Retain talent, advance gender equity & prioritize inclusivity: PwC Canada's approach to parental leave

PwC Canada knows that the family-building years are one of the most important times in a person’s life. They also know that it can present career challenges for three key reasons:

Transitioning in and out of the workplace can be overwhelming, people worry about the impact of taking time away from work on their career progression, and each person’s access to support, and their support needs, are unique.

To get ahead of these challenges, PwC Canada made the parental leave journey a core part of their people strategy, expanding benefits, streamlining resources and providing structured support for both parents and managers.

Their goals were clear: retain top talent, advance gender equity and ensure an inclusive experience for all parents.

In 2023, we began working with PwC Canada to bring this vision to life, launching career coaching and manager training programs that have since supported hundreds of staff members.

By embedding parental leave support into their broader people strategy, they’ve not only improved retention and engagement; they’ve also ensured that every employee, regardless of gender, position or seniority, has the support they need to navigate this transition with confidence.

In today’s episode, Chief People Officer Sonia Boisvert and Total Rewards and Wellbeing Leader Lisa Rosen share PwC Canada’s approach to supporting parents. 

They break down why the Parentaly program has been a game-changer and the significant ROI they’ve seen as a result.

They also share a framework for HR leaders on how to make the case for investing in parents and caregivers, something they believe is a win for both employees and businesses.

Allison: Hi Sonia and Lisa, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Sonia: Hi, Allison.

Lisa: Thanks for having us.

Allison: I have been so looking forward to this conversation because I've had the pleasure of working with both of you as well as your broader team for a few years now and have had a front row seat to both, I would say, the specificity and the passion and enthusiasm that you have put into developing not only how you support your parent employees, but also all employees. 

You have a big mandate here. Our conversation today will be focused mostly on parental leave and parents more broadly, but I did want to call out that I've just been so impressed with all of the work you've done. 

And maybe to set the stage, I was hoping we could start with Sonia sharing a little bit more about where this all comes from. What is the PwC Canada's people value proposition and how does that directly align to your core business strategy?

Sonia: Thank you, Alison. I will say that our people value proposition is all about creating and maintaining an inclusive and caring environment where everyone can build a meaningful career. It is a key part of our strategy to keep and attract top talent, giving our people a sense of pride and belonging and ensuring we stay competitive in the talent market. In this sense. Our PVP encompasses all our efforts to make sure our workplace is a place where people feel valued, supported, and motivated to do their best at work.

Allison: I love that. How would you say then our partnership, the Parentaly program fits into that broader value prop?

Sonia: The value prop for us is really understanding that everyone has unique circumstances and priorities, especially when it comes to significant life moments like adding a new person in your family. This is one of the most important times in a person's life and we want to make sure our employees feel supported in their moment that matters.

Retaining for us is a key part of our strategy and we know that the family building years can be very challenging. Historically, this is a time when women might choose to leave the workforce or take a step back on their careers, especially in high-performance organizations like PwC Canada. Offering support through one-on-one coaching for expecting a new parent to help them for this milestone, both personally and professionally, was so important for us. 

Also, the manager training is crucial. We want to equip our leaders with the skills to support expecting parents before, during, and after a leave. This includes knowing how to support the broader team as work gets relocated and when a parent returns to work. We want them to feel welcome back by a leader who understands the challenge they may face and is supportive of their reintegration.

Allison: I love that. I wanna take a step back a little bit because what's so interesting is, we've been doing this parental leave work at Parentaly for a very long time. Very rarely do we speak to a company that already knows how incredibly important this moment is and how you need to put real attention to this parental leave transition.

We're gonna get into a little bit of what your team and specifically Lisa, when you spearheaded the work to find a partner for this, but I wanna even start before that, which is what was the motivation for you to go out and seek a partner? Because you had other options. You could have attempted to build something in-house, which you have done a lot building in-house. And I know from personal experience, you do build a lot of really incredible things in house. What was your motivation to find a parental leave partner?

Lisa: It's such a great question. And I think I want to start by saying that the leave solution and the coaching solution was just one part of our broader strategy to reimagine our parental leave experience and the family building experience at PwC. 

