It's just a company. Take your time and spend it with your family, and don't stress about it. In a decade you're not going to regret bonding with your spouse and child and missing some work.
If management are worth their salt, this sort of behavior won’t be tolerated. If it’s tolerated, you have poor managers.
Not much more to say about that.
1) increase the workload for who remains
2) decrease the workload and delay the deadline (which could affect other parts of the company, the pnl)
3) find a contractor or two to pick up the slack, this may take a while and can still fail or cause the rest of the team to stall while that person/people onboards.
Depending on your situation money can be tight or deadlines can be tight or both. Meaning the only appreciable option may be #1: which is part of why it’s harder to work in startups where both of the above may be true.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame management, but it can be arbitrary limitations imposed by management for sure.
A manager and everyone else should be establishing that as much as their contributions are missed it's not a problem that they had a child or took the leave they are entitled to.
I’m not sure how I feel about that honestly.
On the one hand it makes people feel more free and feel less bad in themselves.
On the other it will become an open secret among everyone including those who may eventually take leave and then be aware of it, passive aggression may ensure even if it’s not permitted, and of course on some level it’s dishonest.
You are reading it wrong.
It's not just about the individual taking the leave, it's about spreading discontent throughout the entire team because someone is taking advantage of a benefit they are entitled to.
Basically, you are advocating for the idea that someone using a benefit they have is bad.
i.e. I'm allowed to spread discontent on the team and make you feel bad for taking a salary.
Because you do benefit from those benefits even if you choose not to have a child. The people working there would most likely not work there if these benefits didn't exist.
> it's impacting everyone else at the business negatively
Clearly it's not. The companies offering this clearly prefer the type of people that benefit from this. And you do as well, as the people taking advantage of this are clearly important to your job satisfaction.
Isn't his point that the asymmetric benefit is unfair for non-parents and thus contributing to a lack of job satisfaction for everyone left picking up the slack?
Solution: work somewhere else, where another benefit structure is offered
At the end they could choose to let the team be less productive. Business should already assume that they may lose an employee at anytime, or roadblocks may come up, so if they're assuming the teams are always going to be at 100%, that's probably not realistic.
The business could also: hire another manager, or promote someone whose been looking for an opportunity to learn to manage. If they do want to shift the load to other existing employees, ideally the business is structured so that other managers aren't at 100% capacity and can help fill-in temporarily. That's still a form of "picking up the slack", but if it's planned for, it's usually less an issue.
Plus, benefits are often "unfair" in that they help some employees more than others. A sickly coworker gets more out of the health plan than someone who is as fit as a fiddle. Not needing glasses, I get literally nothing out of half of the "vision and dental" package. The tuition benefit does nothing if you're unable or choose not to take a course.
It impacted the business having him be absent for two weeks - I was forced to attend two meetings on his behalf and had to answer a bunch of email.
He could have chosen to man up and not take a vacation, or could have taken his laptop and attend meetings remotely and answered email. What a jerk.
Otherwise Company, Inc. shouldn’t have offered the benefit in the first place.
They need to do prep work before leave so that the team doesn't become disgruntled to begin with.
If the behavior is exhibited at all, you have poor managers. If not tolerating it takes any other form than helping to ease tension, you have very poor managers.
If taking advantage of your benefits is going to kill the company, then the company probably wasn't meant to exist. After you get your kid off to a good start in life, begin the job search. The market isn't quite as bad as the gossip blogs say. Companies still need people to write software and people to manage the teams that do that.
I really don't think any of this is going to happen to the OP. Their manager will handle 1:1s. Someone on the team can run meetings. Some decisions will be made while they're away, and they'll have to accept them even if they disagree. That's the worst case, but that's management in general.
That's not really a place you'd want to work anyway, as this reeks of both bad management and bad colleagues. Would the same colleagues be disgruntled toward that person if said person had a death in the family? I mean shit happens and management needs to step up with better planning and scaling down the workload to account for the time off of the employee. If colleagues are disgruntled towards the employee taking time off and not at management for making them work more, they're either assholes or idiots.
As someone who did have to "step up", I think I did a fine job, but I wasn't exactly thrilled about needing to do 2 jobs now: my old job and the job of the person out on leave. For no additional pay.
I absolutely believe parents should take leave, and while the exact amount may be up for debate, I think that, generally, paid leave in the US is woefully short. But I think it's really shitty to just pretend the extra burden on your colleagues doesn't exist when someone takes leave, or that they'll necessarily see it as a great "opportunity".
It seems like either they really assigned all of the leave-taker's job to you, and that seems excessive, or this person was doing a TON of stuff. Were there no other people who could take over parts of the leave-taker's work?
I’m sure the impact to the parent commentor could have been mitigated, but absolutely sure that it almost always isn’t.
In this case, the startup was young, and (as is usually the case for startups) we had too much to do as it was. Also, coincidentally, we had a bunch of people having babies around the same time. There were simply not that many other people who could take on the work.
I think that's primarily the point I want to make: in a sizable corporation, probably a quarter of the company could disappear for a year or two and it wouldn't make any difference. A young startup just doesn't have that amount of spare capacity, so it's not realistic to think that going on extended leave (for whatever reason) won't have a large impact on the people that remain.
PS - if you want to argue that by "one quarter" should really be a third or 20% or 15% or whatever, knock yourself out. Point being that large corporations have a lot more redundancy that small startups, so the impact of someone leaving for an extended period is vastly different.
On top of that, the startup may find it difficult to pay someone else while still paying you. If you're an early employee, there may also be financial incentives to the company letting you go, such as not having to pay out the higher rate or higher equity you negotiated as an early joiner.
You can take the time off but in some cases are risking losing your job by doing so for long. If you need the money, that's a tought spot. Even if you're good at getting new jobs (many people aren't), getting a new job can be a full time job in itself which you don't have time to do if you're seriously on mat/pat, and anyway few companies will hire you while you're still unavailable.
I understand for moms, nursing is the real benefit.
But it's not just a company. It's also your family's income. It's how you're feeding the baby you now have.
You’re not indispensable. Your team will be fine if you come up with a plan. Your manage should step up to fill the gap.
Go spend time with you family.
that’s explicitly the point of this post — OP is asking what their plan should be.
this, and the GP comment, are super annoyingly missing the point.
OP is already planning to take 3-4 months off. they ARE going to spend time with their family.
they’re just asking for advice on the transition, and half the comments are totally ignoring them, lol
Screw that. The planning is basically telling everyone “hey im gone, Bill will cover me, see ya”