Employee benefits: Financial firms 'are kind of waking up' to providing better perks
Mary Childs was at dinner almost three years ago with a group of girlfriends who worked in finance. Being ambitious women of a certain age, they were discussing the intersection of careers with parenthood. But they realized, as they talked, they lacked key pieces of information: There was a troubling lack of transparency around employee benefits.
These women might want to change jobs, but were confronted by the delicacy of asking a potential employer about parental leave. For that matter, it was only after getting deep into an interview process that they might learn about vacation time or other benefits. In contrast, the level of pay for finance workers is public knowledge.
“Why is this so hard?” Childs, the co-host of NPR’s "Planet Money" podcast, told Yahoo Finance Live. “Aren’t we supposed to think about benefits as a competitive advantage? Isn’t this supposed to be a way we attract and retain talent?”
Childs and PE Hub’s Karishma Vanjani set out to document financial firms’ benefits policies in a feature article for Quartz. They canvassed 101 firms. Thirty-two responded.
“It was such a dental appointment getting all this data from the firms. I had to be on calls with like hundreds of different PR people trying to just get a hold of the data,” Childs said.
What she turned up was encouraging — on a relative basis. “I think firms are kind of waking up,” she said.
Part of that is of necessity. The so-called quits rate — the percentage of the workforce that quits every month — was near a record-high 2.7% in June, with job openings at a record. The rate for finance and insurance employees was considerably lower, at 1.2%, and the number of job openings has ticked down since its high in 2017. But the industry remains competitive, particularly as potential bankers have been lured to the tech sector over the past decade.
Job seekers are prioritizing benefits like work-life balance and other intangibles. According to a recent Bankrate survey, more than half of employed Americans plan to look for a job over the next 12 months. Of those, 56% highly value work flexibility, 35% more paid-time off.
People working at Bridgewater get the latter, Childs and Vanjani found. While the hedge fund is known for its demanding work culture, it also offers the best vacation policy of the firms they surveyed, with employees required to take at least 15 days off, plus six days when the entire firm is closed. London-based hedge fund Marshall Wace clocked in with the best parental leave, at 26 weeks.
“I think we’re making really good headway societally on family leave,” said Childs, who said the terms family or parental leave better reflect modern parenting than their gendered counterparts, maternity and paternity leave. “We’ve seen really massive progress in the past three to five years.”
Julie Hyman is the co-anchor of Yahoo Finance Live, weekdays 9am-11am ET. Follow her on Twitter @juleshyman, and read her other stories.
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.
