Tech companies – particularly those in the Bay Area – have long been known for their employee perks and benefits. Google’s food, Evernote’s paid housekeeping, helicopter rides at Dropcam, travel bonuses at AirBnB: the list is endless. To most folks outside the tech bubble, these sound great, but perhaps superfluous.
Lately though, tech companies have been getting press for a much more substantive benefit in their parental leave offerings. Netflix earned headlines in almost every publication in America by announcing up to a year of paid leave for new mothers and fathers. Microsoft increased its offering to 20 (maternity) and 12 (paternity) weeks at about the same time, and Facebook and Twitter have long offered similar benefits.
I couldn’t be happier about this trend. The flexibility afforded by policies like these is ridiculously valuable to a parent of an infant. Whether it’s a mother nursing, a father bonding, or a parent spending extra time in the hospital, parents have all sorts of good reasons to want to spend time away from the office during those early months.
Even better than the policies is the culture these companies have to grow to back them up. Netflix is a notoriously fast-paced environment, where employees are expected to be incredibly productive. Their newly-announced leave policy isn’t worth a cent if employees are judged negatively by their peers for using it. Employees will be looking to their more senior peers and managers to set the example for how these policies ultimately get used. After he and Priscilla have their first child in a few months, Facebook employees will likely expect Mark Zuckerberg to be conspicuously absent around the office.
But it’s during these early days when we can take these expectations too far. Business Insider observed the Facebook office culture around parental leave when an engineering VP had a child:
When Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of the 600-person ads and pages team, welcomed his son Archer Americus in November 2014, he got snide remarks from his colleagues.
They were ripping him for taking only two months off. He had to explain he was actually taking the full leave, just not all at once.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-parental-leave-policy-2015-8
It’s pretty incredible: Boz took two months off – vastly more time than a typical new father stays home – yet got razzed enough that he had to defend his decision.
I run a tech company myself, and since it’s parenting-focused, there was definitely an expectation that I’d be away from the office for a while after Spencer was born last year. I expected to get a few emails here and there, but the little fella was born right on his due date, so we and everyone in my office, was well-prepared for me being gone.
But after a couple of weeks, I needed a break. Spencer was no tougher in the early days than any other kid, but the newborn phase was the opposite of fun for me. Sleep was basically non-existent (I’m not a skilled napper like my going-through-residency wife – @Carol – was at the time), and we were spending 1000% of our available energy doting on a little guy who had no tricks, and no physical or intellectual capacity to learn any anytime soon.
A couple good friends took me out for a couple hours on my birthday (just a few days into parenthood). It was really cathartic, but I left carrying a truckload of guilt: I was having fun while my wife was two blocks away dealing with poop explosions. I needed to be doing something constructive, using my mind, interacting with people, outside of the bubble childbirth had brought to our lives. The next day, I asked Carol if I could go into the office for half a day, and it turned out to be a great move. I started doing it two or three times a week. Though we tried to strategically plan my work time when Spencer would likely be mostly asleep, we were wrong about that just as much as we were right. Still, despite getting no more sleep than I was before, it was the recharge I needed to stay sane when I was home with my family during those early days.
Carol, although she had a much more rigidly-scheduled leave – she wasn’t scheduled to see any patients for 10 weeks after childbirth, after using her vacation time and adding an extra month to her residency schedule – started to work on her research during times I was home or Spencer was sleeping. She needed the outlet in much the same way I did.
If we were both forced – by policy or by cultural expectations – to stay home for three or four months without thinking about work, it might have driven us (or at least me) batty. I love what I get to do for my career, and at that particular time, I needed to go to the office far more than I needed to devote 100% of that time to parenting my newborn son. That time in the office helped me be a more present parent and husband when I was home.
For me, the ideal family leave policy would grant parents, say, six months per newly-born child, usable at any time while they’re an employee. Some might use it during those first months. Others might use it to take their family across the country in a camper when they’re adolescents and need quality time with the parents more than ever. Parents would get the time they need with their families when it’s right for them, and those progressive companies might find themselves retaining employees much more easily.
As we think about these leave policies, we need to be generous and accommodating to new parents. They need slack and understanding as they go through what’s likely the biggest shock to their lifestyle they’ll ever have.
These policies help give parents that slack, and we need to ensure that companies back those policies up with a culture of understanding, but a culture that judges a parent for returning to work “too soon” can wipe it all away.
