The Parental Leave Dilemma: Helping Your Nonprofit Leaders Navigate Time Out of the Office
If you've ever welcomed a baby into your home, you know how stressful it can be. You don't want to have the stress of what's being left undone at work on top of that.
How do we help our nonprofit leaders navigate time out of the office? That’s what I’m discussing with mission-driven fundraiser, Lacey Kempinski on today’s episode. Lacey is focused on changing the way the nonprofit sector supports parental leave and working parents.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
03:50 Lacey’s career journey and how having children changed its trajectory
06:39 The parental leave dilemma
10:00 The challenges of parental leave in the workforce
12:32 Solutions to the parental leave dilemma
16:14 Supporting nonprofit leaders who need time out of the office
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The Parental Leave Dilemma: Helping Your Nonprofit Leaders Navigate Time Out of the Office
Have you or one of your team members ever taken parental leave? If so, you know how hard it can be to navigate.
I had two of my babies while working internally at a national nonprofit and one as a consultant. I can remember all the prep work that went into the weeks leading up to my leave.
I needed to complete certain projects.
I needed to get other projects to a place where they could be put on hold.
I needed to hand off projects to someone else to manage while I was out.
If you've ever welcomed a baby into your home, you know that is stressful enough on its own, even as exciting as it is. You don't want to have the added stress of what's being left undone at work.
So how do we help our nonprofit leaders navigate time out of the office? What can Learning and Development do? That's what we're going to explore in this blog post with mission-driven fundraiser, Lacey Kempinski.
Lacey is the founder and owner of Balanced Good. After 10 years of working in-house as a major gift fundraiser, she jumped into consulting after realizing she couldn't be the mom and professional she wanted to be in a traditional workforce. As an entrepreneur and business owner, she is now focused on changing the way our sector supports parental leave and working parents. She believes this is one important key to improving the social sector's burnout and turnover dilemma.
1) The Parental Leave Dilemma
I asked Lacey to explain the parental leave dilemma, and this is what she had to say.
“I don't even know if we could accurately call it a dilemma as more of the parental leave reality because the reality is that this will happen in your workforce.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey explains that in the United States, the nonprofit sector accounts for one in 10 jobs. It is the third largest workforce with roughly 12.3 million people. 75% of which are women. 71% of mothers in the US are working mothers. Lacey explains that this equates to about six and a half million women in the American nonprofit sector who are working moms.
“This is going to happen, you're going to have parental leaves on your team. And the numbers are quite similar in Canada, just on a smaller scale. But we need to think more thoughtfully about how we can support our team and this kind of life transition and milestone.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey explains that it is important to layer on top of this the impact of being a working mother.
“In the US mothers experience this thing called a motherhood wage penalty where they lose 15% of their salary for every child they have under the age of five. Which is significant. And then this has impacted more women who are Black, Native American, Latino, and Asian. So if we're wanting equity and equality in our sector and in our workforce, we really need to think about what are the pieces that are impacting the women and the parents that work in our sector. So tangibly, when we think about what is this parental leave dilemma or the parental leave reality, it's staffing gaps, it's women and parents not returning to their current role, it's turnover, it's burnout. All of these things are tangible things that happen in reflection of parental leaves.” - Lacey Kempinski
I can imagine that with the number of women and parents in the workforce you're going to see staffing gaps and turnover as women or parents don't return to their roles after welcoming a child into their home.
2) The Challenges of Parental Leave in the Workforce
When I asked Lacey about the challenges of parental leave in the workforce, she explained that it’s all about turnover and burnout.
“When we think about turnover in the sector, we don't think about parental leave. But the connections between the two are strong. Anecdotally, so many women and parents tell me that they use their parental leave as a time and place to reflect on their current role and look for new opportunities, especially if they weren't supported in going into their current parental leave.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey also points out that it’s important to think about the cost of turnover.
“Some studies show that the cost of turnover is double the salary of the person in that role. Plus there's a time piece to turnover when we think about the HR elements of recruiting, onboarding, interviewing, and all of those pieces.” - Lacey Kempinski
On top of that, Lacey explains that there is also a loss of mentorship in the sector.
“When incredible women and parents turnover and leave to new organizations, we have junior staff now struggling because they don't have that mentor that they were looking up to.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey points out that from an HR perspective, we often think of parental leave as almost a headache that you don't want to acknowledge.
