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> [heading] How do they manage in Canada? > In Canada, companies have had no option but to make 52-week parental leaves work, when requested, since 2000. The q

> [heading] How do they manage in Canada? > In Canada, companies have had no option but to make 52-week parental leaves work, when requested, since 2000. The question Canadian companies ask isn’t “Can we do it?” but “How do we do it?” Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question. If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO/mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What if you can't find a temp, so you hire someone? Is the person entitled to their old job back? Do you fire the new person or the old one? What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers? More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees? I'm not trying to make some kind of gotcha. I really don't know the answer, and I figured the article would answer what seem like extremely obvious questions that arise, but it didn't. I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement? There's also something unsettling about "here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!" feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation's work for them.

otoburb 8y ago
>>Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question. If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO/mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What if you can't find a temp, so you hire someone? Canadian companies will try to hire ahead of the parental leave for 1 year contracts, and stipulate ahead of time that the contract is exactly that - a short-term, time-boxed employment duration. Sometimes there is the option depending on performance and/or business outlooks that the person's contract can be extended or converted to a FTE (assuming they were only hired as a contractor, which may or may not be the case). >Is the person entitled to their old job back? Do you fire the new person or the old one? Yes, the person is entitled to their old job back by law. >What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers? Usually there is a minimum time back, which I thought was 3 months back, but don't have the citation handy. Canadian companies (and I'm sure other non-Canadian companies that operate in countries with similar parental leave durations) will all handle the ripple effects in different ways. Some will offload to others in the team (probably in larger companies?), or simply hire for that role for a 9-12 month contract. >More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees? In this scenario, the company usually has 2-3 months to figure out a contingency plan. There is a disruptive effect, but it's not really any different than managing for the "bus/lottery factor". >I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement? This is a legitimate question. I think this is one of the reasons why the wording is so careful about this being about parental leave, and not just maternal leave. I think this concern and potential bias runs through every company owner's head at some point, but thankfully these laws make it such that it would be discrimination if this point were used in the hiring process and I hope, at some level, acts as a deterrant or diminishes the frequency of this bias in the hiring process.
xutopia 8y ago
We hire interims or share responsibilities between other members of the team. It happens all the time and we rarely find an issue with this. If any company is run in such a way that bus-factor means the company can't thrive with one person gone you're simply doing it wrong.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  This seems like the most obvious dodge. I know plenty of companies, especially small ones, where any person in the company is pretty much the bus factor. When they take vacation the company shuts its doors for a few weeks. This is obviously true for startups and small restaurants, especially ones without gobs of VC funding. Is the solution just to exclude companies that cannot get by without doing this? In other words, make sure certain kinds of startups and small businesses are not possible?
  - DavidHm 8y ago
    If the company is utterly reliant on a single person, that person is either an equity owner, or should be, and the owner is taking advantage of them. If you own in part the business, then imho you take as much or little parental leave as you want/can afford.
    - simonsarris 8y ago
      The reason I used CFO and specialist mechanic is that often companies are utterly reliant not on a single person, but a single person's work or expertise. It may be no problem at all to hire a replacement expert, just like it is easy to hire a new accountant if your accountant dies from a heart attack. But you still hire a new accountant, and in this case, with parental leave, hiring someone to do the leaver's job leads to problems because unlike the dead accountant, they come back! This is the issue, that normally you fulfill a specialist role with another hire.
      - walshemj 8y ago
        you know there is an entire industry of recruitment agencies that specialise in interim directors?
deleted 8y ago
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DavidHm 8y ago
Surprisingly not that much research on this topic on the American side, but here's one. [0] Conclusion: there's a small negative impact on the hiring of women, but it's more than compensated by women being less likely to leave companies that provide them a longer maternity leave. 0: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nsarin/files/20170821_jobprotection_final.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nsarin/files/20170821_jobp...
chefkoch 8y ago
>If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO/mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What do you do if your single point gets sick or quits? As a business you need a backup (plan).
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Absolutely. If they quit, of course you go through the long candidate search process and hire a replacement. If they get sick, many companies are on a timer. Specialist work backs up, projects get delayed, extensions are filed, and so on. If a sickness was expected to last a month or a year, I would expect non-trivial problems to arise.
  - chefkoch 8y ago
    If you absolutely need one for the business to function you need more than one person knowing how to do the job. Maybe not as good as the first guy but beeing so dependant on one person can put a company out of business. I thought that was basic knowledge espcially in tech.
    - simonsarris 8y ago
      In tech, you do not commonly hire people in pairs. If you need a DBA you hire one. If he quits or dies you hire another one. If he leaves for a year, what do you do?
      - chefkoch 8y ago
        >he quits or dies you hire another one. And in the weeks/months until you found one ? It's not like babies appear over night, you have months to prepare.
        x0x0 8y ago
throwaway5752 8y ago
First, as sibling comment notes, this is actually quite mild in terms of business continuity planning because unlike actual "hit-by-a-bus" issues, you have many months of lead time to prepare for it. Second, your choice is not "one year of parental leave" or "perfectly performance from the person with a baby at home". Having a young child is a huge life event, parental leave or not. So, you can eliminate the most competent cross-section of the employable demographic (age for having children is usually past the point when someone is junior to the point of being useless, but before cognitive decline becomes an issue). It's a hard problem, so you have companies struggling with it like the Gates foundation, here. Since Canada is doing fine, perhaps instead of asking rhetorical questions you should read some Canadian HR journals?
ninth_ant 8y ago
The comparison is a bit flawed here. The Canadian system only pays a percentage of your normal wage, is subject to a wage cap, and the 12 months leave is shared by both parents. So it’s not like every situation will have a parent missing for a full year.
SatvikBeri 8y ago
From what I could find, Canada offers 52 weeks total for both parents. Whereas the Gates Foundation was offering 52 weeks per parent (about twice as good), and is now rolling that back to 6 months plus daycare. So that seems totally on par. I couldn't find exact figures, but it looks like the Canadian policy pays up to 55% of earnings, and usually closer to 33%. I couldn't find how much the Gates foundation pays.
- wvenable 8y ago
  Canada pays the same benefits as unemployment insurance would for maternity leave.
jseutter 8y ago
"I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement?" While that probably happens, in Canada this is parental leave that either parent can take advantage of. I would imagine this decreases the amount of gender discrimination. It also worked out really well for me. As a father I was able to take several months off after the birth of our twins to help care for them. My wife had quit her job earlier due to a toxic workplace and medical issues.
- rconti 8y ago
