Mooving in the right direction: how we designed Moove’s new global parental leave policy

I'm thrilled to share a significant step Moove is taking towards building a more equitable and supportive workplace for all our Moovers. At the end of last year we launched our new parental leave policy.?

Our global policy guarantees a minimum amount of paid leave from day one of their employment, regardless of how a Moover grows their family.?

1. A minimum of 16 weeks paid maternity leave
2. A minimum of 4 weeks paid gender-neutral parental leave

This is a significant milestone in a journey from an African start-up to a global scale-up. And, while this new policy has a profound impact on the lives of our Moovers and their families, we know that there is more to do.?

One of the joys of working in a start-up environment is building things from scratch, and creating real and tangible impact. This policy represents extensive research and collaboration, aiming to address disparities in benefits across countries, and I'm excited to share the journey that led us here.?

I hope that by sharing the business case and data sets that I used in the process, others can use this as a starting point for their own journey.?

The need for change:

At early-stage companies, local legislation or statutory minimums are often the starting point for policies, especially when entering new markets. It ensures local compliance, but this approach can create inequality especially when considering countries such as Ghana that have no legal protection for paternity leave. This approach can sometimes fall short of an organisation’s own values, and we believed it was important for us, as Moove, to set our own standards.?

It wasn't just about aligning with our impact goal of gender equality; it was about defining what we believed was right, irrespective of local laws.

Why this matters:

Investing in parental leave isn’t solely about ‘doing the right thing’, nor is it a nice to have. There are many ways in which parental leave benefits families, businesses, and society, to summarise a few:

1. For people. Extended parental leave has been linked to better health outcomes for both infants and parents. A study published in the Journal of Health Economics found that maternity leave led to reductions in infant mortality rates. Mothers with longer leave are also less likely to experience postpartum depression, according to research in Psychological Medicine. Parental leave also allows for critical bonding time between parents and their newborns, which is essential for child development. Research indicates that children whose parents take parental leave show better social and cognitive development outcomes.

1. For employers. Recent research commissioned by Vodafone has found that one in five of 18-34 year olds has quit their job because of poor parental leave policies, with a further 25% saying they decided not to apply for a particular role because they thought the employer’s parental leave policies were inadequate. Offering robust parental leave policies can also significantly improve employee retention rates. A report from the U.S. Department of Labour suggests that when a woman is given generous maternity leave, they are more likely to return to work for their employer, reducing turnover costs.

1. For society. When parents are supported in the workforce, it leads to higher employment rates and economic productivity. A study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests that increasing female labour market participation through policies like parental leave contributes to economic growth.

1. For investment. There is a growing focus among investors on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) factors, where parental leave policies are increasingly seen as key indicators of a company's commitment to gender equality and overall employee well-being. Further, some investors use Equileap to inform their investment decisions, which looks at gender pay gap, parental leave policies, staff gender breakdown.

Finally, as a scaling organisation, a global standard sets a blueprint for our expansion. No matter what continent or country we expand to next, we have a minimum framework that protects our future colleagues.

So. How did we get there?

In order to make the change, I knew that the new policy needed to adhere to the following design principles:

1. Foster equality and fairness - striving for the best outcome for all of our Moovers wherever they are in the world.

1. Keep it simple - ensuring that the new policy is easy to understand and administer. This relieves pressure on our lean people team whether it’s Recruiters talking to candidates, People Partners supporting their stakeholders, or People Operations managing leave on our HRIS platform.??

1. Make it sustainable - as a young and scaling company, this new policy needs to set the trajectory that we want to go on but do so in a fiscally responsible way. We can only impact the lives of our customers if we exist! Sustainable growth is key for our long-term success.?

A data-driven journey:

As with everything at Moove. It all started with data.?

1. Listening to Moovers. The first stage was speaking to colleagues across different teams, countries and genders to understand what was important to them. I also spent time with Chloe Stephenson in our Impact team, and Paul Mitchell and Adedotun Lawal in our people team who are respective experts in their field and who each played a vital role in this process. The quotes below are from some of those conversations and highlight the difference even a few weeks can make to Moovers and their families, validate the rationale that parental leave policies support employee retention, and call out the importance of transparency.?

“There were lots of complications around my daughter's birth. If I'd taken only the 2 weeks offered by my previous company, we would have had 4 days at home together before I was back in the office full time. My wife would have been recovering from major surgery and severe trauma at home alone with a very young child and a lack of mobility.”?

