Apple has good news for employees who become parents – Latest News

Cupertino-based tech giant Apple is offering an additional four-week extension to new parents as part of its employee benefits. This will also apply to employees who adopt or foster kids. During this four-week grace extension, employees will be entitled to get full salaries and will have the option to choose their own work time and can also work part time. This extension is in addition to the 16-week paid leave for new parents that the company already has in place. However, for those employees who adopt or foster, the paid leave is a maximum of six weeks. The good news is that the new employee benefit policy extends to all staff including retail workers.

“What we find a lot of times is people are really excited to get back to work. At the same time, [they] feel like they need to make sure things are really stable and successful at home. And that weighs heavy on people’s minds, I think,” said O’Brien, Apple’s head of retail and human resources in a report by Fast Company.

Apple also increased the support it provides to employees who adopt kids. This financial assistance is required as the adoption involves high costs. “The adoption process costs some families hundreds of thousands of dollars. Apple now offsets those costs by $14,000,” said the report. This new financial assistance is almost triple of what it used to be earlier.

Apple is also focusing on mental health of its employees and has announced a new mental wellness benefits program where employees will get more free counselling sessions every year along with “telemedicine options”.

For those unaware, “isn’t the first company to roll out a gradual return-to-work program. Pinterest and Salesforce, for example, both have similar policies (though the latter only grants four-day workweeks),” the report added.