Are Your Parental Leave Benefits Competitive Enough?
With industry leaders starting to offer competitive employee benefits ––paid parental leave chief among them––this is your chance to get ahead of the curve. Paid parental leave is wading into the employee benefits pool, but will you be ready for when it makes a splash?
Employee Benefits: Paid Parental Leave
Before we dive into how paid parental leave is starting to shake up the employee benefits sector, here’s a primer. Paid parental leave is considered time taken off by new-parent employees to welcome a child through either adoption or birth. Paid parental leave does not involve an employee’s PTO, sick, or personal leave, but those stores can certainly be dipped into to supplement the parental leave period.
Some key differences between paid parental leave and maternity leave or paternity leave: American paternity leave is often restricted to the arrival of a biological child. Similarly, maternity leave in the United States is often for biological mothers only, to be taken when delivering and caring for the baby.
According to BenefitsPro, Only 13 percent of private-sector workers in the U.S. receive paid parental leave.
The State of Paid Parental Leave
Quite literally, whether or not your company offers parental leave as part of their employee benefits package can depend on the state in which your company operates. California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are currently the only states that mandate paid parental leave.
However, there has been employee benefits activity at the city level. Cities like St. Paul, MN. and San Francisco, CA, among others, have their own paid parental leave policies.
Turning the Tide of Employee Benefits
Companies like Microsoft are placing mandates on subcontractors, stating at the close of August that they would only offer contracts to companies with a three-month paid parental leave policy that provides the person on maternity leave or paternity leave with up to $1,000 a week. The software leader plans to roll out this paid parental leave policy over the course of the next year.
And Microsoft is far from alone. Just last week, Glassdoor assembled a slideshow of the 15 American companies with the best parental leave policies among them Spotify, Twitter, and Johnson & Johnson.
It may be worth examining the paid parental leave path being blazed by industry leaders. As we approach an era where employees are beginning to feel heard, and the talent pool has the privilege to weigh their options more, it could hurt your company if you do not offer competitive employee benefits. Paid parental leave can take a while to roll out, so if you take notice now, you could be in the sweet spot to start offering competitive employee benefits in a few years.
Regardless of the benefits you offer, you’re still responsible for your employees’ ACA reporting. But you don’t have to shoulder all that paperwork alone–– or at all. ACAwise is a full-service ACA reporting solution. We are IRS-authorized and designed especially to get your 1094 and 1095 forms where they need to go with time to spare. Schedule an appointment with one of our account managers today.
