Parentaly, a platform that helps companies and employees navigate leaves of absence, recently announced it’s appointing an advisory board to help businesses better navigate challenges surrounding this benefit.
A business imperative. The board, which includes former CHROs and chief people officers from companies including Mastercard, Xerox, and MetLife, is coming together at a time when more employers are expanding their paid leave policies—either due to local laws, shifting expectations among workers, or both.
But even as businesses roll out more generous paid family and medical leave policies, they’re not always thinking about how to manage the challenges that arise when employees take advantage of these benefits, Allison Whalen, Parentaly’s CEO and co-founder, told HR Brew.
“When people are going to step away from work for the longest period they will ever step away, we need to make sure that there are systems within the organization set up so that that doesn’t backfire, meaning the work continues effectively,” and workers feel supported in their careers when they return, she said.
Some of the top challenges Whalen sees employers experience when workers take a leave of absence is team burnout, as well as business disruption. “When you remove a person, what happens to the priorities and the business deliverables?” she said. While companies typically have business continuity plans for events like natural disasters or data breaches, “they don’t think about business continuity plans when it comes to parental leaves, which are very frequent and predictable,” she added.
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The CHRO board will tackle these types of issues through thought leadership and research, as well as advise Parentaly about its product, Whalen said.
Tackling leave from the top. Just over one-quarter (27%) of private-sector workers had access to paid family leave as of March 2023, up 17 percentage points from 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More recent figures from SHRM show 39% of employers offered paid parental leave as of this year. As employers have rolled out more generous leave policies, HR teams have developed different strategies for handling staffing issues and supporting workers while they’re away.
These concerns are becoming more pertinent to the C-suite as larger shares of employees (including fathers) gain access to leave, and workers become parents later in life, Whalen noted. “There are just more people leaving, and it’s becoming more problematic, and so that then becomes escalated to a more senior level.”
Leave benefits present an interesting challenge for organizations from a risk-management perspective, Tiffany Stevenson, former SVP and chief people officer at WeightWatchers, who is joining the board, told us. She said she hopes the board can explore how to “bring other decision-makers into this conversation, specifically the CFO, COO, and CEO.” Such C-suite leaders may help organizations think about their “operational effectiveness, the long term talent strategy, and direct impact on business continuity” amid leaves of absence, she said.