GENDER DIVERSITY IN BUSINESS BEGINS AT HOME

At Vodafone, the leadership team found they were losing key talent – not to other employers or opportunities, but to parenthood. Introducing a bold parental leave policy has also meant increasing the levels of diversity in the business. By Antony Welton.

Good people are hard to find. When you find them, you need to do your utmost to keep them – it’s good for customers, culture and business.

At Vodafone, we identified that we were losing key talent – not to other employers or opportunities, but to parenthood.

Parenthood is an exciting, lifechanging time, but not without its challenges. We wanted to find a way to support our talented mums and dads to be able to embrace this new chapter in their lives while balancing their careers with their new parenting responsibilities.

About 35 percent of our female staff were leaving Vodafone in the first year of taking parental leave. This was costing us not only financially, with the time intensive recruitment, interview and induction processes, but it affected our internal culture with the loss of people who were outstanding assets to our teams.

It affected the continuity of our relationships with customers and stakeholders, caused us to lose valuable institutional knowledge and thwarted the career progression of some of our most promising young talent.

To address this we introduced a bold parental leave policy to better support and hold onto our valuable staff. Our policy goes considerably beyond the new parental leave legislation introduced in April this year. Globally, Vodafone provides fulltime pay for a 30 hour working week, meaning our returning parents can spend one more day each week with their child, saving on childcare costs and the loss of income at a time when they need it most.

It also means that our parents can balance spending time with their child while sustaining their career momentum. The impact of this global policy has been far-reaching.

In New Zealand feedback has been that this alleviates a lot of pressure and guilt often associated with being a working parent. While in Africa, Middle

East and Asia-Pacific the policy has transformed the lives of new parents and their children both economically and socially.

As a business, it’s a core responsibility to support employees as they transition into parenthood and to empower them to provide for their families as an earner, a caregiver, or both.

Contrary to outdated beliefs, parental leave does not burn a hole in a business’ bottom line, but supports revenue by creating a powerful gender diversity pipeline, a more stable long term workforce and priceless talent retention which is a coup in today’s fluid job market.

Research from Deloitte identified an 80 percent improvement in business performance when levels of diversity and inclusion were high in companies.

Paying an employee’s salary and benefits, plus the cost of a temporary replacement has a price. But the cost of permanently losing that talent is much greater.

We’ve been delighted with the positive impact this policy has had on our team and business. In the past 12 months we have managed to retain 100 percent of our new mums, with 100 percent uptake of our new policy.

This is a positive step forward, although the large proportion of women participating in our parental leave scheme shows that mums are the primary caregiver in most households. Currently, women make up 40 percent of the Vodafone workforce in New Zealand and we have some work to do before those women can feel equally confident sharing the role of primary-earner with their partners.

As a corporate society, there is an opportunity to challenge out-dated assumptions around maternal roles and take action to help make it more socially acceptable for men to take parental leave.

On a recent trip to Scandinavia, it struck me that around eight out of 10 people pushing prams along the footpath during the working week were men. Gender equality is a cornerstone of society in Northern European countries and, aside from driving policy change, those countries have managed to effect a shift in attitudes.

Greater equality in sharing childcare responsibilities in New Zealand will help accelerate gender at all levels within businesses.

There is a direct correlation between the presence of women in executive leadership and the profitability of business; with research showing that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians .

The Vodafone New Zealand senior leadership team is currently 35 percent female and we have actively encouraged women to apply for our graduate programme, now 52 percent female.

The leadership pathway is strong within Vodafone and our parental leave policy is one way we are able to support women with their career aspirations.

The contribution that women bring into the executive decision making process is worth its weight in gold when it comes to problem-solving, innovating and safeguarding against risk. It means we can feel assured that our products and services are meeting the needs of our diverse customers and that we communicate in a way that resonates with them.

Inspired by the success of our parental leave policy and as part of our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we have gone a step further and introduced a pilot recruitment initiative – The Parental Returners Programme. The initiative targets men and women who have left the workforce to raise a family and are now attempting to get their foot back in the door.

The change in businesses is rapid and that can make re-entering the workforce a daunting prospect. Parents who have been out of employment for between two and 10 years can often lose confidence in their abilities and feel as though their experience and skills are outdated.

Returners involved in our pilot are matched with a buddy or mentor to support them in their transition back to fulltime work and to help reignite their career aspirations.

Greater diversity improves decisionmaking, provides better returns for shareholders and, ultimately, greater social and economic prosperity for New Zealand.

Progressive parental policies help deliver these benefits, but greater equality between men and women taking advantage of these policies is needed. As employers, we can help accelerate a shift by introducing flexible parental leave policies promoting a more even split of parenting responsibilities.

Parents should be able to decide how they share involvement based on their individual circumstances, rather than on gender-based stereotypes.

As part of our collaborative approach to sustainability we would love to hear from any businesses that are successfully encouraging more shared parenting through flexible work policies. Antony Welton is the HR director at Vodafone New Zealand.

There is a direct correlation between the presence of women in executive leadership and the profitability of business; with research showing that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.