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Employee Life Cycle

1. Attraction and Talent Outreach

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2. Recruiting and Hiring

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3. Onboarding and Training

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4. Performance Management, Compensation, and Benefits

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5. Talent and Leadership Development

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6. Retention and Employee Engagement

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7. Succession Planning and Promotion

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8. Separation and Retirement

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Organizational Enablers

9. Corporate Culture and Leadership

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10. Company Performance and Reporting

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11. Policies and Grievance Management

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12. Corporate Communication and Branding

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11.9 Establish family leave policies meeting the stated needs of parents and employees

Content

Description of Best Practices

Meet or exceed in-country legal requirements for leave

Implement additional leave to meet the needs of parents and employees including time to care for sick family members or other family emergencies

Address needs of employees as identified by the company’s benefits analysis

Communicate these benefits to all employees

Train supervisors and managers about their role in creating a supportive climate in which employees feel comfortable using leave

Encourage company leadership to take appropriate leave to encourage employees to do the same

Create and implement processes to maintain full staffing while employees are on leave

Challenges of Implementation

Company culture may discourage men from taking family leave

Business unit is short-staffed and remaining employees must pick up extra duties

Company funds may not be available to pay for the additional leave

What Success Looks Like

Both fathers and mothers use available leave

Men and women use available leave for care of family

Business units are supported through such programs as job sharing, hiring temporary workers and cross-training so as to maintain full staffing while employees take leave

Resources and Tools

Guide: Building a Workplace Flexibility Strategy (Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Australian Government)

Report/Study: Developing A Flexible Working Arrangements Policy (Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Australian Government)

Report/Study: Family-Friendly Policies: Redesigning the Workplace of the Future (UNICEF)

Report/Study: Business and Family-Friendly Policies (UNICEF)

Report/Study: Family-Friendly Policies: A Global Survey of Business Policy (UNICEF)

Report/Study: A Review of the Evidence on How to Cover all Families for Paid Family and Medical Leave (WORLD Policy Analysis Center)

Report/Study: Leveraging Workplace Flexibility for Engagement and Productivity (Society for Human Resource Management)

Article: Creating a "Human-Friendly" Workplace (Allen Communications Learning Services)

Article: 4 Policies that Encourage a Family-Friendly Company Culture (Justworks)

Article: Inflexible Working Hours Could Be Making The Gender Gap Worse (World Economic Forum)