  My employer (in the US), and many others, have begun offering equal parental leave (including for adoption) for exactly this reason. It helps limit the initiative for discrimination by treating people of all genders and sexualities as (more) equal. I think we get 22 weeks/year, which is certainly better than average.
AaronFriel 8y ago
Good questions. People wear lots of hats in startups, and cross-train to avoid bus factors. If someone has highly specialized skills, cannot pass on their skills, and cannot be replaced, they are irreplaceable and the company needs to take other steps to resolve that for its own sake. Here's the question that answers all of your questions: What happens if that person quits? And the answer is, the company either adapts, folds, or had plans in place to handle it. Either they were essential and irreplaceable or they weren't.
- hinkley 8y ago
  What happens if that person holds the company hostage and drags them in directions they don’t want to go?
unavoidable 8y ago
Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization), or you hire a temporary employee explicitly on a 1 year "parental leave" contract. The labour market is quite good, and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all positions (CFO, specialists included). Often, a good temp ends up getting another position at the same company after doing the 1-year contract. There is also a small cottage industry of successful individuals who basically take such jobs. Maybe hard to accept for some, but the world doesn't end when people go on leave to have kids. It also turns out that most people (that I know) are quite happy to buy into this particular social contract. There is a tacit understanding that you might have to pick up the slack a bit for someone else, but one day you might need the same in return - borrowing against the future is another way to think about it. Source: Canadian, have worked in organizations and involved in hiring policies where this is successful.
- bluecalm 8y ago
  It's surely doable in big organizations but small businesses it's an overwhelming cost even if the government pays the salary of the worker on a leave (the only way it can really work). Maybe the answer to that problem is that really important employees who make a lot of money shouldn't be hired as normal workers but as contractors. Something like: if you get 3x more average salary then you are important but you only get paid if you work and standard protections don't apply. If you get a normal salary standard protections apply but then we will hopefully be able to find replacement for you at reasonable cost. It would be nice if I at least don't nee to re-hire you after covering big costs of getting your replacement up to speed. If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost. If I am hiring a cleaning lady or social media specialist then I won't have problems because I will easily find the replacement on the market and they can be productive from day one. If you think it's immoral, think again. I have responsibilities towards my family to provide for them. I won't take risk which can ruin my source of income for the sake of someone's children. What is immoral is forcing employers to cover that risk.
lliamander 8y ago
There's also something unsettling about "here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!" feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation's work for them. There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing? If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents.
  - lliamander 8y ago
    > Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing? Well, a birthrate below replacement can have a number of negative consequences, especially in a society like ours with the way we've setup social security. > If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents. For what it's worth, it was my father that was the stay-at-home parent for my childhood. Certainly I wouldn't want to force women to stay at home, but I've known a number who would at least like the option. How we pay for it is a valid question, but aside from the purely monetary aspect, there's question of emotional investment. Parents are generally only going to have as many kids as they feel they (collectively) have enough time for.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic. That's far more of a child care issue than a parental leave issue. If both parents take a year of leave each for three children that's not even close to a tenth of their working life. And we are expecting far too many hours to be worked per household. But there's no reason a reduction in working hours has to imply a stay at home parent. What if both parents worked 3 days a week, or 2 days a week?
aprdm 8y ago
Your questions are all valid but please remember Canada is a real country and business do exist with this law. It's not an hypothetical scenario. Same exists in other European countries. What do you want out of life is a great question, I prefer the more social view of the world Canada has, even if I am paid less than in the individualist culture of US.
pjc50 8y ago
> here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] Most of the West is below 2 and the world is now at 2.5 average. And one of the main factors helping reduce it is .. the availability of employment outside of parenting. It's not unusual to employ people on 1-year fixed contracts as maternity cover.
sandworm101 8y ago
I'm in canada and there is an actual problem. I know of a lawfirm that suffered through a new hire. She had one kid, took the leave and then was pregnant with another within months of returning. The nasty part was that she made is known she intended on leaving the firm after the second kid. She did then leave. The firm effectively paid her for two years only to have her then walk out the door. Women should get the time. I have no issue with them, and men too, taking the time. But given modern family planning, pregnancies are most often not a surprise. I don't like seeing an employee who plans and executes a multi-year campaign to extract as much money as possible from a program with the goal of then walking away once the tap runs dry. There is no answer. Employers cannot interfere with family matters. Patents get the legally mandated leave. And they are free then to walk away. It only gets horrible when people start to leverage the program beyond the original purpose.
- muizelaar 8y ago
  Parental leave in Canada is paid by Employment Insurance not the employer.
  - otoburb 8y ago
    True, but Canadian firms also compete with one another for talent, and many top firms (presumably more applicable to a whiteshoe law firm) offer "top up" the employe's parental leave salary to X% -- the best I've seen is 80%, but perhaps competing for top talent employers could offer up to 100%. In this instance, both the government and the employers are shouldering that cost.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      Exactly. Many law firms in Canada ensure paternity leave pays out at 100% of salary. Lawyers, like a great many other professions, also come with additional costs. Her dues, her training, insurance, her benefits package, all were paid. Not to mention, when she returns, it is at salary similar to what she would have expected had she stayed. So now they have a new attorney with no experience outside of law school, being paid the equivalent of one with 2+ year experience. All these costs add up.
rb808 8y ago
> How do you manage in Canada? If you're truly a world class company you probably move the company to the US where the policies are more sensible. Or pay Canadian employees much less than the US. Oh that happens already?
beat 8y ago
The birth rate is dropping to at/below replacement across most of the world. Take Iran, for example. It has a lower birth rate than Europe. Not what you'd expect, but it happens to every nation that develops a modern economy. At a certain point, it makes more sense for young parents to concentrate their resources on one or two children, rather than hedge their bets against disease and famine and war by having many children - and more importantly, having a child at all is sufficiently expensive and difficult that many adults just opt out of it.
docker_up 8y ago
Canada does it because there aren't very many high-performing companies in Canada. I'm saying this as an expat. Most of the top performing Canadians move down to the States. The companies that exist in Canada are companies like banks, Rogers, Bell, etc, where you won't find too many high performers. I have a friend who has taken 2 1-year leaves, and it didn't impact her job because her job as an account manager isn't particularly hard to take over. A high-performing company like the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation can't perform at the level that they want if their employees are taking 1 year leaves, and that's just a fact of life. It's the same as Netflix. They have a 1 year policy, but I doubt any engineer will take the full year, but kudos to them if they do.
- tgtweak 8y ago
