Necessity proves to be the mother of retention.

Australian Financial Review - Corporate Woman
Catherine Fox
Aug 28th, 2007

It could be extra paid parenting leave, an on-site crèche or even an allowance to help with child-care costs, but some new options are emerging from businesses keen to hang on to their female employees.
It’s not as though these employers have all had a sudden conversion and seen the light on gender equity. But the pressure to address talent shortages, predicted for years, is making them take some concerted action to attract and retain women.

Most, but not all, are in businesses that employ large amounts of women and they are facing a real problem – if they fail to make some changes they will not have enough people to do the work.
Some of these measures are not new or are extensions of existing conditions. But they do reflect a new proactive strategy that is tailored to women’s lives and recognises that women will continue to leave female-unfriendly and inflexible organisations in a strong job market.

Architecture and design firm Hassell attracted plenty of attention last month when it announced a policy to pay primary care-givers a parenting allowance of $45 per day per child for parenting costs incurred during the 12 months following their return to work.
Hassell employs architects, interior designers, landscape architects and urban planners and at least half of the professionals in these areas are women, says Managing Director Tim Shannon.
“By the time someone has 10 years experience after graduation they are very experienced and very valuable and can contribute and coach new people, and unfortunately many mothers find it really hard work,” says Shannon. “So we are not unique and we lose a lot of experienced talented people at that point in their career.”

The firm surveyed employees to find out what would be the most useful levers to help with retention and found that financial assistance to help with child-care costs made it much easier to justify staying in the formal workplace.
The allowance is paid as part of salary and is not a specific contribution to child care, to be most tax effective, Shannon says.
The level of attention given to this relatively simple step demonstrates how necessary it is for our society to start enabling women to participate fully in the workforce, he adds.
Many law firms are facing the same problem faced by Hassell, with more women graduating from law degrees than men.
They are particularly struggling to retain women at senior associate level and a number of top firms are now focusing on introducing flexible work and other measures to address the problem. One business owner who is suffering form the skills shortage and employs a mainly female workforce has created an onsite crèche for the staff and has been accredited as a breastfeeding friendly workplace by the Australian Breastfeeding Association.
“Not only does the crèche attract staff to work with us, it takes the pain out of going to work for me and gets our staff to return to work from maternity leave,” Impact Communications director Allison Lee says. “PR is incredibly skills-short at the moment so employers really need to step up in terms of their employee value proposition and branding.”
Over at funds manager Perpetual Limited, the provisions for paid parenting leave have been extended from eight to 12 weeks.
And while the measure is not specifically aimed at women, the business has also introduced some extra leave that can be used for caring or for a variety of reasons.
Research conducted with Perpetual employees found that regular leave taking was becoming increasingly important to maintaining high levels of productivity and striking a healthy work-life balance.
The firm also found that about 20 per cent of its 1100 employees were not taking adequate, regular annual leave.