Parental Leave & Reduced Hours for Childcare
Parental Leave & Reduced Working Hours for Childcare
What is parental leave?
- Two options: leave or reduced hours
- No unfavorable treatment for applying or taking leave
- What happens after return decides whether the policy works
Parental leave is not a perk that an employer approves case by case; it is an obligation to allow any application that meets the requirements. So what this system really changes is not one person’s leave plan but the organization’s staffing assumptions. You have to treat it as a given that any team member may be away for nearly a year, and plan headcount, project schedules, and replacement budgets accordingly. An organization that has only coped by having remaining staff split up the empty seat’s work will see a team collapse as soon as two or three people are out at once.
Leave and reduced hours are different things. Parental leave stops work entirely. Reduced working hours for childcare keep the employment relationship and the job in place while cutting weekly contractual hours, typically to between 15 and 35 hours per week. Remaining leave can also be converted into reduced hours or split up. However, the eligible child’s age, total usage period, and number of splits change often, so hard-coding numbers into company policy leads to requests being rejected under outdated standards after the law changes. Pay comes from employment insurance, not the company, so you also need to decide who issues the confirmation and files the report, and when.
The most common misconception is that “it’s fine as long as we don’t fire anyone.” In practice, most disputes erupt after the return. Typical cases: someone else has been placed in the returnee’s old role and the returnee is reassigned with no position; all of their client accounts are handed off and they are left with support work; or the leave period is treated as a performance gap and they receive the lowest rating. Even if title and pay are unchanged, if their authority and duties have effectively disappeared, it can be challenged as unfavorable treatment. The same goes for giving someone on reduced hours the same workload and saying, “Just finish it within your hours.” Cutting hours without cutting the work leaves the employee feeling guilty, and the next person never even files a request.
Hwi KimCEO of HRDIST & talent development systems consultant
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultantKorea’s Act on Equal Employment and Support for Work-Family Reconciliation provides for parental leave and reduced working hours for childcare. It prohibits dismissal or unfavorable treatment for applying for or using them, and requires that employees returning from leave be reinstated to their original job or one paying equivalent wages.
Company A, a cosmetics manufacturer and distributor with 210 employees, has women making up more than 60% of its production and marketing staff. Over the past 2 years, 14 employees took parental leave, and 5 of them left within a year of returning. HR’s concern was that all the policies were in place, yet people were not staying. (Hypothetical example)
- When the HR director pulled the assignment history of the 14 employees who had returned, 4 of the 5 who left within a year had been moved out of their original team.
- At a return interview, a team lead said, “When I came back, the brands I used to handle had been split three ways, and there was no one to hand them over to me.” The CEO then told the team to put the return-placement criteria in writing.
- HR set reinstatement to the original role as the rule. When a move is unavoidable, the revised policy requires keeping the prior salary and position allowance, along with the division head’s approval and the employee’s signed consent.
- For the 6 employees on reduced hours for childcare, the company reallocated brand assignments on a 25-hour-per-week basis. It also counted each of them as 0.7 of a person when setting team targets, so team leads no longer had a reason to discourage anyone from using the option.
- The company added a handover checklist 3 months before leave and a pre-return interview 4 weeks before return to its standard process, and budgeted in advance for hiring replacement staff for 2 people per year.
- The following year, all 9 returnees came back to their original roles, departures within a year of return fell from 5 to 1, and requests for parental leave from men rose from 0 to 3.