I recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Seattle’s King 5 TV News on the passage of Washington state’s paid family leave measure. The bill was passed Friday, June 30 and goes into effect in a few years.  As director of Panorama’s paid leave program, our unique focus is to work directly with large U.S. companies as they assess, design and implement paid leave benefits.

Regardless of a national mandate, state regulations, or benefits offered directly by employers, our position is the same: paid family and medical leave should be made available to all U.S. workers because it makes business sense.

In Washington state and beyond, the conversation is just beginning, and progress is being made. For example, as I explained during my King 5 interview, paid leave is not a “woman’s” or a “mom” issue; every worker has a family member they will want or need to care for at some point in their life. This is a fundamentally different way of looking at this. To create change, we need to change the conversation, and that has to start at the top of any organization.

In my meetings with company executives and HR leaders, most agree their employees need paid leave benefits. Indeed, as the only advanced economy in the world without a national paid leave mandate, everyone agrees something must be done. While we are agnostic in the process that gets us there, we are passionate about working directly with companies to help them provide paid family and medical leave to their employees. We help companies think about and design paid leave benefits that fit their culture and workforce needs.

For more information, including research, a comprehensive step-by-step Playbook, and downloadable tools, visit our dedicated paid leave resource site, The Paid Leave Project or reach out to me directly: angela.romei@panoramaglobal.org.

We’ve never doubted that paid family leave is good business — but the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has recently released a report that shows just how good it is.

Like Fairygodboss, where we track which employers are improving their paid leave policies, the BCG team has taken note of this trend. To get a better sense of why companies are moving in this direction, BCG analyzed the policies of more than 250 mid- and large-size companies and spoke to 25 HR leaders at large organizations.

What did they conclude? Employers find that there’s a strong business case for providing paid family leave for a variety of reasons, including improved talent retention and attraction.

The goal of BCG’s report is to make this information more accessible to companies that are considering updating their policies. When the team did case work on paid family leave, oftentimes companies reported that when they looked into restructuring their paid family leave policies, they spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what was going on in the market.

“We wanted to provide a synthesized view of the current state as well as share the learnings we gained from talking to a diverse set of companies about their experience designing and implementing paid leave policies,” says BCG partner Trish Stroman, who co-authored the report (along with Gabrielle Fitzgerald, Wendy Woods, Shalini Unnikrishnan, and Liz Bird).

Read the rest of the article at FairyGodBoss

In this TEDx, Anna Steffeney, recognized thought leader, talks about Why the U.S. Needs Paid Parental Leave.

With a background in international corporate leadership in finance and technology, Anna is a passionate entrepreneur who is now the CEO and Founder of LeaveLogic. She focuses on improving the experience and lives for working families.

After the birth of her two children—one born in Europe, the second born in the United States—the glaring difference in parental leave policies prompted her to launch LeaveLogic. Their mission is to help normalize leave in the workplace. LeaveLogic revolutionizes how employees and companies manage the family leave process. Their solutions empower employees to confidentially navigate and plan the best leave scenario for their unique situation, while saving companies time, money and effort.

Click here to view the clip.