Elif Kowalski· Director, Total Rewards, Cardinal Insurance
Asked in Benefits & Wellbeing ·
Enhanced parental leave across six countries: one global minimum or local top-ups?
Software company headquartered in Berlin, around 1,400 employees in Germany, the UK, Poland, Spain, the US and India. Statutory entitlements are so different that our current approach, statutory only plus some local habits, produces wildly uneven outcomes. Our US staff get the least by a distance.
Leadership wants a global minimum. The proposal on my desk is 16 weeks at full pay for any parent, regardless of gender or how the child arrives, with statutory pay offset where it exists.
For those who have done this: did you go with a single global floor, and how did you handle countries where statutory already exceeds it in length but not in pay?
8 helpful · 1 insightful · 2 agree · 3 replies · 208 views · 7 following
Accepted answer· by Elif Lindqvist
We set a global floor of 14 weeks at full pay three years ago, 2,000 people in nine countries. The wording that saved us was that the company tops up to full pay for the floor period and local law applies in full beyond it. So in Germany the benefit is really a pay top-up during the early part of leave, while in the US it is the whole thing. We assumed 4% of headcount would take it each year and it has run at 2.9%. Be ready for German colleagues asking why they appear to get less; they do not, but the top-up is less visible there.
Read in the conversation ↓
