I'm very glad to see this post, and to see that these issues are gaining in importance and visibility.
It's not because I plan to use parental leave. I already have two kids. And it's not only because I'm glad to see these policies help other people out, though of course that's part of it.
It's that this sort of "perk", rather than foosball tables, beer fridays, and vintage video game machines, give me hope that the industry is outgrowing its insular, "young people are just smarter" culture. That maybe employers are actually interested in sustained careers that will experience the ebb and flow of life, rather than just a period of extended adolescence. Parental leave policies do imply long term thinking.
This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that.
"What is your startup's parental leave policy?"
In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that.
I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.
In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix.
A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications.
If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state).
For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years.
But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
Nice to see parents in the US might start to enjoy one of the standard benefits in most (probably all) European countries. Being a father, I cannot even imagine leaving my 6-week old baby in a day care, which seems to be the thing parents have to do in the US if both are working.
Also, I think gender equality is an important one on many aspects:
- Bonding with the child(ren) should not only a motherly privilege.
- The mother's career may be more important to concentrate on.
- The father may be interested in doing his share.
- I'm not certain but from the point of view of the child(ren) there can be advantages to have both parents involved the same way.
Ideally I'd like to see certain amount of time allocated to the "family" that can be used/divided by the parents as they see fit.
I wish my company did this when I had a kid. They gave me 2 weeks paid leave. Then I took 6 weeks semi-paid leave from the state. aaaaaand when I returned I was notified that since I "missed" a few weeks of on-call rotation during my leave that I was basically on-call for every day for the next month to "make up" for it. That was pretty awesome considering the production environment would break at least once every day between midnight and 6am. It made taking care of an 8 week old who needed feeding every few hours at night even easier.
Keep in mind that they didn't "tell" you that you'd be on call every night. They asked, and you said OK.
The fact that they didn't include a question mark at the end of the sentence doesn't change the fact. The correct answer is still "No, Of course not." It's then up to them to decide whether it's worth firing you for giving the sensible answer to their silly request.
When we had our first, and thus far, only kid there were some complication that resulted in my GF had to be hospitalized. Then it got worse and she was moved to a hospital which specialized in her condition. I moved into the hospital and stayed there for about 2 weeks with her and eventually our newborn son. In the end she was out of her job for almost a year.
Direct monetary cost to us? Zero. The downside is a high income tax so thanks to all my country men for helping us.
It really is a shame that US is the only "developed" country in the world without paid parental leave. It is also obvious that no gender equality in workplace can be achieved until both mothers and fathers have access to adequate and equal parental leave. Luckily, some tech companies start to care and offer some time off to both mothers and fathers. Well done AeroFS!
While that may be so, the UK is not that much better. There's a statutory right for 12 months for the mother and two weeks for the father, but this is the statutory maternity pay rules:
> SMP for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows:
> the first 6 weeks - 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax
> the remaining 33 weeks - £138.18 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower)
That adds up to less than 30% of median income for the latter 33 weeks of the 39 weeks statutory maternity pay.
Here in Australia has 18 weeks at national minimum wage for mums, 2 weeks minimum wage for dad's through the state.
I'm German, and am a recent dad I must say that's really not all that good in comparison to my home country.
As a mother of an almost 6 year old and a software developer pre and post child, this type of policy is forward thinking and likely appreciated by many employees. I'm trying to think of an argument against such a policy and can't think of one. From the sounds of it, companies will be financially ahead with such policies, at least as it averages out over time?
Let me help you try to think of an argument against it. (Note that I am not necessarily MAKING this argument.)
Suppose you're running a startup and you have 12 employee-months worth of runway left before you'll need to show a concrete proof point to close the next round of funding or, preferably, get to cash-flow breakeven/Ramen-profitable.
Your product is inherently labor-centric. Your employees/team-mates are your best and only hope to produce the product.
In that situation, would you rather be using your last 12 person-months of runway paying your employees to work on the product or paying them to not work on the product and instead raise their own infant child?
Would your company be materially less likely to succeed if one of your employees had a new child and took 15-30% of the remaining runway while providing no benefit to the product? Probably.
What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Would you personally be willing to work for less pay in order to work at such a company? I can agree that employees who use such policies might be much more likely to stay, but I wonder if employees who carry the load while the new parent is on leave (but their position not filled, so all the burden falls to the rest of the team) might be less loyal?
I'm a parent of 2; my wife took the statutory maximum FMLA leave with each of them; her employer had a generally generous paid leave policy, and I'm not anti-kid by any means. I am anti-regulation in general though...
These policies may be breakeven or profitable in the long-run; I don't know. I do know they present a period of unprofitability in the short-term. And when they are gender-specific or even primary-provider-specific, they can manifest themselves as hiring biases against those people most likely to use the policy.
I don't see how there is even an argument against parental leave.