“When we look at it from a reality perspective, and you have plans in place, it really helps.” - Lacey Kempinski
3) Solutions to the Parental Leave Dilemma
Lacey’s team at Balanced Good goes into organizations and covers the parental leaves so that the workload is being supported while the parent is off growing their family. But there are other ways that you can make parental leave easier and more accessible in your organization.
“The biggest thing that you can do as a leader is to have a plan in place and not to have a plan in place when somebody tells you they're excited that they're expanding their family or they're adopting, but to have this plan in place now, prior to anyone telling you this news.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey expands on this by saying that this is not just from an HR perspective, but really from a thoughtful leadership development and job trajectory perspective.
Lacey recommends asking your team members who are going on parental leave certain questions.
How can we support your parental leave in not affecting your career trajectory?
If you want to move on to more senior roles, how can we ensure that you have the work experience you need with your parental leave in that roadmap?
“So really thinking about what the plan would be from a workload perspective for that individual's role, but also the impact on other team members. When you fail to plan for a parental leave what ends up happening is that the workload from the person going on leave gets shifted to the entire team which can cause even more burnout, can cause resentment, and can cause overall challenges in the workplace.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey also explains the need for clear job descriptions and performance metrics.
“To know what we need to support in a parental leave means that we need to have a very clear job description. What is it specifically that this person is responsible for? I joke, but it's not really a joke, that we should not have other duties as assigned in a job description and that we have very clear expectations. And then we have performance metrics around these.” - Lacey Kempinski
Lacey suggests performance metrics because then as a leader, you have a benchmark for how that individual is performing in their role either when they are preparing for leave or when they come back from leave without having to micromanage the individual.
When you become a parent there are daycare pickups and drop-offs, arranging a nanny and sick days, and all of these pieces
“If you have really clear performance metrics, and you know that the person in the role is fulfilling their job duties, then you're able to provide them with autonomy which really is priceless.” - Lacey Kempinski
I talk a lot about setting clear expectations. I feel like from a training and leadership development perspective, clear expectations can help in a lot of different ways. So it makes sense that it would also help from a parental leave perspective.
Check out episode 34 for more information on setting clear expectations: Get Clear on Staff Expectations with This Fundamental Resource.
4) How Learning and Development Can Support Nonprofit Leaders Who Need Time Out of the Office
There are certain things HR can do to support nonprofit leaders who need time out of the office, and L&D can support that.
Lacey recommends three things:
1. Co-create a parental leave plan
“I think that the first thing is creating time and space for you and your team to work towards co-creating parental leave plans or any type of leave plan. If you know somebody is going on leave make sure you build in extra time in your calendar to really co-create what this plan looks like.” - Lacey Kempinski
2. Have leave standards laid out
“I would also recommend having standards laid out on what leave looks like so not just what the time away looks like, but from in your organization and in your team. Do you recommend your team return from leave on a modified schedule? Or do you recommend that they return from leave on a Wednesday versus a Monday? Or what does that all look like?” - Lacey Kempinski
3. Create space for autonomy backed by performance metrics
“I think the biggest thing is making sure that you create space for autonomy that's backed by performance metric tracking. If you can create autonomy in your role, you're going to have working parents that are able to do both of the things that they want to do really well. Parents want to do their job well. In this sector, we have this deep desire to make an impact in our world and to do great things. So the people that I see thriving in their roles are really people who are supported working parents that have the autonomy to be able to show up as a parent and to show up as a nonprofit professional.” - Lacey Kempinski
This makes so much sense. I remember a friend of mine told me that anytime sheI needs something done she looks for a working parent because she knows that they can handle it. They can juggle it. So there is something to that.
From a talent management and a training and leadership development perspective, we often are thinking about what good performance looks like.
What does it look like?
What does it feel like?
What does it sound like to do whatever that thing is well?
We have an opportunity to partner on performance metrics and help do the analysis to figure out what those look like and bring people together in a way that they can share. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity here for L&D as well as management and HR staff to be involved and to make this parental leave process go a little more smoothly and hopefully not be a pain point within the organization.
Lacey shared one final takeaway with us.
“The main takeaway from this is to make sure that you have a plan and a thoughtful plan. With a plan we can really move from this idea of parental leaves being a dilemma to parental leaves being like a welcomed reality that can strengthen our workforce.” - Lacey Kempinski
To hear the full conversation I had with Lacey on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 70.
The Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective
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