  A few things that need clarifying to make a fair comparison: In Canada, the government pays the benefits, and they are capped at $60,000 per year (and you only get up to 75% of that at the best case if you take a lower amount of time than 12 months). Additionally, it's 12 months split between the mother and the father, not 12 months each. On top of that, you are taxed on the income from those benefits, at your marginal tax rate. As far as companies go, many will hire and train a replacement if they anticipate a 1 year leave, and, particularly in the private sector, will often times restructure or abolish a position when it's convenient. The labour laws on this are well defined but not often upheld and there is a lot of room for maneuvering here and only government positions really respect this to the T.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    > In Canada, the government pays the benefits Taxpayer, you mean taxpayer
NikolaNovak 8y ago
I can only speak from personal observations as a Canadian; note that I am using female workers/maternity examples and pronouns to try to answer the specific question posed, especially since historically my observed experience has been predominantly with maternity leaves, but also note that in Canada men can increasingly take paternity leave instead/in addition, which I 101% support and further believe will further make this less of a concern/issue. My wife is a store manager for a major international hardware store chain, and much of her senior leadership team up and down (assistant store managers working for her, as well as her district manager she reports to) are female as well, so in their neck of the woods at least there's no passive selection. Due to nature of pregnancy, maternity leave is something that lends itself to some heads-up, so as far as I have observed the company handles it through careful, productive and communicative planning. This may include contracted positions, but also internal temporary/trial opportunities - role only being available for a period of time is not necessarily a bad thing, if you know and plan for it. Additionally, while people will fall onto a curve and experience counts (so we're not all fully replaceable blocks or cogs), nevertheless you can build an organization that has documented procedures, overlap, and shared collaborative knowledge. I absolutely have seen people who are "irreplaceable" (and have occasionally occupied such a position), but it's all too frequently just a gap, that is addressable if you're forced to address it and need to do so ahead of time. Similarly in my line of work, both the functional and technical experts as well as middle managers or senior leadership, happen to have a majority of female team members, and while as IT/BT projectized organization we are less proceduralized than my wife's organization, again - you see it coming, and you prepare for it. Bottom line - I really think the combination of seeing it coming and having to deal with it, makes it far less of an issue than it might seem from the other side :-/
- jacobsenscott 8y ago
  I have never seen an irreplaceable employee at any level, from the c-suite on down. I've seen lots who think they are.
  - NikolaNovak 8y ago
    I think it may get philosophical/semantic very quickly, but let me put it this way: I have worked on projects, even with 50+ team member size, where I can identify a single person whose removal would cause us to miss KPI/SLAs. Thus, in practical ways, they are at least temporarily [for given value of "temporary", which may be days or years] "practically irreplaceable" and their absence hurts. They may not be "strictly/formally irreplaceable", but it would take 5 people 5 times as long to do certain aspects of their job poorly, and we'd blow our targets. Note that this was not usually due to specific skillset as such (which theoretically, for a price, you may be able to find on the market), but usually their personal, deep, historic knowledge of the specific project, client, requirements, and system. Things that are currently a 30 second question to this person, many many times a day, might become hours or days of reverse engineering either code, or requirements, or both, only to still not have complete answer, for each instance. Multiply by factor of 10-20 occurrences daily, and force multiply during active IRs. Typically, both this person and project recognize this SPOF but there's some reason why it takes a long time to remedy. (Occasionally though, but rarely, this is instead a particular type of contractor/consultant who believes withholding information is a job security method; depending on the market, this is a short gain as word spreads fast once project has finally routed around the problem)
fipple 8y ago
How they manage in Canada is that they have many fewer successful knowledge-based businesses per capita, at every level of success.
8ytecoder 8y ago
Basically what happens when the developer is hit by the bus. Don't we accommodate for this in regular business by creating redundancies? When you know someone is going on a parental leave you double down on that and add one more redundancy. For cases like the CFO, it's not unusual for someone reporting to the CFO temporarily taking over the CFO role (with/without the title). (Honestly why is this any different from someone leaving an org or being generally unavailable for any reason? In fact, in this case it's much better since a baby doesn't pop-out just like that - it gives a nice few months to train a temp.)
imh 8y ago
My CEO is currently out on maternity. Other people are covering. It just kinda works.
Spooky23 8y ago
That’s what you have managers for. The real question is why is the person in charge still employed if a critical business process depends on a single person. I worked for a place where the CFO was diagnosed with cancer and was out for nearly 6 months. You know what happened? The Comptroller was appointed interim CFO and the CFO resumed his duties on his return. All of these what ifs reflect a profound missing of the point. Instead of babies, think about injuries or extended jury duty or whatever. Any institution, whether a corporation, government agency or school, needs to be able to function independent of the individual employees. If the magic mechanic or money lady is that critical, you already have a much more serious internal controls problem.
patmcc 8y ago
First, on the legal side: the firm can leave the position open, or hire a full or temporary person for it, but when the parent returns they get their old job back (or an equivalent one). Also it's not exactly 52 weeks parental leave, it's 13 weeks medical leave (for the mother expressly) and 39 weeks for either parent, to be split as desired. And that's just the paid component (which is paid by the unemployment insurance system). You're also able to take unpaid leave as the other parent. Same difference to the employer, of course. They're not on the hook for the direct cost. What generally happens is the firm hires a person on a one year term, and then at the end of the year the original person comes back and the replacement person is either kept on (if they were good) or not (if they weren't). It's a decent way to hire new people, actually. >>What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers? In Canada you can't take parental leave simply at any time, it's tied to the birth of the kid (wth leeway). It's very unusual to have a child 13 months after the previous one, and there are rules about how often you can take the paid unemployment insurance (tied to how much you've worked over the last year). But yes, you'd be entitled to leave from you job. >>More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees? A well-structured organization typically doesn't have very many of these people, because it's a ticking time bomb. That person will leave; they'll quit or get fired or get hit by a bus or get cancer or take a three week vacation and the business has to figure it out. And babies don't really sneak up on you that much - there's plenty of time to train someone, etc. >>I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? I've never seen any data that Canada has poorer gender equality or more age discrimination than the US. Overall I think that the parental leave laws in Canada do make things marginally more difficult for businesses but significantly easier for new parents. That's a tradeoff I consider reasonable.
- acchow 8y ago
  > I've never seen any data that Canada has poorer gender equality or more age discrimination than the US. Gender wage gap is much worse in Ontario than California (26% vs. 11%). These are the two economic powerhouses of the respective countries. Hard to compare the nations on the whole since they differ in many other ways (Canada is a significantly more urban nation, for example).
KorematsuFred 8y ago
Those who have studied economics will not be surprised at how Canadian companies do this. The law effectively makes it illegal for all Canadian companies to operate in Canada if they can not afford this 52 week leave. Pretty much like how minimum wage makes it illegal for low productivity individuals to work or be employed. There is a definite cost to this which is paid for by the other employees,share-holders and economy in general. It also makes age an issue in hiring decisions and employers would be less willing to hire potential new parents. Secondly, people figure out clever ways to avoid this through contractual employees, outsourcing and other methods. Without such law Canadian society would have been more rich, more innovative and ensured welfare of all in the society.
