DMEC: Welcome to Absence Management Perspectives, a DMEC Podcast.

The Disability Management Employer Coalition, or DMEC as we're known by most people,

provides focused education, knowledge and networking opportunities for absence and disability management professionals. DMEC has become a leading voice in the industry and represents more than 20,000 professionals from organizations of all sizes across the United States and in Canada. This podcast series focuses on industry perspectives and delves into issues that affect DMEC members and the community as a whole. We're thrilled to have you with us and hope you'll Visit us@DMEC.org to get a full picture of what we have to offer. From webinars and publications to conferences, certifications, and much more. Let's get started and meet the people behind the processes.

Heather Grimshaw: Hi, thank you for joining us, Heather. I'm Heather Grimshaw with dmec, and today we're talking about parental leave and the important role managers and supervisors play in helping employees prepare for and navigate it. This role goes beyond the actual leave and can influence that employee's loyalty, productivity, and overall experience, according to Alison Whelan, cofounder and CEO of Parentally, who wrote about this topic in a recent DMEC at Work magazine article. We've unlocked this article titled Can Managers make or Break the Parental Leave Experience for Employees? For Podcast Listeners and included a link to it in the Notes section of this episode. Allison is here with us today to provide more context and guidance about this important topic, as well as some data Parental Lee has recently released. So, Alison, thank you so much for being with us today. I was intrigued by a reference to a recent data finding that leave is one of the most pivotal transitions in an employee's life and one of the most overlooked.

That data was attributed to a recent parental leave survey, and we're hoping that you'll shed some light on what survey respondents said here and provide some context about why leave is overlooked.

Allison Whalen: Yeah, I think that what was so interesting to us when we ran this survey is the definition of overlooked to us is where is there the biggest disconnect between what parents and specifically this survey? The results that we released, we actually focused on the female respondents, which we can talk a little bit more about. What did they say was most important to them? What were their biggest challenges? And we have a whole laundry list that we got from these 3,000 women and then we looked at what are they receiving from their workplaces today and where do we see the biggest mismatch? And by far and away we found that there was a huge mismatch between women Saying that their career success is by far and away their biggest fear with parental leave, and yet they were not getting much support in that area. And another way to put this maybe stepping outside of the data is I think for many people, especially folks who are managing leaves, we immediately think of filing and pay because that is sort of what a company legally needs to do, right? It's like that is there is someone at the organization whose job is to make sure that you are filing correctly, that they're getting paid if they receive paid leave, that they're working with the state based programs effectively. And so there is a lot of focus on that. And yet what we found is that actually the biggest sort of house is on fire moment is more related to career trajectory and not falling behind and not being penalized from a work perspective.

And they're also not getting much support specifically from their managers as it relates to that career support.

Heather Grimshaw: I love the reference to the house on fire moment. And there are so many different pieces and parts to this puzzle from that legal vantage point that it's easy to understand how that could obscure the other pieces. So there's a reference in the article to paid parental leave, normalizing time off for new parents and how this type of parental leave has become increasingly important for recruitment purposes. Is this mainly true for women or also true for men?

Allison Whalen: Also true for men. And I think people would be shocked to see the data. Over 80% of men in this survey said that they would consider a company's paid parental leave policy when making a job decision today. Now, we did not publish that because just to give a bit of context, we put this survey out into the world. We had over 4,000 responses globally from every person, every walk of life. And what we did for this research report is we just published the results of the critical mass, which was women who had taken partially or fully paid parental leave in the United States within the past three years. But we do actually have access to a lot more data.

The reason we didn't include it in this research study is that we didn't have a critical mass. But we can still go back and ask interesting questions like the one that you just posed to me.

