Cleaning up the “mess” of parental leave
Value Proposition
A sabbatical is a highly prestigious and honorable period of paid leave granted for study or travel. Yet parental leave is considered to be a shameful setback in a parent's career. In speaking with working mothers and father's they shared their parental leave horror stories of screaming bosses, secrecy, and name-calling.
That led us to wonder how might employers dissolve the stigmas associated with parental leave in a way that provides a supportive work environment so that employee attitudes and behaviors can be addressed?
Skills Utilized
Ethnographic interviews, system design, prototyping, user testing
We created the fictitious company, Corporate Inc., to illustrate how companies could design a new parental leave strategy. Based on our research, we created the archetypes of Frank and Julie. For this scenario, they both work at Corporate Inc. Frank and Julie are not only co-workers, but they are also husband and wife and are excited to be expecting their first child.
Julie and Frank have experienced difficulties navigating Corporate Inc.’s Parental Leave policy. Julie and Frank dealt with weighing the impact that taking parental leave would have on their career. Frank felt conflicted about not attending any of Julie’s pregnancy check-up appointments because of the pressure to perform at work and provide for his family. He was made fun of and called weak by his colleagues after having to ask for permission to take parental leave.
Julie tried to manage her own fears of how her co-workers and management viewed her pregnancy after her boss yelled at her to “Shut the door and don’t breathe a word of this to anyone until we figure out what we are going to do.” Julie had felt like she committed a crime and was fearful of the repercussions that might come. Julie also had heard stories of women who had left Corporate Inc. to gain the flexibility they needed in order to raise their children. Julie and Frank’s combined experiences led them to raise a complaint with HR regarding Corporate Inc.’s parental leave environment.
Frank and Julie are not the only ones who have recently raised complaints regarding the family environment at Corporate Inc. There has been an increase in the last five years of claims of this nature, employee retention has dropped, and new talent acquisition is down. Despite having implemented family-friendly policies over the previous five years, there still is a need to address the underlying culture and attitude. These factors have led Corporate Inc. to question how they can do a better job of investing in their employees and their employee's family's to ensure long term growth.
We developed key insights after our interviews with parents, psychologists, midwives, and prenatal experts. We learned that the attitudes and behaviors towards parental leave were not just limited to the environment within the company. They were perpetuated by the U.S. definition of professionalism. The United States traditional definition of professionalism doesn’t support the family which has also contributed to the supression of being human at work. This has created a culture of secrecy at the company, where employees are hesitant to share their family life with their bosses out of fear of retaliation. We also found that when an employee was expecting a child there was a shift in the employee's family needs no longer aligning with the employer’s professional needs forcing the employee to make changes that align with what is best for their family.
The new parental leave strategy outlines the Purpose, Values & Principles regarding Parental Leave, Employee’s Attitudes, the Touch-Points for Change, and the Implementation Plan.
Corporate Inc’s parental leave redesign directly addresses employees’ previous negative experiences that were rooted in the stigma of parental leave as unproductive or career stepbacks. Corporate Inc’s redesigned parental leave supports family needs and humanizes the employee’s experience to improve the company’s retention and investment in long-term growth. Offering the redesigned parental leave is Corporate Inc’s choice, when and if their employees want to utilize these offerings will also be their choice.
Employees from all levels of the company were involved in developing the values and principles. They have made a shared commitment to manifesting the parental leave attitudes through their daily practice at work.
These values and attitudes were created from quotes that we heard from our research participants and serve as the foundation for creating touch-points of change.
Since the value and attitudes that are intangible, we looked for tangible touch-points of change for Corporate Inc. to adopt.
To address these touch points we created a timeline with the different steps needed to complete the redesign.
Ideation Appendix 1
Family Friendly System Map Appendix 2