Cure.fit, a health and fitness firm in India has updated its existing parental-leave policy — which offers six months of paid maternity and paternity leave to its employees — by making it gender neutral. Further, the parental-leave programme will also cover binary parents.
As per the updated policy, employees who are becoming parents through natural birth, surrogacy, or adoption will be eligible for this parental break, regardless of their gender.
The Company also encourages team members and managers of employees to regularly check-in with people who are on parental break and give them updates on their ongoing project. This ensures that the employees on leave remain engaged with the organisation, even while their learning curve smoothen at the time of their joining back.
When employees join back after a parental leave break, they either resume working on their previous project or put on a new assignment.
Cure.fit claims that the programme also addresses the most common grouse of decelerated careers during parental breaks, by not altering the employee appraisal cycles.
“One of the core values at Cure.fit is ‘doing the right thing’. In an era, where we’re collectively on a journey to remove labels and enable all individuals to discover their best selves and be better every day, this programme organically seemed like the right thing to do. The programme empowers our employees to design a life best suited to their aspirations and eliminates bias,” shares Ankit Gupta, head of product & engineering, Cure.Fit.
The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017 prescribes a maternity leave of 26 weeks in India. The Central government employees are entitled for a 15-day paternity leave but no such guidelines exist for the private sector. With this updation, Cure.Fit is equalising the parental-leave programme in the Company.
