This conversation with Orli Cotel focuses on how organizations should develop and implement paid family leave policies.

Orli Cotel is part of the founding team at the national non-profit Paid Leave for the U.S. (PL+US). PL+US has helped win paid leave for over 8 million people at Walmart, Starbucks, CVS and more -- and channeled that momentum into the fight for national legislation that would bring paid leave to everyone in the U.S.   Orli has advised companies like Postmates, Thumbtack, SunLife Financial, and more on designing and launching equitable and inclusive paid family leave policies. 

She has worked at the center of this issue during a period of rapid evolution and progress on the topic; her work has helped shift norms on paid leave expectations in the workplace .  Gender IDEAL’s Founder & CEO Flory Wilson recently talked with Orli about how organizations should be thinking about paid family leave policies, how to implement them and how to advocate for government support of paid leave.  

Flory Wilson: Orli, let’s dive in.  Can you tell us who currently has access to paid leave and who doesn't.  How have things changed in the last couple of years?

Orli Cotel: Thanks so much for having me on today.  You know I'm thrilled to talk about this topic and I think one of the things that makes this so timely is the momentum that we're seeing, especially from the private sector.  When we started our work at PL+US five years ago, paid leave was still largely considered a very elite benefit so when we began our work paid leave was something you might find in some tech companies or in finance.  It was largely a benefit for executives and managers and it was not something that most people – especially low-wage working people – had.  So we started our work with an equity lens because we really wanted to catalyze a major shift, so that paid leave would be something that was seen as necessary to provide to all working people and not just folks that could have it as a fringe benefit.    That said, there are so many workplaces that are still failing parents because our national public policy landscape hasn't yet met the needs of American families. 

Flory: Thank you for framing out the issue and highlighting how many people still don't have access to what is a very fundamental benefit. Before we go further, can you just break down the terminology for us and let us know what are the different types of leave?

Orli: One of the first types of leave that was provided was maternity leave for women who needed to recover from childbirth. Then there was a growing awareness that if you only provide maternity leave, you're signaling to your employees and your customers and the world that parenting is a woman's responsibility, which is really an outdated notion. If you signal to women from the very beginning that it's their job to do child care, that impacts their family dynamic and their ability to deliver as an employee and it impacts the way your whole workplace is approaching the idea of working families. So more workplaces are now implementing a gender neutral policy, a parental leave policy.   This is much more inclusive to adoptive parents – not everybody has the same kind of journey to become a parent and if you have a policy that's only for birthing parents you're leaving out all of the adoptive parents. So that kind of equal dynamic for parental leave is very important and that is the terminology around parental leave.  

Caregiving leave recognizes that all people have caregiving responsibilities beyond newborn . Especially with an aging population in our country, a lot of folks have to care for their parents or a spouse or a family member.  All kinds of things happen in our lives and you need to be able to show up for your family.  So Deloitte pioneered this idea of leave that would not just be gender neutral but also generational neutral.   Employees can take up to 16 weeks of leave in a calendar year for any caregiving emergency.  They could be welcoming a baby, caring for an aging parent or a family member with cancer.  

Flory: Can you tell us why companies should care about providing paid leave to their employees? Let's dig into the business case for paid comprehensive leave.

Orli: I have worked with over 300 companies that all advocate for paid leave and they all have to make a profit.  The more ambitious [in paid leave an employer is], the more benefits an employer will see.   There are a few areas where the companies we work with really see the strongest return on investment with recruitment, retention and morale.   Right now we're in the middle of the great resignation, we've seen over two million women leave the workplace, recruitment needs are very high and it's very hard to attract the right talent. 

On our website, we have a cost benefit calculator.  Too often employers think only about the expense of a paid leave program – how many dollars will this cost in the first year.  They don't look at the return on that investment– how much will you save in recruitment costs and in employee retention.  We've built out an excel calculator to determine those exact numbers; it'll show how much your organization will save by creating a better leave program.

Flory: What are some of the best-in-class leave policies today for workplaces?  know What are employees increasingly expecting and what are the components of those leave policies?

Orli:  Sharing examples is the most helpful approach.   Deloitte has the policy that I bring up again and again because they were really pioneers in figuring out this idea of a paid leave policy that would be equal for all employees – not only for new parents but for employees that had any kind of caregiving responsibilities.  A policy needs to be equal for all employees meaning it does not provide a different number of weeks or different kinds of benefits for managers versus hourly or part-time employees.  All employees - regardless of level or status - need to feel cared for as employees and part of the community – so that means making sure that an organization is not prescribing what a family is but that they’re recognizing families come in all shapes and sizes.  Making sure that policies apply to adoptive parents, foster parents, all the journeys to becoming a parent.   Sun Life Financial defines its caregiver leave policy for “chosen family”, so that means that people who care for someone who may not be related to them by blood.  