And so when we looked at the fathers who filled out this survey, of which I believe we have around 350 responses, they were almost talking about parental leave as important as the female respondents, which was really a surprise to us because, you know, men don't actually have access to a lot of paid parental leave in the United States today. We didn't expect to find that they would care about it as much as women. And it was shockingly similar. And I think it really speaks to a lot of the changing generational dynamics where we have this prevalence of dual income households. There's a big, big shift in terms of equality of caregiving. We are all parents. There isn't, you know, this concept anymore. We would like to change this. I, I would say most of us who are currently in that parenting stage of we don't want this to be seen as this is primarily a mother's moment to take time away. We also want fathers to take that time. And, and so we were really encouraged when we saw that data. And I think the most interesting piece about this is this data as context. Women said that 94% men were around. I think it was 82% who said that they would consider paid parental leave when evaluating a job offer today. This includes a lot of people who are done having kids. And so this really speaks to parental leave. Of course, it's important to people who will use it, but it also serves today as a signal for how will this company treat their employees. And, and if you find a company that they offer, you know, not a lot of paid leave, or they offer a lot of paid leave to birthing parents, but basically no leave to non birthing parents, it raises this question of what does that say about the culture of the organization? Is this going to be a place where only women are taking extended time out of the workforce, but not men? And what does that do to the sort of culture of the organization? And so I found that that was really, really fascinating.

Heather Grimshaw: It is fascinating. The other piece that's really interesting and speaks to what you just said is that the, the respondents are not just people of that childbearing age. It is really promising and encouraging because I do think that it is that holistic picture of culture.

And so frequently people might miss the, that full understanding of what that looks like and how you really communicate it and show up. One of the terms Brian Bass uses, our CEO is carewashing. So the difference between saying you're going to do something and actually showing up and providing that support.

Allison Whalen: Right, exactly. I love that.

Heather Grimshaw: It's easy to, to lose sight or lose perspective on really just how new this is. So I love the fact that it sounds like it's an ongoing research initiative and look forward to hearing,

yeah, once.

Allison Whalen: You start studying something, you realize, oh wait, I want to study this next thing too. And so I feel like this will probably be the never ending research project where we come up with the next questions that we have. But we've all at parentally identified the father experience as the next big research project that we want to undertake.

Heather Grimshaw: And I'm sure you've heard some of the, the state representatives talk about some of the data that they're finding. It is interesting to see how fathers are using some of the leave, the paid leave that's available because it is as, as you said, it is frequently a shared experience. But those unique elements are so important.

Allison Whalen: To bring this to light. And I think this also speaks, speaks to a lot of what we shared in our research about the female mother experience.

Mothers almost never split up their leave because it's almost always a combination of disability right after a birth of a child and then a bonding leave. And we find that overwhelmingly mothers will take one long leave.

We find that overwhelmingly or more commonly than not, fathers are splitting up their leave. And so that has real implications because for example, in sales, most companies have rules for commissions that you have to be in seat to be given a commission. And so we will see fathers plan their leaves around being in seat to get a huge payday from a commission. For example,

mothers can't do that. They are literally not allowed to because if they're on disability, they can't come back for a week to be in seat to get a Commission, right. I mean this is a very specific example, but this comes up all the time because a lot of companies have huge sales teams or even not sales, but commission or bonus structured type roles where fathers were seeing and rightfully so, I would do this as well probably if I were in their shoes. They are optimizing for their take home pay because they can. And birthing parents are not able to do that. And when you take shorter leaves, then it just changes sort of the nature of your career trajectory in a way that is really interesting. And so there are really big differences that we see in terms of how they're using their leaves, you know, fathers versus mothers.

Heather Grimshaw: That is really interesting to hear and I so appreciate the really detailed example because frequently if it's too high level of an example, it doesn't hit home, whereas that does. And this transitions us, I hope nicely into that manager supervisor focus, which you did beautifully in the article and identify managers as really potential or possible bridge builders to address some of the gaps between an employer's policy and the practice with parental leaves.

It was interesting and frankly a little disappointing to hear that people who take time off for family reasons, specifically new parents here, are still believed to be in some way less committed or not as ambitious as their counterparts. And I was hoping that you would talk a little bit about a manager's role in preventing or potentially diminishing the effects of this type of bias. In other words, what can managers do to ensure their team members who are taking parental leave feel included and supported both before and during that leave?

