Work-Life Benefits

Challenge

Major life events – like the birth or adoption of a child, illness of a loved one and full-time care for those children and family members – have a lasting and truly life-changing impact on our employees.  At its best, it’s a happy, exhausting, yet stressful time. During rougher moments, it was contributing to significant stress, employees’ not working to their full-potential with career stagnation or, in some cases, the hard choice to leave Ally entirely.

Actions

In November 2015, we rolled out a package of work-life benefits to support our employees during these life-changing moments, giving them flexibility to care for the most important part of their lives – their families – to help address the needs of a diverse and talented workforce.

First, 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave was introduced for both women and men to support bonding with a child after birth or adoption. This supplemented existing leave and PTO policies, allowing employees to take upwards of 20 weeks paid leave, and it could be taken at once or in segments over the course of the year. It also provides added support to adoptive parents, in addition to Ally’s existing adoption assistance which reimburses up to $10,000 in expenses for each child.

Likewise, recognizing many employees are caregivers to elderly parents or other members of the family with health concerns, Ally introduced 2 weeks fully paid caregiver leave. Finally, subsidized nation-wide child care and back-up child care or elder care is now offered across the U.S.

Taken individually, or as a whole, we believe these progressive benefits support our diverse employee population as they navigate at-times complex and emotional personal events in their lives, and do right by them.

Outcomes

Since launch of these industry-leading work-life benefits, 153 moms and 145 dads have taken up to 12 weeks of paid bonding leave, 126 employees took paid leave to care for a seriously ill family member and 46 employees used 217 days of highly subsidized back-up care. Finally, Ally offers discounted nation-wide child care and highly subsidized back-up child care or elder care across the US.

Contact

Sari Jensen

 

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