Here are three takeaways from the conversation.
1. Parental leave is a business disruption issue - and companies need to start treating it like one
Susan has spent her career thinking about what drives performance in organizations. And when she talks about why parental leave matters, she leads with operational risk.
"This leap is a potential disruption," she explained. "And when you have disruption, you have uncertainty. When you have uncertainty, you have stress. When you have stress for the individual, for the manager, for the team, you have decreased productivity and you have decreased engagement. That directly impacts the business and the business outcome."
But she was equally clear about the flip side.
When companies get the leave experience right, they unlock something rare: career development for the team, stronger engagement from the returning employee and a demonstration of real organizational care that builds loyalty.
For HR leaders trying to build a business case internally, Susan's framing gives you language that travels well beyond the HR function - the kind that catches the attention of finance and operations leaders and reframes parental leave as the business issue it actually is.
2. The new employee-employer trust bond is real - and parental leave is a test of it
Susan has a specific way of thinking about what employees expect from companies today. She calls it the “trust bond” and she believes it has fundamentally changed.
"In the past, a trust bond might be stability, might be jobs for life or things like that," she said. "The trust bond that appears now is: I care for you, I invest in you, I got your back."
She believes that companies willing to demonstrate that kind of investment - through benefits, through parental leave programs, through how they show up for employees in major life transitions - will win on talent. Not because it looks good, but because employees who feel secure are more engaged and more productive.
That is a retention and performance argument. And coming from someone who ran HR at a company with tens of thousands of employees, it carries weight.
3. Even the most accomplished HR leaders wish they'd had more support
Susan vividly remembers a moment at her son's soccer game.
His friend spotted her on the sideline and asked: "Hey, who's that lady with your dad?"
"That's my mom," her son said, to which his friend replied, "You have a mom?"
She had returned to work as the primary breadwinner after five years at home - ambitious, driven and performing at a high level. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, she had become a stranger at her own kid's game.
That moment stayed with her. She reflects now that she put so much pressure on herself when she went back - more than anyone around her was putting on her. Two working parents, young kids, competing demands, and no one in her corner to help her think it through.
"I didn't have the resources like Parentaly, which I wish I could have had," she said.
The employees going through parental leave transitions at your company right now are in the same position - trying to hold their career and their family at the same time, often without a roadmap. The companies that give them real support will earn a kind of loyalty that a policy alone never could.
What it really comes down to
Susan Podlogar has seen parental leave from every angle: as a new mother who stepped away, as a professional who came back and built one of the most distinguished HR careers in the country, and as a CHRO responsible for the employee experience at scale.
Her through line is consistent: the companies treating parental leave as a business continuity issue - not just a benefit - are the ones earning the kind of trust that keeps people around, keeps them engaged and keeps them performing at the level you hired them for.
That is not a future-of-work idea. As Susan would say, it is the “next era of work.” And it is already here.
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