Allison Whalen: I think managers are arguably the most important person in this equation. It's like how they say you leave managers, not companies. It's a similar idea here is managers are the single most important person when you think about an employee's experience,

retention likelihood when they go on parental leave and some of the things that managers, we know managers can do and that we train managers to do at parental leave? There are a couple things, very basics like having a strong coverage plan really improved the experience of that person going on leave. Now we believe that in most cases the employee should be building that coverage plan. They should have agency in their career. They're closest to the details and.

But managers have a really interesting and powerful role here where they can come in early on and set guardrails. Here are my priorities while you're out. I have this extra budget. I was thinking of re scoping this person's role. I have headcount that I was planning on bringing in six months from now, which I can bring in three months early and we can have them cover for part of your work. That is really, really important for the manager to be proactively setting some guidelines and sort of outlining what resources and priorities exist for them. Letting the employee then build their coverage plan in partnership with the manager. I would almost argue one of the most important things that managers can do before someone goes on leave is talk about their long term career.

And the reason for that is that I think oftentimes managers are scared to say, let's talk about what this looks like one to two years from now. Because there's this weird bias that managers, not even managers but society, believes that this is a moment where specifically women may not return to work. That's what they believe. Like, is she going to come back? And so maybe they don't want to make plans around her because they don't know if she's going to come back and they don't want to talk about it because they're afraid of what they'll hear or they're worried they'll say the wrong thing. Our data in this research study showed that 94% of women do return. We should all expect that basically everyone is going to return. And if you expect them to return, then your job as a manager is to make sure that they're returning to something that is really motivating and engaging and exciting for them.

And I think it's also important for managers to understand that what everyone wants when they return to work is they want exciting work, they want meaningful work, they don't want to come back to work and have really junior easy things. They want to feel like being away from their child matters. Right. And so you can start that very early in the pre leave process of talking about what you're envisioning for their career development, how you can set them up for success even through their leave of absence. That sends such a powerful message to the expecting employee because now they know I'm not being counted out and this is just a blip in time and we're going to partner together and my manager is still bought into my success. Success. It's so important, and we hear this from employees all the time, that when their managers talk about that, they get very invested in not only building strong coverage plans, but also returning, you know, very strong. We also talk a lot in our manager training about on leave communication with the person who's on leave. It is not illegal to reach out to someone on leave. In most cases, if there is a huge company layoff and somebody is on Leave it is okay to let them know, hey, I'm sure you just saw this in the news. I'm still here. Your team is still here. If you're nervous, let me know and we can chat. Like, that's not. That is giving the opportunity to the person to address whatever they want. And if they say, nope, I'm good, thanks so much for reaching out. Then you don't have to have a call. But if they're on leave and they see that their company is doing a mass layoff, imagine what that feels like to someone who's like holding a new child or whatever. And so we talk a lot to managers about what communication is actually very good. And how do you let that new parent control what the communication is? Because at the end of the day, that's kind of what you want, is you're not going to decide as the manager what you reach out to them for. You're going to ask them in advance what are the things that if they happen, you want me to reach out to you, and if so, how should I reach out to you? And some people will say, I don't want to hear a word. And that's totally fine. Most people in our experience say, you know, I really want to disconnect and focus on my family. But if you will no longer be my manager, I'd like to know if you know this project that I've been working on for three years. I know it's going to the exec committee when I'm two and a half months postpartum. I would love to get just like a short email letting me know what the result was like. There are sometimes things that people do want to know because imagine if you're really invested in this thing you've worked on for three years. You may want to hear how it resulted. But if it's a week after you give birth, you probably don't. Right? And so like, it's not, it's not very straightforward how to do this. And of course there are also laws around this. But it's really important to wrap this up saying this is a very long winded answer. Return to work. It's all about building a re onboarding plan. Our research found that 71% of new mothers returning to work did not receive an adequate re onboarding plan. And I think half of them said they didn't receive a plan at all. They just showed up back at work and had absolutely nothing. Not only is that terrible for the business, imagine what that makes you feel like. You return to work, you've been out for a long time. You're probably already nervous about what is going to happen and no one even did anything for you to welcome you back or help you get back up to speed. So re onboarding plans are really, really, really important. And we have a lot of data in this research study around if managers do some of these key things, if they are able to create strong lines of communication.

