Dive Brief:
- Coca-Cola Company this week extended its paid parental leave policy, and it's giving millennials the credit, according to Fortune.
- Starting Jan. 1, 2017, the company will offer six weeks of fully paid leave to new parents in the U.S., extending leave to cover biological, adoptive, and foster moms and dads, according to a Coca-Cola blog post on their site. About 40,000 workers are covered by the new benefit, though it's not extended to union workers.
- According to the blog post, Coca-Cola credits the new policy to Coca-Cola's Millennial Voices, an internal resource group created to help the company attract and retain millennial workers and consumers. The group was part of compiling the draft language and getting the policy through HR and executive approvals, according to the blog.
Dive Insight:
Coca-Cola's position on millennials and parental leave makes sense, Fortune reports, because recent research from EY found that millennial parents are much more likely to take paid parental leave (48%) than parents of older generations were when they had kids (35% of Gen Xers and 24% of boomers).
In addition, the gender neutrality of the new policy should appeal to younger workers as there is research that shows millennial males are more willing to be involved in raising kids than previous generations.
In the blog post, Katherine Cherry, 27, one of the five Millennial Voices members who worked with Coke’s HR team, said millennials are becoming moms and dads, and "paid parental leave isn’t just a nice thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do for our business."
Parental leave has surged back into the news again, with both New York state and San Francisco announcing laws mandating fully-paid parental leave.
