Submitting a Parental Leave Proposal

Question

Hi there! I'm working to gather all necessary data and competitive information to submit a compelling proposal to my company in hopes to increase paid parental leave. Has anyone on this board been successful in doing this? Do you feel like there was any specific information that really won over your HR team/board of directors? I'd also love any insight in format. I'm in marketing, so I can put together a mean PowerPoint, but should it be something more formal? I'd love any guidance as i'm really passionate about making this happy for myself and my colleagues.

Anonymous · Answer

I think the most important thing is to focus on facts...e.g. how does your company compare in policy to your competitors? How do employees at your company feel about the benefit (e.g. can you do a surveymonkey poll so that you have some data supporting your cause)? I would also try to enlist the help or support of someone in HR because it may not be something that you need to take to the board of the company, per se. If you can get buy-in from someone in HR or senior management this may not be the kind of operating issue that requires board level approval or discussion (typically benefits are not in my experience).

Anonymous · Answer

Hi! Glad to hear you're working on this. A couple of years ago, five women at the New York Times successfully got the NYT to expand its parental leave policy.  They wrote a proposal and submitted it to senior leadership on behalf of the Times' Women's Network. They used Fairygodboss, which has a maternity leave resource center ( https://fairygodboss.com/maternity-leave ) to get info on competitors' leave policies and put together a competitive assessment and business case. They also looked at insights from an informal poll of employees who had taken parental leave in the past few years. If you want to read more detail on how they made their case, check out this article: https://fairygodboss.com/articles/how-to-improve-your-company-s-parental-leave-like-these-women-at-the-times  ....hope this helps!

Submitting a Parental Leave Proposal

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