Maternity leave gives women the time they need to bond with their babies and recover from pregnancy and childbirth before returning to work. Having this time – at full pay - is deemed essential by many countries, and yet there are parts of the world where there is no statutory requirement for paid maternity leave, or just weeks.
For most organisations, maternity policy is typically a local country decision – each employer makes decisions based on their government policy and culture. This meant that, at Vodafone, women across our subsidiaries were taking varied lengths of maternity leave. Some were taking less than 10 weeks, while others had much longer periods of paid leave and a gentle transition back to work. Some of those who were not getting long leave periods before returning to work eventually left.
We needed to do more to ensure our best female talent stayed with us. Of those women who were leaving Vodafone after maternity leave, most of them were doing so in their first year back to work - something needed to be done to retain them.
The penny dropped: imagine providing a global policy across our 30 subsidiaries, focused on both maternity leave and providing women with a gentle transition back to work. Sixteen weeks at full pay seemed a good minimum standard - it is what the United Nations provides its female employees with across the world – and we wanted to do more to help mothers when they returned, too.
Maternity policies vary widely across our 30 subsidiaries, so we looked carefully at the retention rates of women returning from maternity leave in each country and then compared this with the benefits on offer. There were some clues to be found in Italy, Romania and Portugal, where women received quality time with their newborn babies, and then were also supported on their return to work.
In our business in Italy, where women are able to work shorter days for their first few months back, but at full pay, most were staying in their jobs. So, as well as the 16 weeks minimum leave, we decided to take a similar approach. For six months after their return to work from maternity leave, women will receive full pay for a 30-hour-week - a four day week paid as five. The idea is that this will help them manage their return to work, as well as help with childcare and the cost of it.
While paid maternity leave makes sense for women, it also makes sense for businesses. If women are not supported through the maternity period, they are more likely to leave their jobs. And the hidden costs such as recruitment and training new staff – as well as the knowledge and experience lost when a talented employee leaves – are greater than the cost of providing maternity leave.
Our new scheme will be a short-term investment but, we believe, a medium-term gain. Like all companies, we want to retain talent, as well as encourage good people in to our organisation. At Vodafone, 35% of global employees are women and 21% of senior management are women - good by the measure of many corporates, but still falling short of the gender balance we want to achieve.
We have had gender targets, introduced mentoring and set up women's networks. Focus group work provided some insights – showing that some mid-career women were opting out, as they were finding juggling a family and career too challenging. Then we started to drill in to global maternity data to see if we were missing a trick. We came to the conclusion that providing the right mandatory minimum maternity policy across our global footprint would help.
Everyone thought it was a great idea, but they needed to understand the business benefits. We started to look at the hidden costs of losing women more closely, and found that the costs to rehire and train, plus the loss of experience and skills are not measured in the cost equation – the business case to do more for women did stack up.
We commissioned KPMG to analyse this on a bigger scale, and their insights reinforced our company findings: across the world, if employers paid a minimum of 16 weeks full pay rather than the statutory minimum, savings to global businesses could be up to $19 billion a year. Plus, women worldwide could save up to $14 billion each year on childcare and get to spend around 608 million more days with their babies.
For me, it has been fantastic that the leaders at Vodafone have understood the business benefits of doing the right thing and been prepared to take a bold step to help mothers at our company. We hope others will follow and think about maternity benefits as an investment - and realise that it makes good business sense to have good minimum maternity standards.