**Parental leave in Germany is still distributed very unequally between mothers and fathers. According to the German federal statistical office, in 2020 mothers took on average 14.5 months of parental allowance while fathers took only 3.7 months.¹

Parents have the right to receive the classical parental allowance up to 12 months if only one parent takes parental allowance and 14 months if both parents apply for parental allowance. An alternative they can distribute the same amount of parental allowance over 36 months in total with the so called Elterngeld Plus. This is probably the reason why three out of four fathers (72%) applied for two months of parental leave only.

The amount of fathers applying for parental allowance has risen continuously in the past years. However, we see that those who do apply for parental allowance usually stick with the minimum amount of two months. And this amount has basically stayed the same since 2017. So you can say that more and more fathers do apply for parental allowance but not for longer than the legal minimum amount.²**

Gender equality is something that all companies should care for and in my opinion, a crucial point when this becomes much more complicated is as soon as children come into play. Already having taken more months of parental leave in the first place, the same picture continues after going back to work. Much more mothers work in part time than fathers (in 2019 only 33,8% of mothers worked in a full-time position compared to 93,6% of fathers³). Working part time still leads to fewer career opportunities leading to fewer women in leadership positions and in the end, to a lower pension. Thus, the reasons to engage in creating an equal parental leave distribution are plentiful.

There are many things that politics should improve in this field. However, companies have a social responsibility as well and on top of that, it is also something that employees appreciate and wish for⁴ and would lead to a bigger employer attractiveness. That’s why it is so important that companies pay attention to who is taking parental leave and take actions in order to support fathers and mothers to take parental leave to an equal amount.

Why is it important to pay attention to equal parental leave at all?

The German Statistical Society evaluated their reasons, and this is what they found.⁵ Not surprisingly, financial reasons were the number one reason for fathers taking less parental leave than mothers. They also found that fathers are more likely to take more parental leave when the mother of the child has a high income. This shows that the gender pay gap is the number one reason for fathers taking less parental leave. The second biggest reason according to this study is that mothers often want to take 12 months of parental leave by themselves. This could be explained by mothers seeing themselves mainly responsible for childcare in their role. Or to them thinking that it is expected from them. This effect is called maternal gatekeeping when mothers prevent fathers from taking parental leave to some extent The third biggest reason for fathers not to take parental leave was that they expected negative consequences for their career. Here, it is interesting to see that fathers apparently still give more importance to consequences on their career than to the mother’s career.

So, what are the reasons that fathers take less parental leave than mothers?

Build and visualize a skills-based organization with a collaborative culture

Agyleos Logo Social C

The future of People & Culture arrived

1. Show that you appreciate fathers taking parental leave

The very first thing that you should do is to show that you encourage fathers taking parental leave longer than two months. Some companies introduce special paternity leave policies or an internal contact person fathers can talk to plan their paternity leave and time after proactively. In my opinion, the best way is setting a positive example. If central people in the company, maybe even from the C-Level take parental leave and show that it is appreciated and possible, this will make it much easier for other people in the company to follow. Actively communicating that you appreciate fathers taking paternity leave could also be the very first step.

2. Take away the salary argument

As we have seen before, the main reason why some parents make the decision that the mother is taking most part of the parental leave is that men on average still earn a higher salary and, therefore, it brings them into a more difficult financial situation if the father takes a longer parental leave. This issue is wrong on different levels, and you can approach this on different time horizons.

On a longer term, the solution to this problem is obviously pay equality. This topic earns a whole article itself and cannot be solved by your company alone. But every company should try go ahead as a positive example. Probably the fastest move you can make to create salary equality within your company and show that you care for this topic is creating transparency over your salaries. The boldest way here would probably be to making all salaries transparent. But it can also be a solution to just make your salary structure very clear and transparent and regularly analyze if you are on the right track to reducing the gender pay gap. Also, introducing a regular salary cycle, reviewing all salaries at the same time can be a good solution as this can help aligning salaries in a better way across the company.

