Start Up Dads At Tech Major Get Three Months Off To Bring Up Baby

To truly make for a level playing ground for working mothers, paid paternity leave was a much needed move. We, at BabyChakra, are cheering for all other mothers, whose better halves can avail this opportunity!

The news article, as published in The Times of India, reads –

The war for talent is playing out in a big way as companies outplay each other on employee benefits. Of these, paternity or childcare leave to the secondary caregiver parent has emerged as one of the key attractions. Salesforce, the Bay Area (San Francisco) tech giant, is the latest to set a new benchmark on paternity leave and emerge as a company that offers the largest quantum so far—three months—of secondary caregiver leave.

Recently, Microsoft increased its paternity leave to six weeks. Early this year, Cummins India had set a new benchmark among manufacturing companies by raising its paternity leave to one month. This comes when most other companies offer 10 days to two weeks as paternity leave. 

For companies like Salesforce, an attractive paternity leave of 12 weeks is expected to assist in talent acquisition, especially since the firm is on the lookout for skilled people. 

Jnanesh Kumar, director, Employee Success (India), Salesforce, said, “We believe offering paid paternity leave is the right thing to do, the right way to treat our employees. Becoming a new parent is a huge undertaking. For parents who are forced to take unpaid family leave, the situation becomes infinitely more challenging. A strong paternity policy helps in addressing work-life conflicts which are a reality for both men and women after the birth of a baby. More importantly, we want to encourage people in India to talk about paternity leave and remove the stigma from women.”

Globally, Salesforce has over 25,000 employees. In India, the company has offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. It’s been a year since it launched its centre of excellence (CoE) in Hyderabad, which is one of its largest engineering and customer success hubs globally.

“The CoE in Hyderabad is our largest global office outside of our San Francisco headquarters. We plan to tap into the highly skilled technology talent in Hyderabad and add over 1,000 jobs in Hyderabad alone by 2020,” said Kumar.

The government recently mandated a six-month maternity leave. Some companies have de-linked parental leave from gender by the usage of terms like primary caregiver and secondary caregiver. This also fights gender biases attached to childcare as, in some cases, a man could be the primary caregiver. Studies reveal that a strong paternity leave helps young working mothers to come back to the workforce. Most progressive companies extend their parental policies to adoption and surrogacy as well.

 _{This article was originally published in The Times of India.}

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_{Also Read – 5 Ways Dads Can Bond With Their Babies}

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