So the first thing we needed to do was define our business problem. What was the problem we wanted to solve? And for us, that was we wanted to retain top talents and we also wanted gender balance in our organization.

So we knew that we would need a firm wide and a really holistic approach to how we were going to approach parental leaves. And it needed to align, like Sonia said, with our people value proposition, our values, and our value of care, which is a really important value at PwC, and then also a broader inclusion and belonging approach. 

Once we knew, okay, that's the business problem we're trying to solve, then we took a step back and said, what are the challenges and barriers that parents face, right? And so through conversations and through research, we identified several, they are one transitioning in and out of the workforce can be overwhelming. It's difficult for parents to balance that caregiving and their workload and their career. And this can lead to people, primarily women, leaving the workforce. And so we don't want that to happen.

We also have the broader societal perceptions around gender norms, both as I said, societal, but also within the firm. And that can really result in penalties or career impacts for people who take a leave. So things like, you know, your performance, your salary, how you progress, for example. 

And then, of course, we also need to look at other factors like intersectionality. So how does that impact people from different ethnicities? How does that impact sexual orientation or disability? So now we know the business problem, barriers and challenges. So next step was to set priorities and we set six. 

So for your American listeners in Canada, we have maternity leave benefits that are funded through our government. They can provide up to 15 weeks of financial assistance for parents who are pregnant or recently giving birth. And then we have parental leave benefits for an additional 40 weeks or sometimes 69 if you extend them. And those are shared benefits between two parents. And so we'd previously at PwCtopped up birth parents. So you're receiving that government funding, we top you up to 100%. So the first thing we did was expand that. And we expanded that to all parents. So regardless of gender and non-birthing parents.

We created a parenting hub on our website where we pulled everything together because people had trouble finding things and that was a massive change.

Allison: Which by the way is amazing. I've seen it and when I saw it my jaw dropped. So kudos to you because it is incredible.

Lisa: It's awesome. It's actually mind boggling what an impact it has had and the number and reduction of questions that people have. Like now people know what to do and where to go. It's amazing.

And on there, what made it amazing was we created these clear action items and guidance for both those leave takers, but also their managers at every phase of the leave. So before leave, during leave, return from leave.

We also updated our emergency care benefits. So this is a benefit we have, where it's an emergency childcare benefit. So let's say your child goes to daycare and there's a flood, or they go to home daycare and your daycare provider is ill. We have a benefit that supports that when there's unexpected challenges.

And then of course, partnering with an external vendor for the leave approach. Oh, and I would be remiss not to mention that we also have an inclusion network. So we have an inclusion network for families that we tap into as well.

Allison: And that's really helpful context because at the time you had a competitive process to try and find this partner to do the very specific piece that Parentaly does. But it is important, you're right, that Parentaly is not the solution, right? There's all sorts of ways that companies need to be thinking about this. 

And I would even add to that that I love that you highlighted the policy piece because I think oftentimes companies talk to us like, we have a great solution, but we can't do it all. And it includes the culture, the policy, the surrounding benefits. And then once you're able to sort of wrap those together, it creates this just incredible holistic support. So thank you for calling that out.

When you looked at the specific piece that Parentaly does, what were the things that you were looking for in a partner? Because you do actually have coaches in-house. I know it's different than the type of coaching we do.

But this is something that I get asked all the time from specifically professional services firms, which is we have internal career coaches. We have internal coaches. We have a mentor program. We have ERGs. Why did you feel like you needed to select, you know, another partner? And what was it specifically about Parentaly that you thought, yes, we need to, we need to partner with them.

Lisa: Yeah, another really great question. So there are a few things that stood out about Parentaly specifically. And I'll be honest, you know, as we went into the search process, we spoke with a lot of organizations and people did different things, right? And so, you know, there are different models that people use.

And what we really liked about Parentaly were three things. 

The first was the one-on-one coaching approach because as Sonia said earlier, we know that people's concerns are unique to them and having that safe space and ability to really be one-on-one with someone was really important and we felt that would resonate best with our people. 

