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Hi everyone,

We're currently reviewing our parental leave setup in Personio because our existing process is becoming challenging to manage, and we'd love to hear about your best practices!

We currently use accrual policies for:

  • Maternity leave

  • Extra partner leave

  • Partner leave

  • Paid parental leave

Our current structure is causing a couple of pain points:

  1. "Papa/Mama Dag" (Single Days): Our team needs to request each individual day of this type of leave separately. This creates a lot of unnecessary manual effort for both the employees and our HR team.

  2. Unpaid Parental Leave: For unpaid leave, our current workaround is to only adjust the employee's working hours. Because this impacts benefits, we can only make this change effective on the first of the month. This makes it difficult for employees who need flexibility and creates a heavy, manual workload for us to track how much leave has been taken.

We are looking for a more sustainable and less manual approach.

Specifically, we're interested in: How do other companies set up and track various types of leave for (future) parents within Personio to make the process smoother, more accurate, and less labor-intensive?

Any insights or creative solutions you've found would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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.

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