Best practices Unpaid parental leave in the Netherlands

Hi ​@JGrassl !

Great question, and one I think plenty of community members have had to grapple with. I’m just going to tag some folks that might be able to provide some insight:

​@HRJoy ​@LegoMD ​@SabbuSchreiber ​@ruta.veite ​@Josefin Bohlin ​@vesna_hr ​@Christine Chilton ​@Carly Murphy ​@fmason ​@berat can ​@JuditSos ​@MvdS 

Oh and ​@Edda van der Ende !

Hi ​@JGrassl 

Can you set up a separate policy for the unpaid parental leave? We set different time off policies for all of our leave types. In Ireland unpaid parental leave is 26 weeks, so if someone is taking all or some of that leave we just put the start and end dates in, so it shouldn’t matter so much about the working hours, as the employee will be off for the entire period of leave. As the leave type is unpaid there shouldn't be an impact from a monetary perspective based on the hours worked/not worked. 

Carly 

​@Moe Thanks for tagging some people!

​@Carly Murphy  Thanks for your insights so far!

To add a bit more detail on why the unpaid parental leave is tricky for us:

The change in working hours required for the unpaid leave directly impacts benefits like our SARs (Share Appreciation Rights) and our pension contributions (saving for old age).

The way our employees use this leave is generally to work one day less per week, essentially switching to part-time for a couple of months or even a year or more.

Unfortunately, our system and provider requirements mean we can only adjust these benefits effectively on a monthly basis (i.e., on the 1st of the month). This is the key reason why we are struggling to manage flexible, mid-month leave requests.

Knowing this, if anyone has managed a similar scenario with benefits linked to unpaid parental leave, we'd be especially interested in your solution!

That’s a great question 😃 I haven’t had to deal with parental leave yet, so I can’t really help there. But I’ll definitely be following along since I’m sure I’ll need this at some point 😄

What I can share is our experience with unpaid leave (not parental, just general). While it’s definitely simpler if someone takes a full month, it works the same way for shorter periods like a few days or weeks. Either way, the benefits and other considerations need to be handled manually on our side, so in practice there’s not much of a difference.

Hi, 

Unfortunately, didn’t have the opportunity to study your case that deeply, but we have it very simple here. The employee marks the entire period with “parental leave” that they are away. It is not connected to salary payments. The employees need to apply for state benefits for the parental leave period(s) and they then send the official decisions to our person handling salaries. 

But we do also have “other absence” as one option (not used in this case), which can be used e.g. for unpaid leaves. People just fill in the comments when applying for this absence.

Tagging some more folks to add to the conversation:

​@BSBSBS ​@isaac256 ​@Naat ​@DennisGroenen ​@Vasiliki Manika ​@Elina ​@Roy ​@annajk ​@Vincent Holthuizen ​@Yuki Miharu ​@Damiano ​@Xirui123 

Hi!

Can only agree that the current set up is far for optimal for the NL indeed. 

"Papa/Mama Dag" (Single Days): we usually just request a plan for the half/whole year in advance (that is agreed with their manager) and key it in for them in the backend (skip approval). Still manual work (especially if it concerns half days), but this way we also can control better for all the rules that come into play (expiration dates, taking it in full weeks ect). 

Unpaid Parental Leave: We specifically do not reduce their FTE. This affects reporting and since unpaid parental leave can taken flexibly this might not match an actual FTE change. Furthermore, pension contributions continue on fulltime/contractual hours during this type of leave for us. Also might impact public holidays and other benefits as you mentioned (which you might not be allowed to prorate because of this legal type of leave). 

We assign their balance, and they can either request it themselves (go through approval flow), or submit a plan in advance and we key it in for them. We inform them that at the end of the calendar year, we will look at the total of unpaid parental leave effectively used, and then recalculate the holiday entitlement for the last year (again manually unfortunately). 

What would be a great win if 

• That Personio automatically recalculates holiday entitlement based on unpaid parental leave used.
• That Personio also recognizes unpaid parental leave and deduct it from the total hours of leave taken when a holiday request is overlapping the same period. 
• Easier to sync certain absence types to Outlook Calendar (we haven managed so far, it now sync also the types we don't want. Logging all the stand alone requests in Personio and then once more in Outlook is a little wasteful. 

In sum, no quick fix here either, but hope this can give you some ideas!

Hi everyone,

Unfortunately, I’m unable to assist with this matter directly, as payroll is managed through an external system.

In our process, we use Personio to track leave dates, and then we record that information in NMBRS, our payroll system, to ensure accurate management of payroll and benefits.

Please let me know if you need any further clarification.

Best,

Vasiliki