Something you can do for the short term (especially as you have no control over the salaries in other companies where partners might be working), is topping up the parental allowance above the state maximum of 1.800 Euro. Some companies even do that to the amount of the actual salary, like Spotify who offers every full-time employee 6 months of parental leave at 100% of their salary⁶. As another example, Einhorn pays their employees a salary raise of 400 Euro net per child⁷. In the best case, this eliminates the salary argument in the parental leave discussion but at least it will give parents more flexibility in planning their parental leave.

3. Create flexible working models

Finally, companies should anchor flexible working models within the company. The more normal flexible working models become, from remote working to hybrid working time models, the easier it will be for fathers and mothers to combine family and work. And we know that both men and women are interested in this and that it leads to greater satisfaction. So, get creative and offer your employees different flexibility models.

Since the pandemic the sensibility for these topics has risen in most companies. After many parents struggling a lot with dealing with working from home whilst at the same time home-schooling their children, many companies have become sensitive to becoming more family friendly. Let’s use this momentum to make a real difference in working conditions for both parents, destigmatising fathers taking parental leave and, therefore, facilitating the situation for mothers and fathers to make an open decision on who is taking how much parental leave.

What can companies do to support both parents taking equal parental leave?

**Sources:**

¹https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zahl-der-Woche/2021/PD21_19_p002.html

²https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/03/PD21_146_22922.html

³https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualitaet-Arbeit/Dimension-3/eltern-teilzeitarbeit.html

⁴https://www.bmfsfj.de/resource/blob/127268/2098ed4343ad836b2f0534146ce59028/vaeterreport-2018-data.pdf

⁵https://www.statistik-bw.de/Service/Veroeff/Monatshefte/20210203

⁶https://hrblog.spotify.com/2016/05/06/paid-leave-music-to-our-ears/

⁷https://einhorn.my/faires-gehalt-fuer-alle/

Never miss an update - Get our latest updates straight to your inbox!

Parental leave is still distributed very unequally between mothers and fathers in Germany with 72% of fathers only applying for the legal minimum amount of two months. Companies have a social responsibility as well to push this issue forward and can expect that their people will value it.

Why and how companies can support equal parental leave

**One of the big challenges in my career as People Operations Manager was to bring processes that we thought of in the People Operations team to life. To really get them through to the teams and - eventually - let them function in a self-organized way that does not need any reminding and following-up from the people operations team.**

**The most prominent example for me is probably the implementation of a 360° feedback process which I did several times throughout the past years. However – and I think talking about failures is just much more interesting than talking about success – I have not yet reached the result of a fully self-organized feedback process that did not need following-up and ongoing support from the people operations team. I spent a lot of time reflecting and discussing with people about what was missing or going wrong to find out what was hindering the process of working as self-organized as we intended it to be. These are the lessons I learned:**

When you are just getting started with creating a new feedback process, the question is always which stakeholders you include in the process and how much of their time you want to consume. You know how busy everyone is and how you would feel bad taking too much of their time. And after all, you know the topic well, so why not take over most of the work and so it happens that the process is almost completely implemented by the people operations team themselves and you are now somehow forcing it onto the people, even though your intention was a very different one.

One example where it became obvious to me how much some people saw it as our process was shown in the way how some people answered the 360° feedbacks. Even though we asked people to write to the person receiving the feedback directly as if you were speaking to them, some people referred to the person in the third person, as if they would only be speaking to a manager or the HR team. Apparently, it felt to them like the feedback was directed to the people operations team instead of the person directly.

> **Conclusion: Even if it the intention is good, do not design the feedback process with the people operations team alone and make the people the owners and designers of it as they are the ones who should want to work with it.**

1. It was the people operations team's process instead of the team's process

People are usually busy in their daily schedule and giving a good and thought-through feedback is time-consuming and it is also something that many people are struggling with as writing a specific and helpful feedback is something that does not come natural to everyone. As long as feedback has a lower priority than other daily tasks, it will be treated as just that.

Another reason for a low participation rate could also have been that some people did not see value in it. This could be due to bad experience with the process, e.g. when they received a very unmeaningful feedback, or many people have even never had a feedback focused on development before, so they just did not experience how valuable it can be. I think people will engage in a feedback process as soon as they see value in it. In my experience, this was usually the case once people received a helpful feedback for the first time. This makes it very important that when someone is using the new feedback process for the first time, they have a good experience with it (in this case good means helpful instead of only positive).

