Artemis’ Parental Leave Task Force is proud to announce our improved parental leave policy!

An often-overlooked challenge of growing a company from five, to twenty, to over a hundred employees is designing policies that scale with the company. Artemis’ strong culture is one of our greatest assets, and we work hard to make sure that our core values inform every aspect of our growing business. We crowdsource our policy design, and the importance of such a collaborative process has become increasingly apparent in the wake of Basecamp and Coinbase’s disastrous, top-down policy announcements, which led to a mass employee exodus.

To ensure that our policies are growing with us, we annually poll our employees on how we can improve our benefits package. We then form a volunteer task force made up of employees across the company to scope and design policy improvements based on the poll’s results. Our transparent and collaborative approach to policy design ensures that our policies truly support needs of our team and are informed by our core values.

Artemis’ Parental Leave Task Force formed in response to our original parental leave policy receiving a 50% satisfaction rate across the company. The original policy was designed in the early days of the company, when our small team was unable to provide much paid time off and we hadn’t yet had teammates who were in this phase of life. Artemis supports a parent’s need and desire to establish a bond with their newborn baby or newly adopted child, and our new policy enables parents to take that time, while supporting them throughout their transition away from, and back to, work.

Employees are still a valuable part of the company while they are using their parental leave benefits. While on leave, parents are paid at full base salary, their equity continues to vest, and they keep their health coverage. We protect a parent’s job title and salary for the 12 months following the birth or placement of a child and ensure that they remain on track for a promotion or raise.

Flexibility and inclusivity are at the heart of our new parental leave policy. Both birthing and non-birthing parents (e.g., adoptive and foster parents) are now eligible for 60 business days (12 weeks) of paid parental leave that they can structure how they need within 12 months of the birth or placement of a child. Parents can take all 60 days off consecutively and then return to work full time or take them non-consecutively (e.g., 2 weeks off, then 2 weeks on, then 2 weeks off, etc.). They can take some days prior to the birth or placement of a child or take them all afterwards. A return-to-work schedule will look different for every parent. Some parents are back at work full time after a few weeks away, others come back on a part-time basis, and still others come back after 12 consecutive weeks away. Parents can now choose to return on a part time basis, which is based on the number of hours worked per week (<30 hours a week). Ultimately, there is a lot of flexibility for parents to design their leave and their return-to-work schedule in a way that works for them.

Artemis is also proud to announce our new Parent-Partner Program (PPP) which pairs parents with a partner to offer emotional support throughout the transition away from and back to work. A Partner is an ally or parenting peer who can help re-introduce parents back to work, empathize with the joys and challenges of being a working parent, celebrate milestones (e.g., monthly ‘birthdays’ for their child during the first year, child’s first smile) and just generally check in.

Artemis is proud to have developed such a transparent and collaborative approach to policy design, ensuring that our policies grow with us while rooting us to the core values that guide our work.