The music streaming service has said it will offer all staff up to six months’ parental leave on full pay, to ensure worldwide workers don’t miss out on a similar benefit already enjoyed in the Swedish capital.
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The announcement – which was followed by a conversation between the company’s chief human resources officer, Katarina Berg, and senior presidential adviser, Valerie Jarrett, at Spotify’s NY City office – signals a growing trend for tech companies to offer competitive benefits as a way of attracting talented workers. The policy can be used until a child turns three. “We really want to have a culture in our country were you can be a working parent and be productive at work”, Jarrett said.
Spotify was the beneficiary in this instance: yesterday, it announced its new global parental-leave policy, modelled on the (mandatory) system it uses in Sweden.
Parents will be able to take the leave at one time, or spread it out in three sections over three years. Employees who have had children since the beginning of 2013 will also be eligible for the benefit, since parents will be allowed to take their time off at any point between the birth of their child and his or her third birthday. Jarrett said the administration is pushing for paid leave for American workers.
They’ll also have the option to extend their leave unpaid until their child is 3 years old.
Berg encouraged everyone in the room to tweet their support for paid leave, with the #LeadOnLeave hashtag. It reads, “Spotify is growing up fast and the team’s responsibilities at home and at work are growing with us”. Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Adobe, and Accenture have all recently improved the paid leave policies they present to employees.
According to the Department of Labor, just 12 percent of workers in the private sector workforce have access to paid family leave.
“We kept looking at each other during this meeting, and finally he looks at us and says, ‘What are you thinking about that’s so much more important than this meeting?’ I said to him in a moment of truth, ‘The Halloween Parade starts in, like, 25 minutes.’ He looked at the two of us and said, ‘Well, why are you here?’ The permission that he gave me that day to go be a single mom … made me unbelievably loyal”.
This post has been updated.
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Maybe, when he grows up, companies won’t need to announce leave opportunities because they’ll be an accepted part of work life.