Humanity isn't here to ensure the survival of the corporation. We allow corporations to exist. If we decide that family time and bonding with our children is important, which we should, then the corporations need to adjust.
Fathers and mothers should get time measured in months to bond with their children after birth. It doesn't even need to be paid for by the company, we should just be using the unemployment benefits we've all already paid in to. It'll also help the job market as some positions may require temp workers to fill gaps. I'm honestly perplexed how anyone can be against mandatory parental leave and I'm a single guy without any children or any plan to have children in the near future.
Someday most of us won't work, not in the sense we view work in this current day, so why fight the inevitable? We should embrace it and take steps to get it right that is fair and sustainable.
I took a bunch of time off (unpaid) after our first kid, and it was definitely helpful. For the second one though, I took a different tack.
I just dropped down to 4 day weeks.
It was actually easy enough to do. I'd already been gone entirely for a few weeks, then I came back most of the way to full time, then... I just never ramped back up the rest of the way. (I bill by the hour, so there was never a salary discussion to muddy the waters).
That was over a year ago. I'm healthier now than I was then (partly from that extra day of chasing kids around, partly because with 3 day weekends all the time you find extra time in the mix for things like mountain biking). And I seem to be just as productive since I come in to each week with a nice clear mind, without having to have crammed and entire weekend worth of activity into just 2 days.
I toy with the idea of dropping down to 3 day weeks.
I worked for a small company when my wife had our children. I was the first employee to have a child while at the job. I was lucky enough to be senior enough to negotiate the parental leave that I needed.
It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them.
A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified.
I get so sad every time when someone describes how things work in US.
First 3 years are crucial in development of a child and it makes such a huge difference if the baby/child has an attention, love and contact with her parents 24/7 - or, if she spends day laying in an understaffed daycare with very little incentives to develop her.
Just for comparison, my country (Czech Republic) provides:
* 28 weeks of paid leave that start 6-8 weeks before expected birth date, with a payment roughly similar to average of mothers last year's net salary.
* Birth itself is covered by state insurance.
2-4 years long maternal leave where (any) parent gets a fixed sum of cca 11 average monthly salaries (distributed over the maternal leave period).
* During the above time, state also pays parent's health insurance.
* Also, employer has to ensure that parent can return to his/her position as long as the leave is shorter than 3 years.
You might think that this is expensive, but I see it as an investment in giving children healthy start full of attention and love, no matter their family's situation.
As a parent with a few kids, I was very fortunate to be able to work with my employer and instead of x number of weeks off, we split the same quantity of hours to part time per day for double the amount of weeks.
This worked out well for both me and the company. The company was able to continue projects with my input, and I did not feel like a stranger on my "return".
Obviously for the first few days I was completely out, but after that I could handle dropping by the office a few hours each day.
That's awesome that some companies are starting to be proactive about this.
One further step would be to require parents to take this time off. There was a news report about how American employees didn't use much of their vacation time last year. In a competitive company people who take vacation or the full parental leave can be seen as not being passionate enough about the job.
This can lead to an environment where nobody takes vacation and I imagine many will choose not to take parental leave.
This needs to be standard across companies of all size and it needs to be a reasonable time, as it is at AeroFS. Kudos to them for doing something about it.
[+] [-] geebee|11 years ago|reply
It's not because I plan to use parental leave. I already have two kids. And it's not only because I'm glad to see these policies help other people out, though of course that's part of it.
It's that this sort of "perk", rather than foosball tables, beer fridays, and vintage video game machines, give me hope that the industry is outgrowing its insular, "young people are just smarter" culture. That maybe employers are actually interested in sustained careers that will experience the ebb and flow of life, rather than just a period of extended adolescence. Parental leave policies do imply long term thinking.
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eduardordm|11 years ago|reply
"What is your startup's parental leave policy?"
In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that.
I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.
[+] [-] yourapostasy|11 years ago|reply
A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications.
If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state).
For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years.
But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
[+] [-] yuncun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawz|11 years ago|reply
Also, I think gender equality is an important one on many aspects: - Bonding with the child(ren) should not only a motherly privilege. - The mother's career may be more important to concentrate on. - The father may be interested in doing his share. - I'm not certain but from the point of view of the child(ren) there can be advantages to have both parents involved the same way.
Ideally I'd like to see certain amount of time allocated to the "family" that can be used/divided by the parents as they see fit.
[+] [-] digitalchaos|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|11 years ago|reply
The fact that they didn't include a question mark at the end of the sentence doesn't change the fact. The correct answer is still "No, Of course not." It's then up to them to decide whether it's worth firing you for giving the sensible answer to their silly request.
[+] [-] pascalo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssmoot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] husted|11 years ago|reply
Mom, dad and son are all doing great now.