theluketaylor 8y ago
Organizations have adjusted quite well here in Canada. For people entering the labour market or moving up the responsibility ladder a maternity leave contract has become an extremly common way for people to get their foot in the door while offering companies a simple exit at the end of the contract if the fit isn't right. Hiring new employees can be risky for companies here since terminating employment is often not simple, but parental leave creates a perfect opportunity to offer fixed term employment contracts to people you can measure against the leave employee's performance. Once the leave is up if the contract employee has worked out they are offered full time employment (or sometimes other parental leave contracts). The obvious loophole is to not hire full time employees and to just string people along on contract after contract, but there is an employment law (at least here in Ontario) that companies cannot use contracts for an employee again after 4 out of the last 5 years contract work. The relationship either has to be terminated for a time (I think 2 years), converted to full time employment, or shifted to a true business to business agreement where the employee incorporates. > What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Parental leave available to everyone is funded by employment insurance, so your available leave is partly tied to how much you have worked prior to going on leave. Employers are free to augment EI, but everyone qualifies for the basic leave and it's paid for by everyone paying into the EI pool. Each individual company and person is not left holding the bag. Like our health care, spreading the costs to everyone makes things more sustainable since not every person in the country goes on leave or gets sick at the same time. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/ei-maternity-parental/eligibility.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/ei-maternity-p...
RobLach 8y ago
Every company should be "hit by a bus" resilient if it expects to last.
solatic 8y ago
You hire somebody full-time to fill the position. When the employee comes back from parental leave, either move the new employee or the returning employee into a new position. People ask sometimes why, in capitalism, companies need to grow all the time. Why do company profits have to grow every year? Why can't they just stay at some same, low but healthy level, year after year? Well, this is one of those reasons. When you're constantly growing, then it's not an issue for somebody to come back from parental leave, because there are always new positions opening up. Maybe the person coming back will need to wait an additional week or two for the right position at the company to open up, maybe the person will need some training for a slightly different role. But there will be new spots.
baybal2 8y ago
In our engineering consultancy, the whole last year was all about taking big losses in people: 1. CTO left the company, after marriage, and decided to run his own smaller scale consultancy/prototyping company. For him, it was certainly impossible to combine being a chief engineer, and being a first time father with a newborn at the same time. Even a promise of doubling his pay, over his already high compensation, was not enough to keep him. He was the man who worked with the founder of the company for a really long time, beginning his career as a poor pipsqueak on an assembly line. He was an exemplary engineer and a team lead, despite him only having 2 years of engineering college. A thing to learn from that is that you have to reduce intensity of work with seniority, not increase it. Family has no price tag. Trying to keep a successful 30 something Chinese guy in the company is a giant challenge, and the more money you throw at the guy, the more likely he will leave! Even a promise of maximum 6 month of paid paternal leave, and reduced schedule after was not holding water as it was clear to everybody that the company can't function in its present form without everything spinning around C-levels. What would've been the best option here is if we can genuinely guarantee a humane job schedule for somebody like him, and be able to back that with concrete actions. Our soon coming attempt at this is to give senior, lead, and C-level positions to people in late twenties, expect to rotate them frequently, and be ready that they may ask for a voluntary demotion when the time comes for them to get busy with family matters. We also plan to double down on our effort to move more decision making, and PM work to junior employers to offload senior engineers and C-levels. 2. Our best PM, and best engineer departed the company (was fired) for screwing up a project that had 8 digit revenue potential, and screwing it in the most unprofessional way possible. We could've tolerated failure if the screw-up he did was genuinely involuntary, but not when he kept the issue secret from the rest of the company for 3 months. This however ended very, very well for him in the end. One gigantic multinational hired him just 2 weeks after we fired him, and he is super happy now... Out of that, we learned that it is important to keep "high stakes game" away from individual employees. The guy was simply too afraid to reveal the issue to the rest of the company, because his bonus and his future career with us depended on that. A big thing resulting from that is that we have "a talk" with every senior PM about handling such situation; C-levels now personally inspect high stakes projects to see that PMs do not hide "big issues," and not trying to quietly solve them by themselves. Lastly, we agreed to no longer give any bonuses to senior project staff, and instead gave them high flat rate salary. That is a complete anathema in China, and we had a very, very long talk in the company. I'm glad we went through with it. I can't be more happy with the change. All measures above resulted in that our PMs no longer get too cocky and cavalier with each project, and no longer try to take as much projects upon themselves as they can physically. Projects now go much, much smoother, with each PM handling no more 2 or 3 projects at the time, and paying more attention to competing them "smoothly" over just completing them quickly. 3 Our COO, an another person who was with the founder for a really long time took her maternal leave. She is an expert in all thing about running logistics in manufacturing, an extremely valuable part of the company, one of our primary assets. Now, being taught by us losing our CTO, we manged her maternal leave much smoother. On the paper, she is given 1 year fully paid leave, and we took an obligation to keep her employed, even if it is the end of the world, after that. Even prior to that, the company had a talk with her about how much workload is ok for her, if she wants to remain a COO, and what we can do to keep her workloads on humane level. She was very happy to be given a substantial amount of time to train juniors in her team to take upon more work. With that done, our manufacturing logistics now runs like a clockwork, and she was back to work 6 months after, taking a just a little bit lighter work schedule. Because she is now sure that nothing critical depends on her personally, she is more confident that having to run back home when something happens with baby will not impact her work as a COO.
xorcist 8y ago
Not sure if the question is meant seriously. There is no shortage of countries in the developing world having all kinds of parental leave, and plenty of information how that is structured. > bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? Yes, that's bascially how things are done. Either a temp hire or, more commonly for specialised roles perhaps, a consultant. There's a whole job market for doing these one year stints. Of course, you can't force people into parental leave. Some doesn't take any at all. Some take as much as they can. It may very well be the case that specialists and business leaders take less time off than others, but it's not a general trend, especially not with the working class which is perhaps the opposite of what one might expect. > Is the person entitled to their old job back? Generally yes, but these things are hard to enforce. > Do you fire the new person or the old one? Not really since replacements are hired for a specific time period. > if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day? Then you have a problem but usually you know about it half a year before it's too late. > things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? There are plenty of data available on this. Comparing data from different countries is problematic, but countries with more social insurance tend to also have more women in leading positions. This is probably due to confounding effects of course but should be indicative that if the above effect exists it is comparably small. > the women already did half the corporation's work for them. I didn't quite understand this part.

