Most parental leave policies are designed to attract new talent, with incentives, benefits and payouts. Melbourne-headquartered media agency Hatched, meanwhile, decided to design a new parental policy to help its existing staff return to work.

Two years ago, Hatched’s leaders realised they had a problem. Female staff would leave to have a child, take a lengthy break from work and perhaps return part-time, feeling guilty, out of touch with colleagues and maybe even stressed about what to wear.

Media is a fast-moving sector – TikTok did not exist in Australia before 2017, and it now has more than 8 million users. Returning after time off could be disorienting, and overwhelming.

“This is going to sound overwhelmingly simple – and it kind of is, but what we did was we asked the parents what they needed and what they wanted,” Stephen Fisher, the chief executive of Hatched, says.

“We had an internal process which, instead of a corporate, off-the-shelf response, said ‘This is what a parental policy should look like.’ Not out of a finance team or CFO or someone else, we sat all of our parents down and said, ‘Hey, what do you need? What does a best-in-class parental policy look like in the real world?’”

What emerged, and helped the agency emerge as a finalist in the AFR BOSS Best Places to Work rankings, was a new parental leave policy.

“We wanted to prevent the talent drain of women aged 30 to 45 and ensure that our parental leave policy supported them both financially and emotionally,” Fisher says.

The policy includes 12 weeks of paid leave for parents on top of the government’s 18 weeks. There are six coaching lessons to navigate the guilt and stress of leaving young children to go to work, and three paid “keeping in touch” days to come back to the office.

Hatched is 11 years old and works with the likes of Bapcor, Who Gives A Crap, Open Universities and AIA Insurance. It is a full-service media agency, meaning it plans where ads go, devises the strategy behind them, buys them, reports how they went and tweaks them to make the campaign better. There are 63 people in its Melbourne office and 14 people in its relatively new Sydney team with one overarching goal.

“If I put one dollar into media and marketing, I expect a return that is greater than that,” Fisher says.

“Our mission, if you want to frame it that way, is to be an agent of positive change in our industry and beyond. And the parental leave policy is an example of that. The overarching ethos of our business is ‘Don’t f— it up.’ Right? It’s very, very simple.”

The same goes for the parental leave policy. The new one also pays leave for pregnancy loss. “We want 20-year clients, but we also want 20-year employees,” Fisher says.

And it appears to be working. Since launch, in July last year, the agency has not lost a single woman between 30 and 45 years old. Surveys through Culture Amp show “engagement” with the business has jumped to 78 per cent from 60 per cent. Scores around management caring about staff rose to 90 per cent from 84 per cent, while a belief that Hatched has a genuine commitment to social responsibility rose to 84 per cent from 82 per cent.

Perhaps the most crucial number came from a survey from media agency advertising channel Media i, which runs surveys every year of the majority of the nation’s 5000 media agency staffers. The number of Hatched staff – “hatchlings” – looking for a job elsewhere fell to 5 per cent from 20 per cent. Staff happiness rose from 70 per cent to 90 per cent.

One element kept coming up in discussions – clothes. So Hatched decided to put a $1000 clothing allowance into the policy.

“As you come back into work, you need that new wardrobe,” Fisher says. “You know, this is a big moment, we want to celebrate with you coming back in. So we just put $1000 into people’s accounts.”

Article originally published AFR May 1 2024