It’s 2:13 a.m., roughly a week after my daughter, Maya, was born. I haven’t slept for more than three hours at a time. Complex sentences don’t make sense anymore. Only simple phrases will do: Verb noun. Soothe baby. Change diaper. Feed baby.
Seven days. That’s all it took for me to go from productive professional to barely functioning, monosyllabic diaper machine. Yet, for all the difficulties, I consider myself lucky. If I were like most employees in the United States workforce, seven days is all I would have — I’d have to be right back to work the following week. If my company were like most in the country, I’d be burdened by two kinds of guilt: The guilt of having left work for seven days to take care of my family and the guilt of having to go back to work and leave my family. Call it the paternal leave guilt sandwich.
Thankfully, I’m not in this situation. I work at a company that values its employees and gives real, meaningful benefits. Let me say that differently: My company gives us benefits, not perks. There’s an important difference. Benefits are things like health insurance, paternity leave, and paid sick leave.
These days, you’ll hear more about perks than you will about benefits. Things like ping-pong tables, fridges stacked full of Red Bull and Perrier, video games, and other vanity items. What the employer is signaling to you with these items is clear: We’re cool! We’re hip! Join us, and you too can play ping-pong all the time! It’s an attractive signal, especially to young employees.
It’s also a siren song. Why? These benefits have diminishing returns. You simply don’t value a foosball table as much the 10th time you’ve played as the first time. More than that, you start to realize that many of the perks that attract employees don’t actually help — and may cause more harm than good.
I worked in all different types of employment situations: agencies, tech shops, accelerators, startups and more. In most of those cases, the idea of paternity leave is fanciful. Mothers barely receive paid leave; fathers were laughed out of the room for even asking about it. Paternity leave shouldn’t kill your career.
Standard protocol in most companies is 14 days paid leave for mothers…