otoburb 8y ago

>>Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question. If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO/mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What if you can't find a temp, so you hire someone? Canadian companies will try to hire ahead of the parental leave for 1 year contracts, and stipulate ahead of time that the contract is exactly that - a short-term, time-boxed employment duration. Sometimes there is the option depending on performance and/or business outlooks that the person's contract can be extended or converted to a FTE (assuming they were only hired as a contractor, which may or may not be the case). >Is the person entitled to their old job back? Do you fire the new person or the old one? Yes, the person is entitled to their old job back by law. >What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers? Usually there is a minimum time back, which I thought was 3 months back, but don't have the citation handy. Canadian companies (and I'm sure other non-Canadian companies that operate in countries with similar parental leave durations) will all handle the ripple effects in different ways. Some will offload to others in the team (probably in larger companies?), or simply hire for that role for a 9-12 month contract. >More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees? In this scenario, the company usually has 2-3 months to figure out a contingency plan. There is a disruptive effect, but it's not really any different than managing for the "bus/lottery factor". >I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement? This is a legitimate question. I think this is one of the reasons why the wording is so careful about this being about parental leave, and not just maternal leave. I think this concern and potential bias runs through every company owner's head at some point, but thankfully these laws make it such that it would be discrimination if this point were used in the hiring process and I hope, at some level, acts as a deterrant or diminishes the frequency of this bias in the hiring process.

xutopia 8y ago

We hire interims or share responsibilities between other members of the team. It happens all the time and we rarely find an issue with this. If any company is run in such a way that bus-factor means the company can't thrive with one person gone you're simply doing it wrong.

simonsarris 8y ago
This seems like the most obvious dodge. I know plenty of companies, especially small ones, where any person in the company is pretty much the bus factor. When they take vacation the company shuts its doors for a few weeks. This is obviously true for startups and small restaurants, especially ones without gobs of VC funding. Is the solution just to exclude companies that cannot get by without doing this? In other words, make sure certain kinds of startups and small businesses are not possible?
- DavidHm 8y ago
  If the company is utterly reliant on a single person, that person is either an equity owner, or should be, and the owner is taking advantage of them. If you own in part the business, then imho you take as much or little parental leave as you want/can afford.
  - simonsarris 8y ago
    The reason I used CFO and specialist mechanic is that often companies are utterly reliant not on a single person, but a single person's work or expertise. It may be no problem at all to hire a replacement expert, just like it is easy to hire a new accountant if your accountant dies from a heart attack. But you still hire a new accountant, and in this case, with parental leave, hiring someone to do the leaver's job leads to problems because unlike the dead accountant, they come back! This is the issue, that normally you fulfill a specialist role with another hire.
    - walshemj 8y ago
      you know there is an entire industry of recruitment agencies that specialise in interim directors?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

DavidHm 8y ago

Surprisingly not that much research on this topic on the American side, but here's one. [0] Conclusion: there's a small negative impact on the hiring of women, but it's more than compensated by women being less likely to leave companies that provide them a longer maternity leave. 0: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nsarin/files/20170821_jobprotection_final.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nsarin/files/20170821_jobp...

chefkoch 8y ago

>If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO/mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What do you do if your single point gets sick or quits? As a business you need a backup (plan).

simonsarris 8y ago
Absolutely. If they quit, of course you go through the long candidate search process and hire a replacement. If they get sick, many companies are on a timer. Specialist work backs up, projects get delayed, extensions are filed, and so on. If a sickness was expected to last a month or a year, I would expect non-trivial problems to arise.
- chefkoch 8y ago
  If you absolutely need one for the business to function you need more than one person knowing how to do the job. Maybe not as good as the first guy but beeing so dependant on one person can put a company out of business. I thought that was basic knowledge espcially in tech.
  - simonsarris 8y ago
    In tech, you do not commonly hire people in pairs. If you need a DBA you hire one. If he quits or dies you hire another one. If he leaves for a year, what do you do?
    - chefkoch 8y ago
      >he quits or dies you hire another one. And in the weeks/months until you found one ? It's not like babies appear over night, you have months to prepare.
      - x0x0 8y ago

throwaway5752 8y ago

First, as sibling comment notes, this is actually quite mild in terms of business continuity planning because unlike actual "hit-by-a-bus" issues, you have many months of lead time to prepare for it. Second, your choice is not "one year of parental leave" or "perfectly performance from the person with a baby at home". Having a young child is a huge life event, parental leave or not. So, you can eliminate the most competent cross-section of the employable demographic (age for having children is usually past the point when someone is junior to the point of being useless, but before cognitive decline becomes an issue). It's a hard problem, so you have companies struggling with it like the Gates foundation, here. Since Canada is doing fine, perhaps instead of asking rhetorical questions you should read some Canadian HR journals?

ninth_ant 8y ago

The comparison is a bit flawed here. The Canadian system only pays a percentage of your normal wage, is subject to a wage cap, and the 12 months leave is shared by both parents. So it’s not like every situation will have a parent missing for a full year.

SatvikBeri 8y ago

From what I could find, Canada offers 52 weeks total for both parents. Whereas the Gates Foundation was offering 52 weeks per parent (about twice as good), and is now rolling that back to 6 months plus daycare. So that seems totally on par. I couldn't find exact figures, but it looks like the Canadian policy pays up to 55% of earnings, and usually closer to 33%. I couldn't find how much the Gates foundation pays.

wvenable 8y ago
Canada pays the same benefits as unemployment insurance would for maternity leave.

jseutter 8y ago

"I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement?" While that probably happens, in Canada this is parental leave that either parent can take advantage of. I would imagine this decreases the amount of gender discrimination. It also worked out really well for me. As a father I was able to take several months off after the birth of our twins to help care for them. My wife had quit her job earlier due to a toxic workplace and medical issues.

rconti 8y ago
My employer (in the US), and many others, have begun offering equal parental leave (including for adoption) for exactly this reason. It helps limit the initiative for discrimination by treating people of all genders and sexualities as (more) equal. I think we get 22 weeks/year, which is certainly better than average.

