General Mills expands paid leave for new parents, caregivers

With qualified employees in short supply amid a tightening labor market, General Mills is following in the footsteps of some of its competitors by offering more paid time off to new parents and other caregivers. 

Starting in January, the Minnesota food producer is increasing fully paid time off for new birth mothers to 18 to 20 weeks, and parental leave for fathers, partners and adoptive parents to 12 weeks. General Mills currently provides six weeks of maternity leave and two weeks of parental leave.

The company will also start offering employees two weeks of paid leave to care for immediate family members with serious health issues, and up to four weeks off following the death of an immediate family member.

"We spent a lot of time talking with employees at different life stages and asking questions about their pain points and what contributes to feeling torn between work and home," Jacqueline Williams-Roll, chief human resources officer at General Mills, said in a news release. "Out of those discussions, we developed a strategy to focus on these moments when employees really need support the most."

The benefits will be available to the company's roughly 13,000 salaried and non-union production workers, who represent about a third of the company's worldwide workforce.

The move by General Mills comes after similar ones by rivals. Unilever increased its paid maternity leave to 16 weeks in 2016, and last year Kellogg hiked its parental leave to up to 14 weeks.

In addition to heightened competition for workers, many companies are also looking to comply as states and municipalities pass legislation mandating paid time off.

Millennials value paid parent leave more highly than prior generations, according to a Ernst & Young survey. About 78 percent of full-time millennial workers have a spouse or partner who also works full time, which is nearly twice that of baby-boomer couples, found the poll, conducted in late 2014 and early 2015.

Only 16 percent of the U.S. civilian workforce had access to paid family leave as of December 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.