When companies moved away from the idea of maternity or paternity leave and started talking about primary and secondary caregiver leave, they thought that was progressive at the time because it seemed gender neutral.  But this was very problematic because you're asking employees to make a choice, to assign that one parent should be primary and the other secondary caregiver rather than equal parents,  in the early days of forming their new family. That creates a gender dynamic that really is not aligned with the equality and the equity that we want to see in our society, our families and in our workplaces.  So you don't want to have to make your employees choose who's going to do more parenting; people want to be equal parents.  

Flory: Is there guidance for a company that wants to put a comprehensive parental leave policy in place but only make it available to employees that have worked there for a year or more.  What is the best practice in terms of when someone can have access to these comprehensive plans?

Orli:  I’ve seen every different method of doing it.   Overall I think the most important approach is for company leaders to ask how they want [the company] to show up for its employees. I have seen so many LinkedIn posts from people who share stories of interviewing while pregnant and sharing that information, getting hired and being able to take leave after being on the job for only a few weeks and feeling so proud of their employer.  The point is [for companies] to do the best that they can do for their employees knowing they will see the benefits through engaged and supported employees.   

We launched our paid leave policy as a non-profit when we had five employees.  Employers shouldn’t wait until they have an employee coming forward and saying they're pregnant.  Having that policy set beforehand so that your company isn’t scrambling to develop one is much better.  

Another one is Bobbie, an organic infant formula company.   They publicly shared their policy – they have 56 employees and their policy is four months of fully paid parental leave followed by up to eight months of unpaid leave so you can be out for a year and come back and get your job back.   They're doing that as a growing startup which shows that companies of all sizes can do this.

Flory: Let's talk about PL.US.  When you and I first connected my jaw hit the ground when I realized how integral you and your colleagues have been in implementing leave policies with some of the biggest companies around the globe and you've done it quietly.   

Orli: We really look at our work through the lens of how can we do things that are high-impact and low-ego.  It hasn't been about brand building for our organization, it's really been about what can we do behind the scenes to create a shift in the landscape.   When we started our work, these leave policies were really non-existent at most of the largest employers in the country, especially for their low-wage working staff.   Around that time, Starbucks launched a great paid leave policy.   They were praised in the media for it but no reporters were asking them “Who does it actually apply to?”  When we asked that question, the policy covered only their 3,000 employees in corporate headquarters and completely left out 160,000 baristas that are really the heart and soul of their operation.   We helped transform the policies at Starbucks, Walmart, and CVS, changing their policies so that people at those companies could access parental leave.  It had a trickle-down effect with other companies who also started to provide paid leave and impacted the norms across the private sector, leading to 8 million people with new access to paid leave.   We took all of that momentum and tried to channel that into the fight to pass federal paid leave policy because what we really need is not just for employers to do their part but for the federal government to pass paid leave.  There are 10 states plus D.C. that have passed paid leave programs in their states, but one federal program would really bring paid leave to those 100 million people who don't have access today.

Flory: One clarification – when you talked about Starbucks and Walmart – are all of their employees, corporate and hourly workers,  able to access the same leave policies?

Orli: When we started our work, their hourly associates had no paid leave. We worked to get paid leave for hourly associates at Walmart however they only gave those benefits to their full-time staff.   There are hundreds of thousands of people who work part-time at Walmart – often not by choice, they would like to have more hours but they're not given enough hours to meet that benefits threshold – so there's a long way to go still.   California has a statewide paid leave policy which means that it's funded by the state.  It takes it off of the employer's balance sheet so that when an employee takes leave they get a check from the state for a percentage of their salary.   My employer only had to pay a small amount to top up to my full salary.  These types of state or a federally-run programs provide a lot of help to employers. 

Flory: What advice would you give to people who maybe aren't in a management role or who are not the decision makers at their organization but who want to advocate internally for paid leave policies?

Orli: On our website we have resources that are geared towards employers and we have internal advocacy materials for employees who want to help advocate for better leave at their own companies.  Also, The Skimm has launched a campaign called #showusyourleave and it includes a database of all of the 400 companies that have shared their policies.  So  if you go to The Skimm website and look for that database it's really helpful for benchmarking.   Bringing benchmarking data to your HR department showing how your competitors are doing on paid leave really helps companies to update their policies.  We have sample policies on our website that you can borrow; also Bobbie has a whole handbook that they've just launched that shows you their full policy.   

Lastly, we all need to take a stand in support of public policy for paid leave and that's not only because it will help business and help your bottom line to have the government subsidizing the cost of the leave through a federal or a state program but also because your consumers care about this issue.   We have 350 companies that have done that on our website by saying that they support public policy.  Feel free to reach out to us if you want to get involved in that work and have some opportunities for us to spotlight your leadership.  

Additional resources:  

The Skimm Paid Family Leave Resources.

PL+US resources for business leaders

List of 350 businesses supporting national paid leave policy