AaronFriel 8y ago

Good questions. People wear lots of hats in startups, and cross-train to avoid bus factors. If someone has highly specialized skills, cannot pass on their skills, and cannot be replaced, they are irreplaceable and the company needs to take other steps to resolve that for its own sake. Here's the question that answers all of your questions: What happens if that person quits? And the answer is, the company either adapts, folds, or had plans in place to handle it. Either they were essential and irreplaceable or they weren't.

hinkley 8y ago
What happens if that person holds the company hostage and drags them in directions they don’t want to go?

unavoidable 8y ago

Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization), or you hire a temporary employee explicitly on a 1 year "parental leave" contract. The labour market is quite good, and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all positions (CFO, specialists included). Often, a good temp ends up getting another position at the same company after doing the 1-year contract. There is also a small cottage industry of successful individuals who basically take such jobs. Maybe hard to accept for some, but the world doesn't end when people go on leave to have kids. It also turns out that most people (that I know) are quite happy to buy into this particular social contract. There is a tacit understanding that you might have to pick up the slack a bit for someone else, but one day you might need the same in return - borrowing against the future is another way to think about it. Source: Canadian, have worked in organizations and involved in hiring policies where this is successful.

bluecalm 8y ago
It's surely doable in big organizations but small businesses it's an overwhelming cost even if the government pays the salary of the worker on a leave (the only way it can really work). Maybe the answer to that problem is that really important employees who make a lot of money shouldn't be hired as normal workers but as contractors. Something like: if you get 3x more average salary then you are important but you only get paid if you work and standard protections don't apply. If you get a normal salary standard protections apply but then we will hopefully be able to find replacement for you at reasonable cost. It would be nice if I at least don't nee to re-hire you after covering big costs of getting your replacement up to speed. If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost. If I am hiring a cleaning lady or social media specialist then I won't have problems because I will easily find the replacement on the market and they can be productive from day one. If you think it's immoral, think again. I have responsibilities towards my family to provide for them. I won't take risk which can ruin my source of income for the sake of someone's children. What is immoral is forcing employers to cover that risk.

lliamander 8y ago

There's also something unsettling about "here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!" feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation's work for them. There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic.

pjc50 8y ago
Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing? If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents.
- lliamander 8y ago
  > Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing? Well, a birthrate below replacement can have a number of negative consequences, especially in a society like ours with the way we've setup social security. > If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents. For what it's worth, it was my father that was the stay-at-home parent for my childhood. Certainly I wouldn't want to force women to stay at home, but I've known a number who would at least like the option. How we pay for it is a valid question, but aside from the purely monetary aspect, there's question of emotional investment. Parents are generally only going to have as many kids as they feel they (collectively) have enough time for.
Dylan16807 8y ago
> There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic. That's far more of a child care issue than a parental leave issue. If both parents take a year of leave each for three children that's not even close to a tenth of their working life. And we are expecting far too many hours to be worked per household. But there's no reason a reduction in working hours has to imply a stay at home parent. What if both parents worked 3 days a week, or 2 days a week?

aprdm 8y ago

Your questions are all valid but please remember Canada is a real country and business do exist with this law. It's not an hypothetical scenario. Same exists in other European countries. What do you want out of life is a great question, I prefer the more social view of the world Canada has, even if I am paid less than in the individualist culture of US.

pjc50 8y ago

> here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] Most of the West is below 2 and the world is now at 2.5 average. And one of the main factors helping reduce it is .. the availability of employment outside of parenting. It's not unusual to employ people on 1-year fixed contracts as maternity cover.

sandworm101 8y ago

I'm in canada and there is an actual problem. I know of a lawfirm that suffered through a new hire. She had one kid, took the leave and then was pregnant with another within months of returning. The nasty part was that she made is known she intended on leaving the firm after the second kid. She did then leave. The firm effectively paid her for two years only to have her then walk out the door. Women should get the time. I have no issue with them, and men too, taking the time. But given modern family planning, pregnancies are most often not a surprise. I don't like seeing an employee who plans and executes a multi-year campaign to extract as much money as possible from a program with the goal of then walking away once the tap runs dry. There is no answer. Employers cannot interfere with family matters. Patents get the legally mandated leave. And they are free then to walk away. It only gets horrible when people start to leverage the program beyond the original purpose.

muizelaar 8y ago
Parental leave in Canada is paid by Employment Insurance not the employer.
- otoburb 8y ago
  True, but Canadian firms also compete with one another for talent, and many top firms (presumably more applicable to a whiteshoe law firm) offer "top up" the employe's parental leave salary to X% -- the best I've seen is 80%, but perhaps competing for top talent employers could offer up to 100%. In this instance, both the government and the employers are shouldering that cost.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Exactly. Many law firms in Canada ensure paternity leave pays out at 100% of salary. Lawyers, like a great many other professions, also come with additional costs. Her dues, her training, insurance, her benefits package, all were paid. Not to mention, when she returns, it is at salary similar to what she would have expected had she stayed. So now they have a new attorney with no experience outside of law school, being paid the equivalent of one with 2+ year experience. All these costs add up.

rb808 8y ago

> How do you manage in Canada? If you're truly a world class company you probably move the company to the US where the policies are more sensible. Or pay Canadian employees much less than the US. Oh that happens already?

beat 8y ago

The birth rate is dropping to at/below replacement across most of the world. Take Iran, for example. It has a lower birth rate than Europe. Not what you'd expect, but it happens to every nation that develops a modern economy. At a certain point, it makes more sense for young parents to concentrate their resources on one or two children, rather than hedge their bets against disease and famine and war by having many children - and more importantly, having a child at all is sufficiently expensive and difficult that many adults just opt out of it.

docker_up 8y ago

Canada does it because there aren't very many high-performing companies in Canada. I'm saying this as an expat. Most of the top performing Canadians move down to the States. The companies that exist in Canada are companies like banks, Rogers, Bell, etc, where you won't find too many high performers. I have a friend who has taken 2 1-year leaves, and it didn't impact her job because her job as an account manager isn't particularly hard to take over. A high-performing company like the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation can't perform at the level that they want if their employees are taking 1 year leaves, and that's just a fact of life. It's the same as Netflix. They have a 1 year policy, but I doubt any engineer will take the full year, but kudos to them if they do.

tgtweak 8y ago
A few things that need clarifying to make a fair comparison: In Canada, the government pays the benefits, and they are capped at $60,000 per year (and you only get up to 75% of that at the best case if you take a lower amount of time than 12 months). Additionally, it's 12 months split between the mother and the father, not 12 months each. On top of that, you are taxed on the income from those benefits, at your marginal tax rate. As far as companies go, many will hire and train a replacement if they anticipate a 1 year leave, and, particularly in the private sector, will often times restructure or abolish a position when it's convenient. The labour laws on this are well defined but not often upheld and there is a lot of room for maneuvering here and only government positions really respect this to the T.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > In Canada, the government pays the benefits Taxpayer, you mean taxpayer

