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A new survey from leave management software company Cocoon shows just how impactful paid leave policies are for both US job applicants and employees.
The survey found that paid leave is a must-have for many candidates, with 60% of respondents reporting that the lack of a competitive paid leave package would be a deal breaker when considering a new job. An additional 29% of respondents signaled that it “might” be a deal breaker.
“I hope that this is a call to action for folks…I hope that this is a tool that they can use to the industry at large, to better support, you know, the people that rely on us as companies,” said Amber Zeise, director of people at Cocoon.
Paid leave even outranks most other benefits; respondents ranked it as a second priority—even more important than a competitive salary—following only 100% health insurance coverage, according to the findings.
The survey also found that 70% of respondents reported that a generous paid leave package would impact their decision to stay at their current employer. Employees who have been at a company for a year or longer are more likely to take leave, and those who take leave stay up to 10% longer at their job, according to Zeise, citing internal Cocoon data.
“The thing that this survey is really starting to show us... is that when you support your employees, they support you, and they are more likely to stay at your company, more likely to stay longer,” she said. “So that support you give does pay off—even though as a human being, I would love for just the fact that people need it to be enough for us to offer that—but we’re in business and that matters.”
What’s HR to do? Simply complying with state or local regulations on leave requirements doesn’t always mean a company’s leave policy meets the leave needs of employees.
Cocoon also released in November benchmarking data to help companies make “compassionate” leave more widely available. Compassionate leave policies lead with flexibility and privacy so employees can determine which moments of their life might require them to be away from work, rather than leaving that to lawmakers or a company—those policies are often much more rigid. No one employee has the same needs, so Cocoon’s own internal compassionate leave policy is also available for free online.
“The idea behind the compassionate leave policy is that there is a leave that folks can take if their needs don’t neatly fall into one of the other categories that already exists,” she said. “I think that’s so important because our survey results show that leave is not about specific employee groups or specific employee populations. It is a need for everyone, and folks have such varied life experiences, and our policies are really not caught up to that yet.”