Aviva is offering 26 weeks of leave at full pay to all new parents - what do you reckon?

[BojanaMumsnet]

Hello

We’ve just spotted that the UK’s largest insurer Aviva will be offering its employees equal parental leave. New mums and dads - whether they gave birth, adopted or have had a baby via surrogacy - will be able to take up to one year of leave, including 26 weeks leave on full basic pay after the arrival of a child. It will include full time and part time employees across all levels of the company and a minimum length of service will not be required.

This new policy will be offered to Aviva employees who become a parent on or after 19th November 2017 in the UK, Ireland, France, Singapore and Canada. Aviva says it’s working to extend this to all other businesses within the next year.

They say that this is “part of their strategy to create a diverse and inclusive working culture in which barriers to career progression are removed.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Will this help to tackle the motherhood penalty? Will it encourage more dads to take substantial parental leave? Is there anything else you’d like to see in parental leave policies? Do you work for Aviva or another company offering unusually good parental leave, and if so how do you think this affects the choices you (and your spouse, if applicable) make around parental leave?

Thanks
MNHQ

It’s fairly hard to make the cultural changes to get men to take leave after the birth of a child.

It’s almost impossible if there isn’t a well paid option available which is why I welcome initiatives like this. They give choice where there wasn’t one before.

Equating a sabbatical to maternity or paternity leave is ridiculous unless what is achieved during that sabbatical has equal social and economic benefits that maintaining the population does. Your jolly to climb the Inca trail or whatever or loafing about for a year watching telly is not going to ensure we have public services, a thriving economy or people to pay your pension in 30 years time. Some of these posts seem to be taking issue with people getting maternity leave which is coming across and petty and spiteful as well as not very bright (I’m not talking about people asking abiut carers leave etc). Some of the language used here is offensive too. Breed? Get some manners.

ScreamingValenta there is an unpaid option for emergencies for carers/elderly relatives that is not sick leave. Time off for dependents would be applicable here but I appreciate there isn’t anything more substantial. To be quite fair, there isn’t for parents of sick children either other than parental leave and that doesn’t go very far but I acknowedge it is something albeit unpaid.

13 years ago I had 26 weeks full pay maternity with Citigroup in the U.K.

Moving childfree people pay taxes that help all children get educated and other benefits that parents get. We benefit in the sense that we're training the nurses who will look after us when we're ill etc. But most companies to do not hire temps to cover maternity or paternity. Other staff pick up the slack. Patents often ring in to say they can't come in because their child is sick, school is closed, they have a sports day. The childfree staff tend to be the ones who pick up the slack. In many firms, patents get priority of holidays in school breaks, time off at Xmas etc. Reading threads on MN shows all this. The non parents don't get extra pay in return for covering for parents. Policies like this could cause resentment to non-parent which isn't good for company productivity. A company is there to make money, not treat parents differently to non-parent staff. A society that really treats everyone equally will be better for all.

A society that prioritises the needs of it's children will be more successful.

I'm 46, so extremely unlikely to be using shared parental leave in the future. But I think it's a fantastic policy - I hope Aviva will monitor takeup though and consider ways to encourage men (and their managers) to take it up.

Working in an environment where men take significant shared parental leave (with the usual result that they continue to be more involved in family life afterwards) would have benefits for me regardless of whether I could personally use it.

Personally I prefer to base my assumptions about workplaces on academic research and evidence ShatnersWig. We do see evidence of a lot of poor practice on Mumsnet but that by its very nature is not representative of the whole. You make a lot of statements as fact that are not proven and I would argue are not true in the most part.

But I’ll be sure to update the education and training section of my CV with your lecture. Possibly between my postgrad and CIPD qualifications. I’ll scrub off the bit about my Masters dissertation that covers managing maternity in the workplace because it’s clearly redundant now you’ve explained things to me