NikolaNovak 8y ago

I can only speak from personal observations as a Canadian; note that I am using female workers/maternity examples and pronouns to try to answer the specific question posed, especially since historically my observed experience has been predominantly with maternity leaves, but also note that in Canada men can increasingly take paternity leave instead/in addition, which I 101% support and further believe will further make this less of a concern/issue. My wife is a store manager for a major international hardware store chain, and much of her senior leadership team up and down (assistant store managers working for her, as well as her district manager she reports to) are female as well, so in their neck of the woods at least there's no passive selection. Due to nature of pregnancy, maternity leave is something that lends itself to some heads-up, so as far as I have observed the company handles it through careful, productive and communicative planning. This may include contracted positions, but also internal temporary/trial opportunities - role only being available for a period of time is not necessarily a bad thing, if you know and plan for it. Additionally, while people will fall onto a curve and experience counts (so we're not all fully replaceable blocks or cogs), nevertheless you can build an organization that has documented procedures, overlap, and shared collaborative knowledge. I absolutely have seen people who are "irreplaceable" (and have occasionally occupied such a position), but it's all too frequently just a gap, that is addressable if you're forced to address it and need to do so ahead of time. Similarly in my line of work, both the functional and technical experts as well as middle managers or senior leadership, happen to have a majority of female team members, and while as IT/BT projectized organization we are less proceduralized than my wife's organization, again - you see it coming, and you prepare for it. Bottom line - I really think the combination of seeing it coming and having to deal with it, makes it far less of an issue than it might seem from the other side :-/

jacobsenscott 8y ago
I have never seen an irreplaceable employee at any level, from the c-suite on down. I've seen lots who think they are.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  I think it may get philosophical/semantic very quickly, but let me put it this way: I have worked on projects, even with 50+ team member size, where I can identify a single person whose removal would cause us to miss KPI/SLAs. Thus, in practical ways, they are at least temporarily [for given value of "temporary", which may be days or years] "practically irreplaceable" and their absence hurts. They may not be "strictly/formally irreplaceable", but it would take 5 people 5 times as long to do certain aspects of their job poorly, and we'd blow our targets. Note that this was not usually due to specific skillset as such (which theoretically, for a price, you may be able to find on the market), but usually their personal, deep, historic knowledge of the specific project, client, requirements, and system. Things that are currently a 30 second question to this person, many many times a day, might become hours or days of reverse engineering either code, or requirements, or both, only to still not have complete answer, for each instance. Multiply by factor of 10-20 occurrences daily, and force multiply during active IRs. Typically, both this person and project recognize this SPOF but there's some reason why it takes a long time to remedy. (Occasionally though, but rarely, this is instead a particular type of contractor/consultant who believes withholding information is a job security method; depending on the market, this is a short gain as word spreads fast once project has finally routed around the problem)

fipple 8y ago

How they manage in Canada is that they have many fewer successful knowledge-based businesses per capita, at every level of success.

8ytecoder 8y ago

Basically what happens when the developer is hit by the bus. Don't we accommodate for this in regular business by creating redundancies? When you know someone is going on a parental leave you double down on that and add one more redundancy. For cases like the CFO, it's not unusual for someone reporting to the CFO temporarily taking over the CFO role (with/without the title). (Honestly why is this any different from someone leaving an org or being generally unavailable for any reason? In fact, in this case it's much better since a baby doesn't pop-out just like that - it gives a nice few months to train a temp.)

imh 8y ago

My CEO is currently out on maternity. Other people are covering. It just kinda works.

Spooky23 8y ago

That’s what you have managers for. The real question is why is the person in charge still employed if a critical business process depends on a single person. I worked for a place where the CFO was diagnosed with cancer and was out for nearly 6 months. You know what happened? The Comptroller was appointed interim CFO and the CFO resumed his duties on his return. All of these what ifs reflect a profound missing of the point. Instead of babies, think about injuries or extended jury duty or whatever. Any institution, whether a corporation, government agency or school, needs to be able to function independent of the individual employees. If the magic mechanic or money lady is that critical, you already have a much more serious internal controls problem.

patmcc 8y ago

First, on the legal side: the firm can leave the position open, or hire a full or temporary person for it, but when the parent returns they get their old job back (or an equivalent one). Also it's not exactly 52 weeks parental leave, it's 13 weeks medical leave (for the mother expressly) and 39 weeks for either parent, to be split as desired. And that's just the paid component (which is paid by the unemployment insurance system). You're also able to take unpaid leave as the other parent. Same difference to the employer, of course. They're not on the hook for the direct cost. What generally happens is the firm hires a person on a one year term, and then at the end of the year the original person comes back and the replacement person is either kept on (if they were good) or not (if they weren't). It's a decent way to hire new people, actually. >>What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers? In Canada you can't take parental leave simply at any time, it's tied to the birth of the kid (wth leeway). It's very unusual to have a child 13 months after the previous one, and there are rules about how often you can take the paid unemployment insurance (tied to how much you've worked over the last year). But yes, you'd be entitled to leave from you job. >>More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees? A well-structured organization typically doesn't have very many of these people, because it's a ticking time bomb. That person will leave; they'll quit or get fired or get hit by a bus or get cancer or take a three week vacation and the business has to figure it out. And babies don't really sneak up on you that much - there's plenty of time to train someone, etc. >>I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? I've never seen any data that Canada has poorer gender equality or more age discrimination than the US. Overall I think that the parental leave laws in Canada do make things marginally more difficult for businesses but significantly easier for new parents. That's a tradeoff I consider reasonable.

acchow 8y ago
> I've never seen any data that Canada has poorer gender equality or more age discrimination than the US. Gender wage gap is much worse in Ontario than California (26% vs. 11%). These are the two economic powerhouses of the respective countries. Hard to compare the nations on the whole since they differ in many other ways (Canada is a significantly more urban nation, for example).

