As we at EA First embark upon our plans and ideas for 2020, we felt we needed to look at our employee benefits, and position to the market who we are and what we value.
Whilst I am not lucky enough to have had a baby myself, I am,for the first time, a proud new uncle. As such it got me thinking about what our maternity/paternity leave should be.
Whilst there are moments where my sister says she doesn’t feel very lucky (you can probably imagine those moments), it has been an interesting experience to watch her go through the first 5 months of Thomas’s life.
My young nephew, as beautiful as he is, is also a handful that brings a whole host of new challenges for his parents.
Two things jumped out to me at this point.
The first was the struggle my sister was going through, whilst she got to grips with the challenges of having a newly born baby.
My brother-in-law had 2 weeks paternity leave and then used annual leave so that he could have the first month off with his son/to support my sister. He was then very quickly back to work.
I know as I write this article, my sister would have loved to have had her husband around a lot longer than what he was able to do. I also know if he could have been able to, he would have loved to have had a lot longer off.
The second point that struck me was the financial pain she was going through as her salary very quickly starting dropping as the months passed by.
Whilst dealing with the stresses of bringing up a new baby, they also had the added stresses of a reducing household income that had just gone up by one head.
A debate continues across many thousands of pages, about the commercial pros and cons, of the varying levels of leave given, by the many different businesses that exist today.
For us, we want to keep our decision making process simple.
When something so special happens, we want our employees to enjoy, with their partner, those cherished moments, without worrying about the financial pain, or the very quick return of one of the parents to work.
As such, we are proud to say that as part of our extensive employee benefits programme, we will be offering any mum or dad 9 months fully paid leave.
We don’t look at this as a commercial pro or con, we look at it as a moment, where we as a business, can simply do what we feel in our mind, is the right thing.
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