The sign outside Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. Netflix on Tuesday announced it is letting new parents on its payroll to take up to a years paid leave. Employees will be allowed to return and leave again if necessary and continue to earn their normal pay throughout.
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However, more companies are thinking about offering at least some paid time off, which is mandated in nearly all other countries – but not in the US.
“We’ve seen many employers expanding their amount of paid leave available, but it would be a small number of industries with a relatively small-to-medium size population that could afford to do something as extensive as Netflix”, said Tavarozzi.
As a part of the strategy to retain staff, Netflix has announced that it would allow parents to take time-off from work for as long as they want under the company’s new policies that have just been revealed.
“Compared to other rich nations in the OECD group, America’s outlier status is stark: the UK guarantees 52 weeks of paid leave for mothers, two of which are mandatory”, The Guardian reports.
“As we ask our employees to bring their “A” game to work every day to achieve our mission, we believe it’s our responsibility to create an environment where people can do their best work”. A standard benchmark for companies with more than 50 employees, set by the Family and Medical Leave Act, is 12 weeks unpaid leave for new mothers who have been employed for more than a year.
Netflix is now offering new parents up to a year of paid leave.
Yahoo doubled its maternity and paternity leave in 2013 to make it more competitive with Facebook and Google, and it has shown to be an important perk for all three companies.
What do you think of these new parental leave policies? New fathers will get 12 paid weeks, instead of four paid and eight unpaid.
“If organizations introduce such policies but foster a hostile culture that disapproves their use, these benefits will fail to produce the intended outcome”.
Regardless of what a company wants to give in terms of leave on its own accord, in-house counsel should be looking to the future and how the actual law around time off for new parents may change.
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What will the decision mean for other employers?
