Melissa Foley
Yahoo: Cultural Changes
The cultural changes within Yahoo that I have decided to discuss for this topic are the maternity changes at Yahoo.
Recently the President and CEO, Marissa Mayer greatly expanded Yahoo’s company benefits for new parents and not just new mothers, but fathers as well. Fully paid leave for the new parents has now been up’d to eight fully paid weeks. And if that wasn’t improvement enough women who go through actual child birth, i.e. giving birth to the baby instead of adoption or surrogacy can qualify for up to 16 weeks of paid leave.
This is a huge cultural change especially since if you also recall, Bayer also recently did away with the Yahoo work from home policy in it’s entirety, which is a favorite for many full time working mothers. I believe expanding the maternity and paternity leave policy is going to help and show that Yahoo isn’t being cold towards working mothers and parents, but compassionate and dedicated, while keeping working order. Yahoo’s expansion of 16 weeks paid is 4 weeks over the federal mandated 12 weeks unpaid by leave for childbirth by the federal government.
In the working culture and paternity leave polity before this announcement, Yahoo provided no leave to fathers at all and another really neat thing in the changes is the help with child care expense, Yahoo is providing up to $500 a month to help with in home or centered child care, and child need products.
This change exposes an ongoing effort within Yahoo to be part of a growing ‘hip’ working culture that can compete with other Silicon Valley technology companies recruiting the best of the best in the Executive Market, such as top competitors Facebook and Google.
How is this more efficient and productive? Studies show longer paid maternity leave helps in retention on employee’s especially, as well as in return and productivity of employee’s because many new