Talk about, you know, I hate the word flexibility. It's almost like more creative working structures for a short period of time right when the new parent returns to work, if they're putting together a strong re onboarding plan, the impact on retention is huge. And so we don't have total like causation in this study. I'm sure that a lot of this is the managers were already good managers,

but we do know that strong coverage plans, communication and re onboarding plans are really, really critical.

Heather Grimshaw: Yeah, that's really helpful. And I do think you, you mentioned you used the word fear as you were starting to talk about this and, and the fear of saying the wrong thing, the fear of overstepping or maybe alienating someone. And sadly, I think it does lead a lot of people just to say nothing, which is not wise, especially here, you know, in this type of scenario. And so that's really helpful to hear the, not only the anecdotal evidence, but also that data that you have that's so powerful. So you mentioned re onboarding here, which is wonderful. And one of the key pieces that I took away from your article is that pre leave planning, that is so important and you talked a little bit about this just now, but I'm hoping that you'll share a little bit about what it entails and really how organizations are investing in it. And just as a little added nuance to that question, I'm also wondering, you mentioned that you frequently work with very generous companies and so I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how you can do this as a small organization as well as a larger organization.

Allison Whalen: And you want to know specifically about pre leave planning, is that.

Heather Grimshaw: Yes, please. Just to, just to narrow the scope there.

Allison Whalen: Yes.

Heather Grimshaw: Thank you.

Allison Whalen: Yeah, this is something I'm so passionate about this. When I first started parentally, we were just a pre leave planning business. That was it. Because my sort of insight aha moment when I had my first parental leave was that nobody knows how to do it. It's difficult and it's arguably the most important thing to do for the business, for the manager, for the team and for the person going on leave. And I was astounded at the fact that I could not find anyone who was doing this well who had any sort of systematized way to do this. And so I became really, really focused on the pre leave portion. Now, today we also do return to work support. It looks very different. So when we work with companies, return to work is much more about meeting you where you are and being very helpful to your unique challenges when you return to work. Some people return because of or they struggle with childcare or they struggle with, you know, work stuff. Pre leave, we are very focused on how to build a strong coverage plan and it is much more prescriptive. So the way that we do this, and I'll share that because I haven't actually seen many companies do this well, which is why I have a business. I'll share how we do this. We've now worked with over 5,000 employees who've gone on parental leave. And we, we have learned the different ways that people need to be thinking about coverage planning. And it looks different depending on is this, are they themselves a manager or an individual contributor? What function are they in? If you're in sales versus marketing versus product, the way you build a strong coverage plan looks very, very different. It also looks different depending on your career goals. There are some people that are going after a huge promotion you and the way that they think about coverage planning should look different than someone who says, I'm really happy and I just want things to go well and then I return to work and I love this job and I want it to be steady state.

Right. And there are many different flavors of how you want to think about your career trajectory.

