Curious about Benefits

[Trainwreck20]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

this is only true to the extent that hiring someone new 'takes away' from the profit sharing at the end ... and the only reason you hire somebody is because you expect their productivity to bring in more than what you're paying them..

Well, we hire people to increase the value of the company, both in that they bring in more work than they get paid and they increase the revenues of the company, which increases the share price. There are several other instances where an overhead employee can increase the profitability of the company while not providing a revenue stream. Finally, the quality of the employee can greatly affect the value of the company, and that is where offering a paid maternity leave plan might be beneficial.

Having worked in a government agency for some years, it is fascinating to to work in a mid-size (?) company (which was very small when I started her) and watch it grow and the financial decisions that have to be made. I can tell you that the company was originally started as a sort of 'refuge' from some of the 'sweatshop' model consulting firms, and the now cliche work-life balance consideration is still very real here. At some point, we will probably offer some sort of paid maternity leave, but there needs to be some critical mass (we are currently about 80 employees) to mitigate the impact. We are probably about there, but honestly, we are heavily weighted to female employees and generally pretty young currently, so the impact could be substantial still.

What we have historically done is offer a fairly lengthy unpaid maternity leave and allow employees to work a minimal number of hours (if they would like to) during their leave. From a career development perspective, this allows the employee to stay connected to their clients, which is extremely valuable. It may only be 5 hours a week after 4 weeks off, but the object is to allow the employee to maintain connected to the career track, not make a lot of money. Also, we have had a significant number of people opt to come back for 20-32 hours per week after they have kids and this can work extremely well in our field.

At the end of the day, I guess I am saying that if the gov't mandated that we provide a certain amount of paid maternity leave, that we would end up potentially having to scrap a highly successful solution that has been very popular in the past.

[Aquitaine]

At the end of the day, I guess I am saying that if the gov't mandated that we provide a certain amount of paid maternity leave, that we would end up potentially having to scrap a highly successful solution that has been very popular in the past.

This is a great illustration of how these things should come about. My company has four people in it, so we're not required to do anything, but we end up accommodating people if and when they want to go to half time for class, or work on the beach for three weeks - I learned a lot from what is now the classic tech reinvention of HR:

https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

We'd be too small to fall under any government mandate anyway, but as we grow I certainly hope we'll be the ones making the decisions on what to award to whom rather than having them made for us.