KorematsuFred 8y ago

Those who have studied economics will not be surprised at how Canadian companies do this. The law effectively makes it illegal for all Canadian companies to operate in Canada if they can not afford this 52 week leave. Pretty much like how minimum wage makes it illegal for low productivity individuals to work or be employed. There is a definite cost to this which is paid for by the other employees,share-holders and economy in general. It also makes age an issue in hiring decisions and employers would be less willing to hire potential new parents. Secondly, people figure out clever ways to avoid this through contractual employees, outsourcing and other methods. Without such law Canadian society would have been more rich, more innovative and ensured welfare of all in the society.

theluketaylor 8y ago

Organizations have adjusted quite well here in Canada. For people entering the labour market or moving up the responsibility ladder a maternity leave contract has become an extremly common way for people to get their foot in the door while offering companies a simple exit at the end of the contract if the fit isn't right. Hiring new employees can be risky for companies here since terminating employment is often not simple, but parental leave creates a perfect opportunity to offer fixed term employment contracts to people you can measure against the leave employee's performance. Once the leave is up if the contract employee has worked out they are offered full time employment (or sometimes other parental leave contracts). The obvious loophole is to not hire full time employees and to just string people along on contract after contract, but there is an employment law (at least here in Ontario) that companies cannot use contracts for an employee again after 4 out of the last 5 years contract work. The relationship either has to be terminated for a time (I think 2 years), converted to full time employment, or shifted to a true business to business agreement where the employee incorporates. > What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Parental leave available to everyone is funded by employment insurance, so your available leave is partly tied to how much you have worked prior to going on leave. Employers are free to augment EI, but everyone qualifies for the basic leave and it's paid for by everyone paying into the EI pool. Each individual company and person is not left holding the bag. Like our health care, spreading the costs to everyone makes things more sustainable since not every person in the country goes on leave or gets sick at the same time. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/ei-maternity-parental/eligibility.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/ei-maternity-p...

RobLach 8y ago

Every company should be "hit by a bus" resilient if it expects to last.

solatic 8y ago

You hire somebody full-time to fill the position. When the employee comes back from parental leave, either move the new employee or the returning employee into a new position. People ask sometimes why, in capitalism, companies need to grow all the time. Why do company profits have to grow every year? Why can't they just stay at some same, low but healthy level, year after year? Well, this is one of those reasons. When you're constantly growing, then it's not an issue for somebody to come back from parental leave, because there are always new positions opening up. Maybe the person coming back will need to wait an additional week or two for the right position at the company to open up, maybe the person will need some training for a slightly different role. But there will be new spots.

baybal2 8y ago

In our engineering consultancy, the whole last year was all about taking big losses in people: 1. CTO left the company, after marriage, and decided to run his own smaller scale consultancy/prototyping company. For him, it was certainly impossible to combine being a chief engineer, and being a first time father with a newborn at the same time. Even a promise of doubling his pay, over his already high compensation, was not enough to keep him. He was the man who worked with the founder of the company for a really long time, beginning his career as a poor pipsqueak on an assembly line. He was an exemplary engineer and a team lead, despite him only having 2 years of engineering college. A thing to learn from that is that you have to reduce intensity of work with seniority, not increase it. Family has no price tag. Trying to keep a successful 30 something Chinese guy in the company is a giant challenge, and the more money you throw at the guy, the more likely he will leave! Even a promise of maximum 6 month of paid paternal leave, and reduced schedule after was not holding water as it was clear to everybody that the company can't function in its present form without everything spinning around C-levels. What would've been the best option here is if we can genuinely guarantee a humane job schedule for somebody like him, and be able to back that with concrete actions. Our soon coming attempt at this is to give senior, lead, and C-level positions to people in late twenties, expect to rotate them frequently, and be ready that they may ask for a voluntary demotion when the time comes for them to get busy with family matters. We also plan to double down on our effort to move more decision making, and PM work to junior employers to offload senior engineers and C-levels. 2. Our best PM, and best engineer departed the company (was fired) for screwing up a project that had 8 digit revenue potential, and screwing it in the most unprofessional way possible. We could've tolerated failure if the screw-up he did was genuinely involuntary, but not when he kept the issue secret from the rest of the company for 3 months. This however ended very, very well for him in the end. One gigantic multinational hired him just 2 weeks after we fired him, and he is super happy now... Out of that, we learned that it is important to keep "high stakes game" away from individual employees. The guy was simply too afraid to reveal the issue to the rest of the company, because his bonus and his future career with us depended on that. A big thing resulting from that is that we have "a talk" with every senior PM about handling such situation; C-levels now personally inspect high stakes projects to see that PMs do not hide "big issues," and not trying to quietly solve them by themselves. Lastly, we agreed to no longer give any bonuses to senior project staff, and instead gave them high flat rate salary. That is a complete anathema in China, and we had a very, very long talk in the company. I'm glad we went through with it. I can't be more happy with the change. All measures above resulted in that our PMs no longer get too cocky and cavalier with each project, and no longer try to take as much projects upon themselves as they can physically. Projects now go much, much smoother, with each PM handling no more 2 or 3 projects at the time, and paying more attention to competing them "smoothly" over just completing them quickly. 3 Our COO, an another person who was with the founder for a really long time took her maternal leave. She is an expert in all thing about running logistics in manufacturing, an extremely valuable part of the company, one of our primary assets. Now, being taught by us losing our CTO, we manged her maternal leave much smoother. On the paper, she is given 1 year fully paid leave, and we took an obligation to keep her employed, even if it is the end of the world, after that. Even prior to that, the company had a talk with her about how much workload is ok for her, if she wants to remain a COO, and what we can do to keep her workloads on humane level. She was very happy to be given a substantial amount of time to train juniors in her team to take upon more work. With that done, our manufacturing logistics now runs like a clockwork, and she was back to work 6 months after, taking a just a little bit lighter work schedule. Because she is now sure that nothing critical depends on her personally, she is more confident that having to run back home when something happens with baby will not impact her work as a COO.

xorcist 8y ago

Not sure if the question is meant seriously. There is no shortage of countries in the developing world having all kinds of parental leave, and plenty of information how that is structured. > bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? Yes, that's bascially how things are done. Either a temp hire or, more commonly for specialised roles perhaps, a consultant. There's a whole job market for doing these one year stints. Of course, you can't force people into parental leave. Some doesn't take any at all. Some take as much as they can. It may very well be the case that specialists and business leaders take less time off than others, but it's not a general trend, especially not with the working class which is perhaps the opposite of what one might expect. > Is the person entitled to their old job back? Generally yes, but these things are hard to enforce. > Do you fire the new person or the old one? Not really since replacements are hired for a specific time period. > if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day? Then you have a problem but usually you know about it half a year before it's too late. > things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? There are plenty of data available on this. Comparing data from different countries is problematic, but countries with more social insurance tend to also have more women in leading positions. This is probably due to confounding effects of course but should be indicative that if the above effect exists it is comparably small. > the women already did half the corporation's work for them. I didn't quite understand this part.