So. And then of course there's also what additional resources do you have access to? Some people have budget for a backfill, most don't, as just one example. And so how we do this is we have a combination between a productized support. So we ask folks a number of questions and based on their answers, we're able to give them different directions of how to build a really strong coverage plan, give them different templates, different things that they need to be focused on figuring out and answering as they go through this pre leave coverage planning experience. And then everybody gets matched with a parentally expert because as you can imagine, you can't productize all of this. Right. For example, if I am on a PIP and I'm about to go on parental leave and I'm trying to come up with a coverage plan, that is a very complicated scenario and I need to work with a human to help me figure out how to do that. If I'm a manager and I have a team of six direct reports and I'm going to ask one person to take over most of my roles, I'm going to elevate them, they're going to run the team meetings, they're going to take on some of my projects. But I'm also going to pick another person to do a couple of other things. Now imagine the dynamics that that creates for my team. That's very difficult to productize. That's where they would be working with their parentally expert to say, hey, I've gone through all of this, I've started to build this plan and now I need to figure out how to navigate the team dynamics here. But I think that if companies wanted to build this out themselves, they certainly could. There are some companies that have hired people. Very few large companies have hired people to focus just on the parental leave experience. They tend to focus though more on employee experience, how you feel, connecting you with mentors, which is great. We don't do that. But I think what's missing is really strong support in coverage planning and figuring out what are ways that other people in similar roles actually think about covering for their work. Because at the end of the day, it's kind of a math equation. It's like if you're going to be not here, then if you, if you're going to put your work on other people, it's complicated because now the other people need to either pause some of their work or you need to, the manager needs to hire another person. So it is a very complicated process to figure out how to do coverage planning with smaller organizations. I think that. And by the way, we do also work with smaller organizations. The only reason it's not our focus is we just, you know, it's easier to sell to larger companies that need us repetitively. But we have worked with a lot of small organizations, so this model works well for them. But I do think that there are differences in terms of how smaller companies think about coverage planning. It really depends on how fast they're growing. So if it's like a really small company that's in a high growth mode, it can almost be easier to cover for someone because they're hiring people constantly. And I'll speak from parental leave experience. We've had so many people go on parental leave since I started the business and we do a few things as context. We're like 30 people, so quite small. We have two people who are literally employees that are part time employees meant to cover for leaves. So they're kind of like generalists and we'll scope them into different places of the company which when you think about that, it's like we're only 30 people. Some people would be shocked that we would have that. But every company should expect that around 10% of their workforce, maybe like 5 to 10% will go on parental leave any year. And so if I know that 10% and for us we're probably 3x that to be honest or 2x that given what we do, we attract a lot of people in that stage of their life. We need to plan for that. You should expect that people will go on leave and you should have know headcount accordingly. The other thing that we'll do is we will accelerate hires when we find out that someone is expecting we will bump up our hiring schedule. And it's not to have that new person take over their job, but that new person, when they start earlier can take over parts of their job. And it's a good onboarding for them to maybe cover for this person a bit to learn about what they're doing, take on some of that work or it's just like another person that can take on some of this capacity. And that has worked really, really well for us. And then I think like in a small organization a lot of this is, you know, sometimes you just have to say no, you have to stop certain things. We don't need to cover everything. Oftentimes people go on leave. We had someone go on leave this year where her work is critically important but it's not urgent. So we paused it and that was totally fine. And so I think that there's a lot to unpack there of like does this work actually need to keep going? And usually client facing roles do. And you can't just say we're just not going to have an account manager. Like no, you can't do that. Think about headcount, think about hiring folks. And the reason why I'm such a fan of these part time employees and they're part time because they want to be. It's their choice. I would hire them for more, but they wanted more. They only wanted to work part time. They get to know our company really well. For us it's better than working with like a temp who comes in and then there's a lot of onboarding and training that we would have to go through. These folks know everything about our company and so they're able to sort of pop into different areas more effectively.

Heather Grimshaw: Sharing that example really helps to illustrate how you can think strategically in advance and prepare because the way that you describe it also shows how you can again illustrate that investment in the person who is taking time to invest in their families as well as investing in the team, quote unquote left behind so that everyone comes out whole and no one is ground to dust.

Allison Whalen: Yeah. No, seriously. And it, we, it's really important because coming out of this research study when we saw 52% of parental leaves result in some level of team burnout, that's a really bad statistic. And I think it highlights that while we think parental leave is sort of niche, it's not because every time somebody leaves it impacts everyone else around us. And it really matters that we think about everyone else's experience. I think sometimes we almost feel bad talking about that. It's like we, we want to support this person going on leave, but not at our expense.

