#FLEXTHETRANSITION Retaining talent during parenthood | Best Practice by PwC Switzerland
Research shows that a pain point in the progression of women’s careers in Switzerland are the traditional norms associated with motherhood and fatherhood. PwC takes a holistic view on what it takes to break these norms and retain their talent after parental leave and onwards advancing at PwC. Their threefold approach – listening to the needs of parents, implementing an innovative return after parental leave policy for both fathers and mothers and measuring retention sounds challenging. Read on to discover how PwC have made it simple.
This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2021.
Working in the ambitious environment of a professional services industry and with the backdrop of COVID-19 poses its challenges for all our people both professionally and personally. A vital element of our ongoing efforts at PwC Switzerland to foster a culture of inclusion is to give our people the possibility to grow considering their flexibility needs through the different phases of their career. One of those phases is new parenthood.
To help our people meet the needs of family and work, we asked our working parents about where the main challenges lie and how we could help them address them more easily. To do this we set up a series of workshops involving parents from all our lines of service and grades. The idea was to better understand the needs of parents at PwC Switzerland and discuss ideas and suggestions for optimizing the support they receive.
The feedback showed that the most challenging time is the period directly after coming back from leave. At this point it can be tricky to find an optimal balance between the different roles, personally and professionally. Our Management Board looked into different proposals and decided to change the support of the specific need identified and give parents a choice of flexible options for returning to work.
Partner Assurance & Diversity Leader at PwC Switzerland
Once parents come back from their leave time (16 weeks for mothers and 2 weeks for fathers on full-time pay plus any additional vacation and/or unpaid leave they may also wish to take), both mothers and fathers can choose between two flexibility deals:
The option of coming back to work part-time for a certain period gives mums and dads the flexibility to choose how they go about finding their feet at work again while managing their changed role as parents. It’s also an opportunity for them to experience working part-time and gauging whether this might be an option for the longer term. This has different and positive effects on working moms and dads:
During the 16-week maternity leave is naturally the time when questions need to be answered around childcare. And often, it’s the mothers thinking about asking for part-time and/or flexible working – but this comes with worries around managing their career. Therefore, the staggered, paid %’s of return to work can really alleviate stress and help a new mother feel and prove she can balance work and motherhood.
Fathers, whose needs have traditionally been neglected (due to the norms), have the opportunity to share the care of their newborn beyond the statutory 10 days, be paid for it and manage it in a very flexible way. There is no order in which fathers make use of their flexibility benefit, e.g. no need to use their paternity leave days before the flexibility period. The only given is that fathers have to take their paternity leave within the first six months after their child is born and the flexibility benefit within one year.
Knowing that their employer offers flexibility to both parents not just the mother in the traditional sense, moves PwC’s culture considerably further along the inclusive path we are on and makes us a more attractive place for talent to work.
“We received lots of very positive feedback on the new flexibility deal, from both fathers and mothers. Fathers in particular are looking forward to the possibility to spend more time with their newborns.”
Alessandro Guidi, Senior Manager, Human Capital
The new parental leave policy including the flexibility deal went live as of 1 July 2021. We are committed to the follow through, by measuring the following KPIs and monitoring them on a monthly basis using our D&I dashboard:
We believe what gets measured gets done. By knowing what our turnover rate is for both men and women after parenthood within two time periods, we learn if our parental leave policy and flexibility deal is indeed helping us to retain talent or if pain points exist that need to be addressed. We supplement the data with qualitative feedback from interviews (incl. from leavers), pulse surveys as well as our annual people survey.
By introducing these flexible arrangements for new parents, we’re paving the way for consistent adoption across the firm. Naturally this is only part of the story. The new flexibility benefits are one component of a broader onboarding process designed to support both parents as well as our team leaders on how to create a positive experience for our parents and parents-to-be. As part of this programme, our parents have the possibility to network and exchange in our virtual community, Parents@PwC, join a new parents peer-coaching programme and attend workshops and events that address topics of particular interest to our parents’ community. To build an even more supportive culture where ambitious, high-performing parents can reconcile their private needs with the demands of their job, we’ll be monitoring these new measures, and the process as a whole, on an ongoing basis.
Find more information about Parenthood at PwC here.
Contact Marc Secretan at marc.secretan@pwc.ch or Jasmin Danzeisen at jasmin.danzeisen@pwc.ch if you’d like to exchange on the topic or share the experience of reconciling the needs of work and family inside your organization.
This Best Practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2021.
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