This is the hottest new perk among LinkedIn’s Top companies

In August 2015, Netflix threw down the gauntlet on paid family leave, announcing that it would vastly expand its benefit for new parents.

The video streaming giant began to offer its salaried employees — regardless of gender — the option to take as much paid parental leave as they needed during the first year after their child’s birth.

One day after Netflix’s announcement, Microsoft added eight weeks to its plan for both birth and non-birth parents, increasing its policy to cover 20 weeks paid leave for new mothers and 12 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents.

Three months later, Amazon boosted its policy, expanding its maternity leave to 14 weeks, with six additional paid weeks available for either parent.

Two years later, neither tech leader can match Netflix, which continues to outshine the local and global competition with its unlimited plan. Netflix may be an outlier, but the movement has picked up steam at companies in all industries.

Many of the 2017 LinkedIn Top Companies have recently expanded their parental leave benefits. In a recent LinkedIn survey, at least 22 of this year’s Top Companies said that they have boosted, broadened or created a new parental leave program in the past year; that includes major firms like Allergan, Salesforce, Airbnb and Facebook.

The increasingly generous parental leave benefits come partly in response to legislation. Between 1995 and 2014, 56 countries around the world strengthened their parental leave requirements, according to The Washington Post. But offering a benefit like paid parental leave also helps companies with recruitment and public relations. Although most developed nations — the U.S. being a notable exception — require some form of paid maternity leave, companies around the globe are distinguishing themselves by going above and beyond the legal minimums.

For many of LinkedIn’s Top Companies, the motivation to expand parental leave has less to do with recruitment than it does with their desire to improve gender diversity at every level of their organization. At Melbourne, Australia-based real estate advertising company REA Group, the decision to expand paid primary carer’s leave in March 2016—from an industry-lagging eight weeks to a market-leading six months, with no restrictions—came down to a desire for innovation.

“Innovation works on diversity,” said Barb Hyman, executive general manager of people and culture at REA Group, which ranked No. 16 in Australia on this years Top Companies list. “Our numbers in terms of gender are pretty good, but we have room for improvement in tech and in sales. We needed to invest in strategies that attracted more diversity, starting with women.”

Only 19 percent of REA Group’s tech workers are women. The parental leave expansion is aimed at helping the company appeal to talented women. “If I look across digital tech companies, there’s lots of sexy perks they offer, but something like this really sends a signal that we want to attract and retain more women,” Hyman said. “We want to minimize the disadvantages women face from taking time off to be a primary carer.”

At Michigan-based medical technology firm Stryker, No. 23 on the list in the U.S., the decision to introduce four weeks paid parental leave for either parent in 2017 — a market-leading move in the medtech industry — was a direct response to employee feedback.

“Our chairman and CEO Kevin Lobo encourages employee feedback and he has challenged our employee resource group, Stryker’s Women’s Network, to help us with identifying opportunities for us to continue to be an employer of choice,” said Katy Fink, chief human resources officer. “Our women’s network identified a few areas of focus, including U.S. parental leave benefits.”

Lion, an Australian beverage and food company based in Sydney, Australia, and No. 22 in Australia on the list, already had a generous primary carer’s leave program, but in March 2017 the company broadened its program to cover a wider range of family care needs.

“We discovered there are many types of families amongst our people and just as many stages of ‘family life’ in which our people had the need for support,” said Jodie Littlewood, Lion Inclusion & Diversity leader. “A policy focused solely on starting a family was not keeping up with the needs of our people, now and into the future. So we chose to re-launch our Parental Leave Policy as Families at Lion – a much broader policy that was inclusive of many different types of families and more important life moments, transitions and stages.”

Lion’s new policy provides time off — in varying amounts — to help with eldercare, family planning, adoption, fertility treatments, and grieving time after miscarriages. Lion also provides support options for anyone experiencing or at risk of experiencing family or domestic abuse. “We hope that this new category of support helps our people to see that we are willing to support them holistically in their journey through family life, not just immediately after having a child,” Littlewood said.

Offering generous leave policies is a major investment for companies, which then presents a new level of risk as well. Companies could pay parents while they are on leave, only to see them resign shortly after the leave period ends. To address such risks, some companies have added restrictions to their leave policies, such as requiring a minimum tenures before or after using leave.

But REA Group’s Hyman said that such restrictions would not reflect the company’s culture of empowerment and trust. “If you resign while on parental leave, we don’t ask you to return the money,” she said. “Not everyone is going to return, but we’ll do what we can to try to hold on to talent. There’s a higher degree of trust built into the lack of rules and boundaries around it.”

At Flipkart, a Bangalore, India-based e-commerce company, the risk it has taken by providing six months of paid primary carer’s leave is paying off. “100 percent of women employees have returned to work after maternity leave since June 2015, when the program was introduced," said Aditi Awasthi, a spokesperson for the company, which ranked No. 1 on the list in India. 

It’s too soon to tell if REA Group’s expanded leave is having the desired impact, but Hyman said the company is seeing a modest increase in the number of people who are taking advantage of the policy. “There’s a bit of a joke here that we’ve started a baby boom at REA.”