> **Conclusion: Make very clear that feedback is part of the company’s top priorities and emphasize its importance regularly. It can also help to create some transparency for the teams when and how many feedbacks are coming up in the next weeks, so that they can plan accordingly, maybe even include it in the sprint planning. To assure a good experience with the process, find ambassadors throughout the company who can help share useful feedback. This can be the Agile Coaches as they usually know the teams well and have experience with sharing constructive feedback. As soon as someone did have a good experience, it is much more likely that next time, they will take this is an example and be just as helpful.**

2. Many reminders were needed so that people participated in the feedbacks

One thing that is central in building an honest and open feedback process is separating feedback conversations about development from performance appraisal. This is easy in theory, but more complicated in practice.

One question aligns with this: if you cannot use the 360° feedback about development to assess someone’s performance, do you have enough other measures to know if someone is doing a good job and fulfilling their goals? The answer is already part of the question – in the end it is about fulfilling goals, or put differently, about results. If someone is delivering results, isn’t that enough information? But again, the question comes close: do you even know that? Many companies will know this answer for most of the roles they have but for some it can still be a black box. This topic is quite complex and deserves its own article. In any case, the solution should not be to use the peer feedback that is linked to the development of an individual and reuse it to get an idea of the performance of a person.

> **Conclusion: The easiest way to start making feedback really about development is to just take away the access to it from people who could use it differently. Requesting feedback and deciding if they want to share and discuss it with someone else in the company like people operations, an agile coach or a feedback buddy should lie in the hands of the individual. Of course, some people might not get a regular feedback anymore because they do not ask for it proactively. However, personal development can only come from intrinsic motivation anyway, you cannot force people to develop. Luckily, most people want to develop and get better at the things they do. If the tools they are given to do so are good, why shouldn’t they use them?**

3. It was still somehow used to measure performance, even though it should have been about development

Like with performance appraisal, the feedback conversations have sometimes been reused for other things. First, maybe you just realized that something in the team collaboration is going very wrong and how someone is bringing a toxic energy to the rest of the team. This could be the person receiving the feedback or a third person. The result is the same, that you cannot talk about development anymore because you just found out about a more pressing issue. My suggestion would be to use this as an initiator to ask the question why you are only finding out about this now and why you have not realized it before. There is probably another hole that needs to be filled.

Second, and much more often, is the case that someone wants to use the conversation – especially if it is a very positive feedback – as a salary discussion. This is especially wrong as it will take away the whole focus from development.

> **Conclusion: Remove all distracting factors from the feedback conversation. After you have created the feedback structure that is fully linked to individual development, you can reflect on all ways that the development feedback has also been used for in the past – like salary negotiations or discussing team inefficiencies – and create spaces where these topics can be addressed, so they do not take away the focus from development: salary conversations in a regular salary cycle, team inefficiencies in team retrospectives or individual 1:1s and so on.**

4. The conversations have been used for other topics as well

This is something I am quite sad about that I still get to hear this occasionally – even though it luckily does not happen a lot anymore. Unfortunately, even though so many of us work hard on changing this bad reputation that HR used to have, it still happens that people have a feeling of distrust or reservations in cases when HR people are involved in talking openly about their feedback. Some people can get the feeling like they are being monitored or that this is a tool of surveillance. This can show that these people are insecure, and it is important to find out why that is the case. Bad experience in the past could be a reason for this, just as much as a lack of psychological safety in your organization.

> **Conclusion: If you feel like this is an issue, have an honest conversation to really find out where this feeling is coming from and what you can do about it. Like in point 3 a bold move to go about this is to give the people the full ownership to decide about their own feedback and who they want to share it with.**

5. Some people still saw HR as a controlling team

As mentioned in the beginning, this is all my very personal experience and of course, every company is different. These are some of the lessons I learned and some things that we are now considering designing our own feedback process at agyleOS. It would be great to hear your experience on the topic and I am happy to keep you updated on how the suggestions I made above worked out for us!

Our colleague Nina talks about one of the big challenges in her career as People Operations Manager which has been building a self-organized feedback process that is focused on development. In this article she shares 5 lessons that she learned about building a self-organized feedback process throughout the years.

Nina Ruddeck

Articles