 weeks. Yahoo
increase their paid maternity leave to 16 weeks and paid paternity leave to 8
weeks. IBM instituted a plan to help breast-feeding mothers who are on business
trips ship their breast milk home for free. Facebook and Apple announced new
benefits allowing their female employees to harvest and freeze their eggs,
deferring child-rearing.
It’s interesting, especially in light of the fact that woman
are underrepresented in the tech industry, with only about 25% of tech
employees being female. Yet, this recent surge in maternity benefits could be interpreted
as an effort to attract more female employees to the industry.
All these new perks sound exciting, but how many employees
will actually take advantage of them? Companies create these policies but then
send out mixed signals, and employees who take advantage of them find
themselves victims of peer pressure.
Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, recently
announced she was pregnant was twins and announced she would only be taking as
little as 2 weeks of maternity leave, and working throughout. It’s not a big
surprise, this is the same woman who only took 2 weeks of maternity leave for
the birth of her first child, and also famously eliminated Yahoo’s flexible
work from home policies not long after taking the helm at Yahoo.
What is the message they are sending? IBM will ship home
breast milk but they are still sending that new mother on a business trip.
Yahoo will give a new mother a paid 16 week leave, but clearly the culture at
the organization is not to take the full allotment of leave.
It will be interesting
to see over time if employees are taking advantage of these new policies, and
if they will spread to other industries, or even to the nation as a whole, as
the United States remains the only developed country in the world that does not
require paid leave for new mothers.
This article was written by Lauren
Sims, an eqHR Solutions Principal Consultant.
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