Companies are increasingly providing their employees with longer and more robust parental leave benefits, knowing how important those early moments are between parent and child. It comes as things like work-life balance and mental heath resources remain top of mind for many firms amid the Covid-19 pandemic, especially for tech companies, given the competitive market for talent.
Yet with all the resources available to new moms and dads around parenting and health care, there is very little support when it comes to work — how to prepare for a leave, how work gets done during a leave, and how to effectively rejoin your team after a leave ends.
It's a problem Allison Whalen discovered while working at Managed by Q in Chicago and pregnant with her first child.
"I was really scared before I went on parental leave," she said. "I was at a fast-moving startup that was changing every week, it felt like. I wasn’t sure how I could possibly step out of the business for 12 weeks."
Her fears proved accurate. When she returned to work, everything had changed, Whalen said. Decisions were made she didn't agree with, morale was down, and she even lost someone from her team who quit as a result of the negative experience that took place while she was out.
"I could not believe that despite all the resources related to parental leave, there was nothing with career available to me," she said.
So Whalen took matters into her own hands by launching Parentaly, a workplace benefit that helps companies and employees with the "work" part of a parental leave. It focuses on helping companies with work that needs completing prior to a leave, how to handle work in the interim, and how to re-onboard parents when they return. It combines one-on-one and group career coaching with content around things like how to transfer work before a leave and when to communicate important work issues with a parent while on leave.
Whalen, who dove full-time into Parentaly when Managed by Q was sold off by parent company WeWork in 2020, said taking an extended leave is especially challenging for parents who are deciding to have children later in life. New moms Whalen spoke with were often more established in their careers, and they found returning to work increasingly challenging.
"Everyone had the same experience," said Whalen, who now lives in Minneapolis. "Everyone said, 'I'm so glad I had this time. I would never take a shorter leave.' But it did real damage to my career."
Today Parentaly is used by companies all over the country, including Zoom, Snap and Best Buy, as well as venture-backed tech startups that are looking to offer more well-rounded parental leave benefits. The startup announced Monday it raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Hunt Club CEO Nick Cromydas and G2 CEO Godard Abel, along with Chicago VC firms 81 Collection and Network Ventures.
Parentaly, which considers itself a remote startup but holds its company off-site meetings in Chicago, is working with Hunt Club, a Chicago recruiting service and referral network, to bring its service to Hunt Club's customers and help more companies offer competitive maternity and paternity benefits.
"As leave policies increase, companies can totally transform, especially in the tech sector, in two quarters," said Cromydas, who is joining Parentaly's board. "People are walking back to totally different businesses than the one they entered. Companies aren’t thinking about bringing them back in a thoughtful way."
A convergence of factors has led to a challenging work experience for expecting parents, Whalen explained. Companies are giving employees more time away than ever before, there's been an increase in gender-neutral policies that let dads take more time off, and people are starting families later in life.
"It's much more difficult to have any engineering manager go on parental leave than to have someone who’s 24 years old, very early in their career, who has more junior-level responsibilities, where it can be easier to find someone to fill in their work," she said.
Parentaly helps companies accelerate projects before a parent takes their leave, helps identify things that can be paused, and works to re-onboard someone after their leave is finished. The goal is to help companies work smarter, be better prepared for a parental leave, and weave the program into their benefits package to be more attractive to prospective employees, who are asking their bosses about leave policies more than ever, Whalen said.
"There are a lot of people that quit shortly after parental leave because they are not allowed a re-onboarding experience," she said. "We think if handled correctly, this can be a competitive advantage. ... This can be a game changer for a lot of women and men. It forces prioritization and acceleration of the most important milestones that maybe you wouldn’t do if you weren’t expecting a child."
