Values-Guided Maternity Benefits
A stressor for both employees and employers can come in the form of pregnancy. The complexity of it for individuals, families, and employers can vary in opposite extremes. One person is elated, while another is overwhelmed and even fearful of what they had not planned. While some employees look forward to paid maternity leave, others in different circumstances wonder how they can financially survive even a day of unpaid time off. Additionally, their worries might be compounded by the challenges of managing and affording childcare after returning to work. Even for those elated a baby is coming, it can be a time of great stress in today’s culture and economy. A stress not only for the expecting employee, but also a stress for their employer.
Being a part of a faith-based non-profit organization providing pregnancy care, we see these stressors daily with those we serve. But we also experience it as an organization of approximately 40 employees, from the perspectives of both employee and employer. As an organization, our foundational values are in providing care and resources for the mother, baby, and family who experience planned or unplanned pregnancy. With 92% of our staff being female, we are thrilled when we learn a staff member has a baby on the way!
In the past few years, we have considered how our values align with our maternity benefits. Questions such as, how does a small employer carry the load when someone is on leave for up to 12 weeks? How do we afford the cost of covering an employee’s responsibilities in their absence? Do we provide paid or unpaid leave, and if so, how much? How does our employee pay fit with what a family needs today? Alignment with our values concluded that providing paid maternity leave was appropriate after the first year of employment. Balancing that with budget needs resulted in full paid leave for 8 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers for birth or adoption out of the 12 weeks available. This leave is available to both full and part-time employees at their hours and rates of pay.
Our next question was of employee pay meeting family needs today, this being the more challenging considering the funds available to a non-profit. The question I settled on is, could a single-parent employee afford to have and raise a baby on what we pay them? As an organization with foundational pro-mother, baby, and family values, our answer clearly needs to be a “yes”! However, the unfortunate real answer was: “no”. With most non-profits, typical pay and benefits are well below market rates from a simple lack of available funds. It is easy to commit available funding to those being served while simultaneously struggling to apply the same values to employees. With an assessment of the market scale for positions, we began the challenge of a 3-year wage equalization plan for all staff to be between 15-50% of the market scale as we strive toward values-guided benefits.
About the Author
Eric Allen is the CEO of Clarity of Central Indiana with nine Care Centers in Indiana, including Greenwood and Franklin. Eric’s family experienced maternity stress firsthand through the loss and challenges of having children. He spent 20 years as a Lead Pastor before Clarity and a prior career in the military aircraft industry.