BABY ON BOARD

With Mother’s Day coming up soon, this is a good time to take a look at your store’s maternity leave policy.  Ideally you should have a policy set in your employee handbook before you need it, and you should think about including adoption and paternity leaves too.

Your goal in creating a parental leave policy is to be fair to your employees and to protect the needs of your business.  In most cases you want to make it easy for the employee to return to work after the baby is born (or adopted).   One problem we have as retailers is that our wages often don’t stretch to cover full-time childcare for a newborn, so part-time work may be preferred by mothers coming back to work.  By offering that as an option you are more likely to retain a seasoned employee.   If an employee does plan to return to work full-time, try to hold an equivalent position open, although this is difficult for small shops needing to hire a full-time replacement.

This difficulty is probably the reason that the law covering maternity leave, the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, only applies to companies with 50 or more employees.  The law mandates up to 12 weeks of unpaid medical leave for maternity, paternity, adoption, and caring for a sick child, spouse or parent. It limits these benefits to employees who have already worked for the same employer for 12 months and at least 1,250 hours during the past year. Some states have a less restrictive policy regarding the waiting period for eligibility — be sure to check the state in which your shop is located.

Many employers who offer health, disability and life insurance, or other benefits such as paid vacation and sick days, allow employees on maternity leave to continue insurance coverage and to accrue other benefits for a certain leave period, such as two or three months, with the assumption that they will resume work full-time.  Sick days and paid vacation are often used during a leave to provide some income.  It is up to you to decide what you wish to offer, and what course of action you wish to stipulate for employees who do not return to work full-time after their leave.

All of this dry talk about policies ignores the fact that a member of your work family is about to experience a major life event.  One of the joys of creating such a community is being able to share the happy moments in each other’s lives.  By all means do what you can to be supportive of an employee’s pregnancy. We’re looking forward to a baby shower at our shop for one of our part-time staff members next week, and to celebrating the arrival of the little one in June.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder