AWARDS FINALIST: Contact Energy – Growing Your Whānau
Contact Energy’s ‘Growing your Whānau’ policy was designed to be one of Aotearoa’s most progressive parental leave approaches. The gentailer aims to be an inclusive and diverse workplace, and wanted to support their people through their journey of growing their whānau and as they transition back into the workplace.
Contact says it recognises the importance of their people having the ability and opportunity to take time away from work while they embark on the life journey of starting, or adding to, their whānau. A time of momentous happiness, Contact acknowledges it can also be a time with significant challenges to wellbeing from both financial and non-financial pressures.
As an employer committed to enabling its people to thrive professionally and personally, Contact wanted a policy to help alleviate those pressures.
The policy
Growing your Whānau is a gender inclusive policy launched in November 2022. Components of the policy include:
- topping up Government parental leave payments to employees’ full salary for the first 26 weeks for primary carers
- continuing employer contributions to Kiwisaver while on parental leave (at 3 per cent)
- Fourth Trimester (three months of free power) available to all eligible employees
- meal kits
- leave balances continue to grow while on parental leave
- one-off, koha of $5000 towards childcare upon return to work
- primary carers can work reduced hours when they return to work for the first six months on full pay (minimum of 80 per cent of previous hours)
- the 10 days of special leave to cover specialist appointments is fully paid (on top of sick leave)
Contact wanted to acknowledge the important role partners play, so the policy also gives four weeks of paid leave to partners.
Contact has built an end-to-end process that includes a simple application to submit when taking up the policy, an HR process to review applications, and payroll processes for top-up payments, Kiwisaver contributions, partners’ leave and paid special leave.
Results
In the six months since launching, more than 70 people in the Contact team have benefited from the policy.
Employee engagement, employee NPS and satisfaction with health and wellbeing benefits all improved after the launch. According to Contact’s quarterly survey, employee engagement has increased from 8.2/10 to 8.3/10, employee NPS has increased from +50 to +54, and satisfaction with health and wellbeing benefits has increased from 8.2/10 to 8.3/10 in the three months after launch. Job applicants are quoting the policy when seeking employment and Contact believes it has influenced other organisations to follow suit.
‘Growing Your Whānau’ has been a success, with significant news coverage and positive endorsement from independent opinion leaders on the impact policies such as this have on workplaces.
Contact says ‘Growing your Whānau’ is more than a parental leave policy; it is a trail-blazing primary carer leave policy and one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching of its kind in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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