The other day a friend of mine who is on maternity leave mentioned that her large company asked that she sign a document indicating that she would give back her six weeks of parental leave pay if she left the company within six months following her return to work. She was annoyed — not irate, but irritated by this seemingly petty request. After all, this relatively small amount of money was already budgeted as part of her salary and she had been hard-working and loyal during her 3-year tenure.
Presumably the company’s goal was to keep my friend in her job, but by taking a punitive approach they actually turned her off to their corporate culture. The idea that the company was so suspicious of her motives following the birth of her child as to indenture her for six months felt wrong. Of course, it’s important for corporations to try and keep employees who take parental leave in the fold — but does the negative approach really make for less attrition and more productivity?
I would suggest that it doesn’t. Employees don’t like working for companies that treat them as adversaries. And the funny thing is that human resources policies often assume that employees are going to try and cheat the system. A good example is sick time: many companies don’t offer paid sick days to their employees on the grounds that workers are likely to abuse this benefit, affecting the bottom line. However, as a study from the Drum Major Institute points out, offering paid sick time does not appear to adversely affect business growth. In fact there is evidence that offering paid sick leave would save money for business, government and individuals. (The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has studied this extensively.)
Requests for flexible work are often done in by the same kind of suspicion. Managers believe that employees — even if they have shown themselves to be otherwise dependable — will take advantage of working remotely or flexibly. But to my mind this argument makes no sense. Whatever their schedule, if a worker doesn’t execute their responsibilities shouldn’t they be fired? Isn’t the answer simply to let go those workers who don’t get the job done?
The tendency for business to act suspiciously toward employees costs money in a number of ways, but especially in retention. People who feel they are not being treated fairly or who believe that the company doesn’t trust them are likely to leave. While no one is indispensable, replacing employees costs no less than 25% of their annual salary, and as much as 250% of that number. And even in this “buyers’ market” for talent, most managers don’t want to spend time on recruitment rather than core business.
Resentment of corporate policies also costs in productivity; employees spend time complaining about their environment rather than working. The costs of employees who resent management are high, while preventing these resentments can be fairly low. Consider my friend and her maternity leave. It’s not likely that she would give up her job, but griping about the company’s requirement that she sign away her ability to leave for six months probably did have some impact on her productivity. Wouldn’t it be more cost effective for the company to take on faith that she would return and keep her happy and productive? Even if she were to leave, they would have gotten better value out of her work while she remained in her job.
What would it take to move the corporate world from a culture of suspicion to a culture of mutual trust? Is there a counter-argument to suggest that policies that take a negative approach do work in some environments?
Related links:
- Another area where suspicious employers may be hurting themselves is restricting access to social networking sites. This terrific post from Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech blog explains why limiting social networking at the office is a bad idea.
- This post on Excelle suggests that employee satisfaction will make the difference between companies that recover from the recession and those that don’t.
- Caliper offers a calculator to help employers determine the direct cost of turnover for individual jobs.
- Six out of ten employees feel that HR does a poor job of administering policies fairly. This post from HR.com addresses that issue and discusses the need to treat employees “fairly, but not equally.”
In your friend’s case the policy is particularly boneheaded. I think it takes 6 months back on the job before you’d even consider leaving for another job- before that, you’re too busy adjusting to your new routine as a working mom.
So all they are protecting against is the women who take leave with no intention of coming back, or he change their mind during their leave and decide to become a SAHM. In those cases, the best this policy will do is secure the company 6 months of that woman’s time, during which she will likely be resentful and less productive than a new worker who actually wants to be on the job.
I didn’t get anything beyond disability pay for either of my leaves, so this didn’t come up at all. But there was a lot of suspicion/worry that I wouldn’t come back after my second leave, which led to people asking for additional planning from me prior to my leave.
Just stumbled on your blog. Love it! So nice to see the chorus of voices for work-life balance growing. Love this post. At the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, Campbell’s soup CEO Doug Conant said, “Trust changes everything.” Conant has apparently created a culture of trust and flexibility at his company. It was an interesting conversation.