Reward Gateway offers its employees unlimited year-long paid parental leave

Business joins 12% of US businesses by giving new mums and dads unlimited paid parental leave during the first year of their child’s birth or adoption.

Reward Gateway, the world’s leading employee engagement company, has unveiled a new way of supporting their employees around the world through a new parental leave benefit. This forms part of a brand new benefits package which was announced internally at the company’s  quarterly all staff business update.

They’ve ditched the traditional maternity and paternity policies and moved to a gender neutral approach giving all employees, regardless of gender, unlimited paid time off during their child’s first year of birth or adoption. This gives employees the choice, flexibility and financial support to decide what’s right for them.  

In introducing this benefit, Reward Gateway joins the ranks of some of the most generous tech firms which offer paid parental leave for the first year, including global video and film streaming business Netflix. The US is one of the only three countries left in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave, the other two being Oman and Papua New Guinea .

Debra Corey, Reward Gateway’s Group Reward Director who joined the company from PageGroup and Merlin Entertainments Group started the year by carrying out a review of the company’s global benefits. This began with the creation of five core benefit principles, which were then used to conduct a ‘health check’ of all existing company benefits to see how they scored against these new principles. The goal was simple, to create a package that embodies Reward Gateway’s values, is competitive in each market, and takes into consideration the new principles of fairness, balance, choice, and delivers something they call ‘wow moments’ but is still easy and simple to use for all employees of the business, regardless of location.

In addition to the introduction of the parental leave benefit, Reward Gateway announced they will be adding other benefits over the next few months, including new benefits they’ve named ‘choose your package’ and ‘wellbeing choice’. These offer yet more flexibility and choice to their employees around the world regarding paid time-off and wellbeing. Employees will get 35 days paid time off (an increase from 30) with the added bonus of being able to increase their salary by reducing the number of days or decrease their salary by increasing the number of days. These round out a very competitive and creative benefits package to include unique ones such as an all employee share program, staff lottery, a free book benefit, and wedding and new baby bonuses, as well as free healthy breakfasts and drinks to name a few. All these benefits are available to employees company wide, from Australia to Macedonia.

Debra Corey said, “At Reward Gateway, we are committed to providing our employees with benefits which deliver against our new principles, and used the review to make sure that every benefit ticked each and every box. The changes we’ve made to parental leave is an example of how we changed a benefit to align with these principles, and is something we are incredibly proud of. We want all our employees, regardless of gender, to be able to spend time with their children, safe in the knowledge that their role will be there for them when they’re ready. As a parent myself, I’m incredibly proud that Reward Gateway is implementing this.

“Paid parental leave is an important contributing factor to help reduce the gender pay gap, get more women into C-Suite positions and strike a healthy work life balance.”

One employee wrote in after the announcement to say “I can honestly say that myself and my partner are still both lost for words following the announcement last week. I cannot express how thankful I am to work for a company that has changed and impacted our lives in such an incredible way. Not only has Reward Gateway taken away many worries, reversed some tough decisions we had to make, but you have given me an irreplaceable 12 months at home with my first child."

*Only 12 percent of U.S. private sector workers have access to paid family leave through their employer according to the Department of Labor

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For more information contact Sophie Lister, Emily Jones, Nelly Akpaka at Hudson Sandler on +44 20 7796 4133 or rg@hudsonsandler.com

Photographs are available to download from Reward Gateway’s media library at http://rg.co/mediaphotos