In response to employee feedback, COUNTRY Financial saw an opportunity to make changes to our Time Off policies. COUNTRY recognizes that employee well-being is critical and enhancements to time off demonstrate our commitment to be supportive of employees during important times in their lives and better enable employees to provide support in the communities where they live and work.

Specific changes COUNTRY Financial made to Time Off policies include:

• Adding one paid floating holiday for employees to enjoy, celebrate or recognize an event that’s important to them.
• Enhancing our Leave of Absence policy to provide 100% paid maternity leave benefit for six or eight weeks.
• Creating a paid parental leave, allowing any new parent up to four weeks of paid time off to be used within the first year of birth, adoption, or placement. This leave can be taken in one week increments to give new parents flexibility and employee mothers may use this in addition to maternity leave.
• Increasing the amount of time off allowed for bereavement and providing more flexibility for how it’s taken.
• Increasing our volunteer time off benefits, so employees can use up to two paid days a year to give back to the community.
• Creating a paid Leave of Absence policy to address pandemic related situations, including time off needed to support childcare or remote learning. This included allowing employees to use paid volunteer time off during the pandemic to help with remote learning. 

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• Enhanced employee experience and continued to build on a culture that cares about employee well-being
• Increased time off flexibility for all employees and provided enhanced options for working parents and caregivers, which received extremely positive feedback
• Increased employee utilization of these time off options, to support work-life balance