[+] [-] option|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|11 years ago|reply
> SMP for eligible employees can be paid for up to 39 weeks, usually as follows:
> the first 6 weeks - 90% of their average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax > the remaining 33 weeks - £138.18 or 90% of their AWE (whichever is lower)
That adds up to less than 30% of median income for the latter 33 weeks of the 39 weeks statutory maternity pay.
[+] [-] pascalo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigzero|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourier|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clbrook|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|11 years ago|reply
Suppose you're running a startup and you have 12 employee-months worth of runway left before you'll need to show a concrete proof point to close the next round of funding or, preferably, get to cash-flow breakeven/Ramen-profitable.
Your product is inherently labor-centric. Your employees/team-mates are your best and only hope to produce the product.
In that situation, would you rather be using your last 12 person-months of runway paying your employees to work on the product or paying them to not work on the product and instead raise their own infant child?
Would your company be materially less likely to succeed if one of your employees had a new child and took 15-30% of the remaining runway while providing no benefit to the product? Probably.
What's the mechanism by which a company would be financially ahead with such policies? Would you personally be willing to work for less pay in order to work at such a company? I can agree that employees who use such policies might be much more likely to stay, but I wonder if employees who carry the load while the new parent is on leave (but their position not filled, so all the burden falls to the rest of the team) might be less loyal?
I'm a parent of 2; my wife took the statutory maximum FMLA leave with each of them; her employer had a generally generous paid leave policy, and I'm not anti-kid by any means. I am anti-regulation in general though...
These policies may be breakeven or profitable in the long-run; I don't know. I do know they present a period of unprofitability in the short-term. And when they are gender-specific or even primary-provider-specific, they can manifest themselves as hiring biases against those people most likely to use the policy.
[+] [-] djb_hackernews|11 years ago|reply
Humanity isn't here to ensure the survival of the corporation. We allow corporations to exist. If we decide that family time and bonding with our children is important, which we should, then the corporations need to adjust.
Fathers and mothers should get time measured in months to bond with their children after birth. It doesn't even need to be paid for by the company, we should just be using the unemployment benefits we've all already paid in to. It'll also help the job market as some positions may require temp workers to fill gaps. I'm honestly perplexed how anyone can be against mandatory parental leave and I'm a single guy without any children or any plan to have children in the near future.
Someday most of us won't work, not in the sense we view work in this current day, so why fight the inevitable? We should embrace it and take steps to get it right that is fair and sustainable.
[+] [-] jasonkester|11 years ago|reply
I just dropped down to 4 day weeks.
It was actually easy enough to do. I'd already been gone entirely for a few weeks, then I came back most of the way to full time, then... I just never ramped back up the rest of the way. (I bill by the hour, so there was never a salary discussion to muddy the waters).
That was over a year ago. I'm healthier now than I was then (partly from that extra day of chasing kids around, partly because with 3 day weekends all the time you find extra time in the mix for things like mountain biking). And I seem to be just as productive since I come in to each week with a nice clear mind, without having to have crammed and entire weekend worth of activity into just 2 days.
I toy with the idea of dropping down to 3 day weeks.
[+] [-] mooreds|11 years ago|reply
It was unpaid. My employer did not force me to take vacation time, which was kind of them.
A month or two before I left, the COO created a parental leave policy, and I was glad to see it codified.
This was a company with under 25 employees, but they could have benefited from this post (and this one, which the OP linked to: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/its-not-okay-to-n... ).
[+] [-] tomaskafka|11 years ago|reply
First 3 years are crucial in development of a child and it makes such a huge difference if the baby/child has an attention, love and contact with her parents 24/7 - or, if she spends day laying in an understaffed daycare with very little incentives to develop her.
Just for comparison, my country (Czech Republic) provides:
* 28 weeks of paid leave that start 6-8 weeks before expected birth date, with a payment roughly similar to average of mothers last year's net salary.
* Birth itself is covered by state insurance. 2-4 years long maternal leave where (any) parent gets a fixed sum of cca 11 average monthly salaries (distributed over the maternal leave period).
* During the above time, state also pays parent's health insurance.
* Also, employer has to ensure that parent can return to his/her position as long as the leave is shorter than 3 years.
You might think that this is expensive, but I see it as an investment in giving children healthy start full of attention and love, no matter their family's situation.
[+] [-] LarryLarryLarry|11 years ago|reply
This worked out well for both me and the company. The company was able to continue projects with my input, and I did not feel like a stranger on my "return".
Obviously for the first few days I was completely out, but after that I could handle dropping by the office a few hours each day.
[+] [-] manachar|11 years ago|reply
One further step would be to require parents to take this time off. There was a news report about how American employees didn't use much of their vacation time last year. In a competitive company people who take vacation or the full parental leave can be seen as not being passionate enough about the job.
This can lead to an environment where nobody takes vacation and I imagine many will choose not to take parental leave.
[+] [-] Alex3917|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frandroid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timjahn|11 years ago|reply