Paid Family Leave: a Cost or Investment Opportunity?

Here at Ikaria Design Company, we strive to employ design thinking in everything we do. One of the key strategies is to begin with a clarifying of values. When our values are crystal clear and top of mind, the values themselves carry much of the decision-making.

Last year, our sole full-time employee, Hannah, announced her pregnancy. This gave us our first chance to implement our Paid Parental Leave policy (12 weeks of fully paid leave). Admittedly, we were thrilled but also a bit anxious. When values are clear, the right thing to do is a no-brainer. I'm proud to say that we were able to keep up our end of the promise with existing revenue. However, If the need had arisen we would have been more than willing to take on some debt in order to follow through.

We started seeing the benefits of parental leave as early as the months leading up to Hannah's due date. The prospect of filling in the many roles she plays for twelve weeks brought us much-needed focus. It also accelerated process changes already underway. We operationalized many of Hannah’s daily decisions, downloaded as much of her expertise as we could, made contingency plans, brought on a couple of key new staff.

Each one of the changes catalyzed by the arrival of this new member of our community continues to generate benefits, not just for the new parents, but for the organization as a whole. I would venture to say that these benefits of automation and process development continue to return much more than the salary Hannah pulled while on leave. In addition, the measures we took to cover Hannah, (the equivalent of 3 part-time jobs) helped clarify her value to herself and us, and on her return has helped us expand her contribution even further as the automations and new staff have freed her up to make ever deeper contributions.

This personal experience with parental leave has shown us that there is no good economic argument against a national policy of Paid Family Leave. As a very small furniture manufacturer in the midwest, we were able to deliver on it. One of the reasons I felt confident was having seen my small local church with an annual budget of under $300,000 provide 12 weeks of paid parental leave to our pastor, not once, but twice within five years.

As I write this, the Paid Family Leave proposal was reduced from 12 to 4 weeks, and now has been removed altogether from President Biden's Build Back Better plan. We are left deeply puzzled about why the US Congress can't do this broadly popular thing. Why wouldn't they want to get credit for something that the rest of the country has found to be of such value? Why wouldn’t they want to take credit for something all of our economic peers throughout the world have already embraced?

When someone agonizes over a policy or decision that you've implemented out of your own values, it becomes clear what their values are. Witnessing the hand wringing in the US Congress is bringing their values to light. Our elected leaders are not in alignment with where most of the country already is. Paid Family Leave is a no-brainer for most Americans. We know that it's a policy that actually creates greater economic value.

Here's the thing that our country’s leadership has refused to learn. When a community is gifted with new life, whether through babies or families who have immigrated to our shores, this is a net positive experience for all. We are accustomed to compassionately helping a young child make the needed adjustments to a new member of the family and their role as the older sibling. We are not shocked or judgemental if they have mixed feelings about the newcomer. From their perspective, it looks like a zero-sum game of less love, attention, and other resources. Expecting American families to endure without Paid Family Leave puts this immature perspective of the young sibling in charge. Is this who we want to be? Isn't it time we acted our age as a nation?

Another lesson learned from the new life that joined us this year can be found in my previous blog post: Floor Lessons From My Granddaughter