“It's one of the things I look for in a company's offer as an indicator of how serious they are about their values. High quality parental leave is a massive decision maker when couples are looking at changing employment, it makes a huge material difference at a time of stress and engenders lifelong loyalty.”?

“I strongly believe maximising paternal leave at Moove will foster physical and mental health between couples. This was evident during the delivery of my daughter last year, when my presence and support at home ensured my wife was always happy. She had enough time to eat and sleep."??

“Any policy has to be visible and freely available - having to ask a company about parental leave is the kind of thing everyone wants to avoid at the point of working out if an offer is forthcoming.”?

1. Benchmarking the Landscape. The next stage was to understand what was on offer at other organisations to see how we stacked up. Initially I cast the net out far and wide, researching previous employers of our Moovers (based on LinkedIn insights), to create this spreadsheet.?However, I quickly observed the vast differences in what was on offer. The truth is, the proposition of working at a scale-up is very different to working in Big Tech or an employer with 10,000+ employees, so I decided to look specifically at venture backed start-ups. Tingting Peng kindly shared Cocoon’s website which benchmarks start-up parental leave. You can see the whole dataset here.?Cocoon reports that: “Across companies of all sizes in our data set, the average leave policy for birthing parents is 16 weeks and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.” This provided a helpful goal for us to aim for.?
2. Crunching the numbers. Now that I had an idea of where we wanted to land, the next piece of the puzzle was to determine how much this would cost our business. Both looking at the size and shape of the organisation today, and where we hope to be in future. The latter part is especially important when we consider the third design principle of sustainability. My research took me to an open-source financial model published by Optimizely.?I collaborated with Olumide Adegbemile in our People Operations team to input our Moover data including the gender, age and salary of our people. We ran this eleven times exploring various scenarios including our current state all the way up to 26-weeks full pay for all genders.?These models helped us evaluate the long-term implications of different policy options, ensuring that our approach was financially responsible and aligned with our company's growth objectives.
3. Senior leadership collaboration. The next stage was to present the proposal, along with my recommendation, to senior leaders in the business including Country Managing Directors, Regional Managing Directors, and the Senior Leaders.?Using all the data, we debated back and forth, ultimately landing on the proposal that was appropriate for our business at that moment. Through a combination of conversations and a-sync collaboration, we made the following decisions as a team:16 weeks full pay for maternity leave. This created standardisation for all markets except for India which has 26 weeks by law. India (and any other countries with more generous statutory requirements in future) will remain unchanged.?4 weeks gender neutral paternity leave. This was a progression from our previous concept of ‘paternity’ leave, and ensured that we are inclusive to all genders.?Fertility leave was discussed but it was ultimately decided that this would be treated in the same way as any other medical appointment.?Introducing global minimum leave standards, explicitly calling out for the first time that this policy is for all families including adoption, surrogacy and birth.?
4. Finalisation and launch. The final stage was turn concept into policy. This involved working with Olutola Bella and the legal team as well as the People Partnering team ( Adedotun Lawal , Kanchan V. , Armel Mea , and Thobile Dlamini ) to ensure compliance in all markets. Finally, we drafted the new policy and uploaded to our HRIS platform before launching to Moovers at a Town Hall meeting. Ehitueme Inegbenebor followed up with a policy FAQ document and Paul Mitchell , Jenny Collins (ACIPD) and I ran a People team drop-in session to answer any questions.

Celebrating progress while looking to the future:

While we are proud of this significant advancement, we recognise it as just the beginning of our journey.?

It is impossible to advocate for female inclusion in the work force unless we recognise that having a child is one of the key points when women leave the workforce.?

43,000 women left the UK workforce last year because of family commitments. In June-August 2022 28% of women weren't working because of family commitments as opposed to 3% of men.?

A gendered parental leave policy makes it very difficult for a couple to do anything except remove a woman from the workforce for an extended period of time.

The gold standard would be to implement a single, generous, and truly gender-inclusive policy that aligns with our most generous current market offering (26 weeks paid leave in India).

Achieving this ambitious goal would require us to continuously evaluate the impact of our policies on our business model and to adapt as necessary. But, I am excited about what the future may hold.?

Join us in building a better future

As we share our journey, we also extend an invitation to other companies to join us in evaluating their policies to ensure that they continue to move in the right direction whether that is a giant leap, or even a small step.?

Let International Women's Day be not just a moment for celebration but a call to action for gender equality.

Investing in inclusive policies is not just ethical; it's essential for a prosperous future for all.