And so I'm willing to and excited to jump in and cover some of their work. But what other parts of my work will be deprioritized so that I have the time and space to do that? And I would add one more really important thing to that. This can be really exciting, but you have to be intentional. So for example, I've stepped in to work more on post sale implementation with our clients.

I had never done that before. We had, we just had two people go out on leave. I am absolutely loving it. And this was like part of our company strategy is oh, when these folks go on leave, Alison's going to shift her focus and she's going to do a deep dive on this and hear all the cool things that she's going to focus on and it's like a positive thing. Now that these folks are coming out, I have this interim project where I'm spending more time here supporting the team and I'm excited about it. And so I think we also would benefit capital we all of us from thinking when someone goes on parental leave, how do we map the coverage to be really exciting for the people asked to cover? Whether it's something they've always wanted to do or it's more senior work than they're used to, or someone wants to get exposure to a different part of the org. Like there are really positive benefits. It's a big, very positive forcing function oftentimes when people go on leave. But you have to be really thoughtful about it, you know, like it, it doesn't, it's not always like the person who will do the work, the Best is going to be the happiest with it. Sometimes it's the person who doesn't have exposure in this space that will be happiest and may even do a better job. And so it is really, really tricky. And I tell them I was dreading this at first. I was like, ugh, you know, I'm much more of like a salesperson and I, I come from sales. You know, I'm not a post sales type of a person. I'm not an operationally, you know, focused type of a person. And I have loved it. It's been such a good stretch experience for me. The team loves it. Like we're all having such a good time because it, it forced us to get out of where we would naturally operate. And now, of course, sometimes that could backfire. We're loving it. I think they are, unless they're lying to me. No, but it, it's just very positive. And so I think sometimes things that can feel stressful and like, ugh, I've got to go and do this, it's like. But is it actually a really good opportunity? And how can you make this a really great stretch opportunity or learning experience? Is something that we always ask ourselves.

Heather Grimshaw: Broadening the scope a bit here. I'm wondering whether the data published from the recent parentally survey is limited to parental leaves or if it might also apply to other leaves as well. You mentioned the value of training managers and supervisors. Is addressing stigma and stigma associated with taking leave sort of on that holistic level, part of that training?

Allison Whalen: Yes. So when we do our manager training, we start with leading with empathy, a lot of which is specific to parental leave and parents more broadly. So that is very specific to a lot of the stigma and bias that we know exists, like the motherhood bias and the fatherhood bonus.

Everything else in the training, our advice for before, during and after this person goes on leave is applicable to any type of leave. And so while we do run this training just for parental leaves, we know that some of our clients have offered this up to everyone and encouraged every type of manager to attend, whether or not they have someone going through parental leave. And it's something that we're beginning to experiment with is how are we able to expand what we've built and the expertise that we have to support more types of leaves, not just parental leaves. Because I think that leaves are more similar than different when you look at the mechanics of covering for someone and attempting to support the re onboarding experience. But of course, depending on what they are going on, leave for there are vastly different emotional and like well-being considerations that look very, very different. Different by the type of leave, but just from the perspective of every type of leave needs to have some sort of coverage plan. Whether or not it's a planned leave or an unplanned leave or an intermittent leave doesn't it matters in terms of the process. But you still need coverage, you need a plan and you do need to re onboard these individuals if and when they return. And so we are in the process of figuring out how do we take what we've built for parental leave, which works really, really well, and replicate or expand that across different types of leaves. Because at its core that is very, we believe it would be very impactful for other types of leaves.

Heather Grimshaw: You've been so generous with specifics and examples, which is really valuable.

Allison Whalen: Thank you for having me and also thank you for all the work that D M E C does. We have benefited a lot from the organization's expertise and the events and the folks that we've met through dmec, so thank you. Thank you so much for that as well.