‘Term time’ a way to support mums and dads
EY lets parents on the staff sacrifice salary to take all the school holiday time they need. Rob Stock reports.
Parents struggle to juggle work with raising school-age children, and there aren’t enough leave days to cover school holidays. But ‘‘Big Four’’ accounting firm EY has introduced a ‘‘term time’’ scheme giving its working parents the right to be at home with the children during school holidays.
And although it was available to dads as well as mums, it was part of a drive to remove barriers that have held women back in the male-dominated field of accounting.
Figures from Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (Caanz) show a strong pipeline of female talent entering the profession – 53 per cent of all new graduates hired are women. But currently just 12 per cent of partners in accounting firms are women.
‘‘Our people can ‘buy’ extra weeks of leave,’’ said Jo Ogg, EY’s managing partner for Auckland. ‘‘You can work your normal five days in the term time, and have the school holidays off.’’
Their salary was reduced to reflect the amount of extra time taken, rather than people not being paid during the weeks they had off.
Term time EY workers didn’t have to negotiate for the leave – it was a contractual right.
But advance notice was needed for planning purposes.
‘‘You get your standard four weeks, and if you would like to buy an extra one or two or more weeks’ leave, you can do so,’’ Ogg said.
The scheme was introduced in April, and was part of the suite of flexible working schemes at the firm, which were designed with all staff in mind.
October each year is ‘‘Flextober’’ to provide the impetus for people to try different ways of working with their teams, and to remind staff that flexible working options were available.
‘‘We know if we can offer up this kind of flexible working to our people, they are more engaged and a more engaged workforce is a far more productive workforce,’’ Ogg said.
It was particularly important to offer flexibility for millennial workers.
They really wanted to be able to achieve more of a work-life balance.
‘‘By next year around 80 per cent of our work force will be millennial,’’ she said.
She believed other employers would benefit from introducing similar ‘‘term time’’ schemes.
All the top accounting firms have introduced programmes designed to allow everyone in their increasingly diverse workforces the chance to thrive, and they were surveyed on them during data-gathering for the annual Sunday StarTimes Top 30 Accounting Firms list, which is topped by the ‘‘Big Four’’ of PWC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY.
The top 30 in the industry brought in annual revenue of well over $1 billion,
Caanz found, though to call the top 30 ‘‘accountants’’ obscures the true nature of their businesses, its data showed.
Advisory services now made up nearly 50 per cent of firms’ revenue, with tax services next at 32.6 per cent.
EY describes its efforts as aimed at creating a sense of belonging at the firm covering all its staff to help people feel safe and perform well.
This article was commissioned in response to a commercial partnership. We have produced it independently, to the same standards applied to the rest of our journalism.