[TusharK]

Volvo Car India has announced that male employees will be able to avail up to 120 days of parental leave at 80% of total salary.



The policy applies to all regular salaried (on-roll full-time) employees in India who have completed a minimum of 1 year employment with the company. This includes all mothers and fathers, same sex parents, parents to adopted and foster children or through surrogacy. There are no limitations on age or marital status.

Women employees will continue to avail 26 weeks of fully paid maternity leave as per the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017.

Link to Team-BHP News

[vj_torqueaddict]

Glad to see more companies following suit. The company I work for announced the same recently. 5 months of Parental leave, for both birthing and non-birthing parents.
Hopefully more companies start doing the same.

[VVN]

Glad to see progressive moves by leading organisations. Slowly but surely the lines between genders will be blurred and we will no longer resort to calling just the female as the 'Home Minister'. Can't wait for that day.

[swunkjyn]

BeJesus, this is a good initiative. I remember when I had my Daughter, I was given only 5 days of Paid Parental Leave. Volvo has been a Company that's at the helm of introducing good things to this world.

[GTO]

Man, that is incredible ! 4 months off at 80% salary. Good for Volvo employees. If I may be candid, I don't think I'd give my team 120 days off for paternity leave. For a company with a small team like mine, it would lead to mayhem. But hey, one thing I have learnt after Covid is to "never say never". Who knows, in the future if policies change.

Originally Posted by vj_torqueaddict

The company I work for announced the same recently. 5 months of Parental leave

Nice dude. If you don't mind sharing, please name the company. Let us give them a public pat on the back.

[vb-saan]

This is brilliant, and a step in the right direction. And what is more heartening is how the policy is spelt – especially on the inclusion.

This includes all mothers and fathers, same sex parents, parents to adopted and foster children or through surrogacy. There are no limitations on age or marital status.

[sahil624]

Great initiative by Volvo India, hopefully there will be a provision for paternity leave in Indian labour law in the near future.

[V.Narayan]

Plaudits to Volvo. This is the way it should ideally be because you need both parents to get that little bundle of life settled. In India invariably it is one of the grandmothers who step in.

In my business we gave a year's paid leave to the mother. It worked very well in some cases. But in a few cases they took the leave and the salary and resigned when it was time to return and went and joined competition! That sucked but life isn't fair at times. Behaviour like this deters even liberal minded employers from being too kind.

[Kosfactor]

I had better luck with employees returning to work in the same team when it was 3 months ML, almost everyone retuned to work. Once this got extended it has become zero return to the same team.

The result was that as usual hiring became more gender biased, now with this we are even.

[charanreddy]

My company offers 3 moths fully paid leave and are very flexible when it comes to when to take the leave. It has helped me immensely when my daughter was born last year.

For knowledge workers, where the quality of thoughts of employees make a difference to the company, it pays for the company to keep employees happy and motivated. Money only works till a certain extent.

[k10_nag]

I am green with envy for Volvo India employees. When my kid was born, my employer gave me a grand total of 3 days parental leave.

Originally Posted by GTO

If I may be candid, I don't think I'd give my team 120 days off for paternity leave. For a company with a small team like mine, it would lead to mayhem.

A very valid point. As I progress in career, I have come to realize the difficulty of employers to plan for 3-4 months leave for employees. The employers usually cannot afford additional back-up strength and it usually ends up as overtime for other team members.

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

In my business we gave a year's paid leave to the mother. It worked very well in some cases. But in a few cases they took the leave and the salary and resigned when it was time to return and went and joined competition! That sucked but life isn't fair at times. Behaviour like this deters even liberal minded employers from being too kind.

This is another problem unique to Indian industry. Employees usually don't stick long in the same company unlike in some of the European and Japanese countries. The employers will feel short changed if the employee leaves within 1-2 years after providing such benefits. So usually they don't bother with such perks in India.

[SoumenD]

Incredible indeed. Having gone through the stage in life can understand what an awesome help this will be for new parents. It gets really tough for only the mother to take care of an infant while the father has to return to work(after 2 weeks of PL), specially as she herself is recovering. Not everyone is blessed to have parents around all the time for help. Hope other companies follow suit

[vj_torqueaddict]

Originally Posted by GTO

Nice dude. If you don't mind sharing, please name the company. Let us give them a public pat on the back.

Sure GTO!
Company is called Atlassian. We build software dev tools, most famous among them is called Jira, those who work in software industry will know.
Well, 5 months of Paternity is one among the several perks. We also announced permanent WFH model last year ( https://www.businessinsider.com.au/a...om-home-2020-8), which to me is the biggest perk of them all

[sups]

Originally Posted by TusharK

Volvo Car India has announced that male employees will be able to avail up to 120 days of parental leave at 80% of total salary.

Excellent move! Not sure if the Swedish connection (though owned by Chinese now) of Volvo Car India has any influence behind the decision. I am trying to explain below.

13 years back when I joined a Swedish company in India and landed in Sweden on my 1st tour, I was shocked to know that both father and mother are given almost a year leave during child birth. My Swedish colleagues used to joke saying "Sweden is the best place to become father".

I once asked one of my colleagues what would happen if the father does not take long parental leave. The answer surprised me. He said it would be interpreted as father not taking enough responsibility towards the child and would be looked down upon in their society.

On a different note, I know two of my colleagues who had 3 kids within a span of 5 years. This means that they were out of office for almost 3 years in those 5 years. And this is perfectly accepted there. Sorry for the digression from the main topic though.

[RahuKetu]

Nice initiative from Volvo. It will really help the parents considering the fact that a sizeable population now lives in nuclear families. I worked for nearly 5 years in a Maharatna PSU and I got 15 days of paternity leave in 2009 which was considered good as compared with most of the other private companies.