The April Wrap Up

Good morning to everyone except the person who invented “spring cleaning”,?

Thanks a lot, we’re now knee-deep in a closet cleaning project and we can’t stop because everything is all over the floor!! Ok, ignoring the pile of clothes on the floor and moving on to more important things: how to advocate for paid leave at your company.

How to advocate for paid leave at your company

As one of the 10 wealthiest nations in the world, you'd think the United States could spare a few dollars towards paid leave. Across all OECD and EU countries, the US is the only one that doesn’t provide paid parental leave. It doesn’t get any better when looking at medical, caregiver, and less common non-traditional leave types.

Employers are getting the message that paid leave is table stakes for today’s employees. Without a paid leave policy (or with a minimal paid leave policy) they’re missing out on top talent and losing internal talent. A company’s paid leave policy is a reflection of how much they value their employees—not only is it the right thing to do, it’s a smart business decision.?

While we’d like to think that most employers implement paid leave policies out of the goodness of their hearts, we’re not that naive. There’s a very real financial component that can’t be overlooked. Our advice? Advocate with ‘the why’ and bring the data to back it up.

Step 1: Research what your peers are doing

You can use Cocoon’s paid leave benchmark report to report across industry and company size. If you have specific companies that you often benchmark yourself against, look into their job postings to see what they offer. It’s really powerful to show your leave policy (or lack thereof) right next to what your peers are offering—people start to understand why candidates might choose a company with more paid leave.

Step 2: Highlight the equity issues

If your company is distributed across the United States, any employees that don’t live in states with Paid Family and Medical Leave programs are… out of luck. You can use Cocoon’s state leave law map to demonstrate the complexity of existing leave laws, but also the vast amount of the United States with no leave laws. Again, a side-by-side comparison is helpful here–choose two different states in which you have employees (one with benefits and one without) to showcase the different experience.?For example:

If the response to this example is that at least the employee in California is getting some pay, you might want to call out that California is one of the most progressive states but “partial pay” across all state leave programs is often a minimal amount. These weekly benefit rates typically have a cap at 60-70% of an employee’s normal salary. This means that as an employee is about to go through a major life event (having a child, undergoing treatment, caring for an ill loved one) where costs are likely going up, they’re taking a sizable income hit.?

Step 3: Define the business risk

Research shows that paid leave significantly increases the likelihood of a birthing parent returning to the workplace. Although there’s a lot of data you can point to (see below) employees aren’t shying away from voicing their needs:

Here’s some research to help back up the qualitative anecdotes:

• 95% of workers who took paid leave returned to work after their leave was over (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• Birthing parents who take paid leave are 93% more likely to be working 9-12 months after their leave compared to the birthing parents who took no leave (National Partnership for Women and Families)
• Higher benefit amounts (in this case, paid leave offered) increase the likelihood of employment (California Employment Development Department)
• 30% of the decrease of women in the workplace can be attributed to the lack of “family friendly” policies like parental leave (National Bureau of Economic Research)
• Google expanded its leave policy and attrition among young birthing parents dropped by 50% (Huffington Post)
• Employers with paid leave policies are 60% more likely to report “above average” financial performance than companies with no paid leave (Centre for Economic Research)

Step 4: Show the cost to your company

For this step, you’ll want to use our paid leave cost analysis tool. Enter your current policy and get the estimated cost and then enter your proposed policy to show the difference. Instead of just an all-up number to show your team, we break it out into the different components of a leave program to highlight that it’s so much more than what’s printed in the employee handbook.?

You can show costs related to the total sum paid to employees on leave, internal time spent on leave, and attrition related to your leave policy. Attrition rates are an indirect cost that’s often overlooked when thinking about paid leave but it’s incredibly important. As you use our tool, you’ll see that attrition costs are lower when your paid leave policy is higher.?

After you enter your policy proposal, you can click ‘Share with my team’ to get a deck template for making the case internally.

At the end of the day, leave happens and employees have lives outside of work. Employers who don’t offer paid leave (or offer minimal) aren’t “cutting costs”—they’re showing employees that they don’t think things outside of work matter. And as anyone with a life (read: everyone) would agree, the things that happen outside of work matter a lot.?

Until next time,

Team Cocoon