He is not completely alone in this. The IT service provider Cisco offers the parent who primarily looks after the baby 13 weeks of normal pay and the supporting parent, usually the father, four weeks. “Especially in America, we don’t necessarily have a unique selling point,” said Katrin Hartmann, Cisco human resources manager for Germany, in an interview with WirtschaftsWoche. “Such offers are more normal there because for a long time parents were hardly given parental leave by law.”
Also read: “There is never a right time to leave an employee out for 13 weeks.”
Like Henkel and Cisco, the business law firm Freshfields also sees additional parental leave that goes beyond the legal minimum as a special incentive for highly qualified employees with plans to start a family. Freshfields pays two months of statutory time off on top, the full salary in the first month and 75 percent in the second month. The firm assumes that this option will now “become even more attractive” due to the abolition of state parental allowance. From April onwards, only couples whose taxable income is less than 200,000 euros will be entitled to this.