Secondly, your program focused on all parents, not just mothers. And that aligned with our vision because as I've said, non-birthing parents are super important and key factor. And in fact, we'd recently signed a paternity leave pledge with one of our partner organizations, Women in Capital Markets, because we know that the role of fathers and non-birthing parents really has a huge impact on new mothers, right? And their workload and their career.

And then finally, and this was really where you stood out, was in terms of your focus on planning the actual work, right? And so things like who's gonna manage your client when you're away, that really resonated with us as a professional service firm because our people are really ambitious and high performing. And many have a very clear sense of where they want to take their career and their path to promotion, their path to partnership. 

And they're worried about that impact of taking parental leave. They don't want it to impact their career growth. And so it can be very hard for people to step away. They care very deeply about their clients, right? They're really embedded in their clients' business. And so to step away for a full year, which is the norm in Canada for women in particular, can be very, very hard. 

And so your program had this structured methodology for how to organize and plan for that leave, both for the person who's taking the leave, but also for the managers as well and the leaders. So this really relieves a lot of anxiety for our people. 

And really bottom line, we felt like you understood our organization and our people and what they needed. So that was why you were successful. 

Allison: Thank you. I'm like, I'm like, keep going, Lisa, give me more. No, this is amazing. No, and I really, appreciate that because I think that oftentimes, and it's not super obvious who should do what sometimes of what is the project leader's role or the internal coach or, know, and I think that one of the things that we've gained more conviction on over the years is that we can be this neutral person that helps almost conduct it, right? 

So there are certain conversations that have to happen internally within the organization, but you can also have the safe space to come and ask the toughest questions that quite frankly are usually the reasons why people may leave. They don't maybe want to talk about it with a coworker. And so I do think that it becomes actually really fun when we work with an organization like PwC Canada, where you do have a lot of other resources and it's not just on us, but we can serve as that sort of hub of security to sort of like navigate the experience.

Sonia: Allison, can I add something into that? I will say that also what we wanted to present to our people is that, to your point, we have good coaching at PwC, a good coaching community. However, because of the uniqueness of that leave and the importance of that moment, we wanted to tell our people that they are experts in that coaching. You can really take benefit of what they're telling you. 

And the fact that to your point that you are external, they open up even more than I feel like for us, it was really also something that we were looking for. The fact that it was external, but the fact also that you were expert on this particular matter. For us, it was a big differentiator.

Lisa: You know what, Sonia, I'm going to jump in, too, because you remind me of something that I didn't think about earlier, but very much resonated with us, which is that you also were very willing to work with us to design a program that worked for our organization. So that co-creation was really exciting. 

Although you have a very structured program, it didn't feel out of the box like we were able to work together to find what would work for our people. And in fact, innovate since we have launched, right? We've made changes to make it work even better.

Allison: Yeah, and I think what's so tough about parental leave is it is really most people's most vulnerable career transition. is a career milestone, but it's also a life milestone. And I think sometimes people don't know it's so hard to unwind that sometimes.

And so if we can come in and people don't need to worry, is this a thing I should talk to this person about or not? No, you can talk to us about any of this because we've seen it all. We've seen every walk of life, every person, every level of seniority. And if we're not the right person to address this, we can tell you who within your organization is. So I think that this is a very nuanced way to sort of think about this experience.

Sonia, how do you know, you know, we started off in a pilot capacity, so you thought we would be great, we could have just been selling the dream. How do you then know that this is a success? What are you looking at?

Sonia: We have been conducting several surveys to understand how different groups within our organization feel about various aspects of their work life. One of the key questions we ask is whether people identify as parents. This helps us track how our parenting strategy is impacting their experience. 

After we updated our parent strategy, we saw some really positive trends right away. People's perception of taking a leave improved significantly. This year, we took a step further and we asked everyone who took any type of leave whether they felt it was career limiting.

The results were clear: Parents don't feel that taking a leave of absence is as career limiting as non-parents do. 

That's not all, I will say, Allison. Our engagement survey also shows that parents are generally more positive than non-parents across all topics we covered. And these positive trends for parents have continued to other surveys as well. It's really great to see that our efforts are making a real difference in the employee experience for parents. We'll keep working to ensure that everyone feels supported and valued in our organization, that's for sure.

Allison: That's amazing because I think if you look at sort of the broader society and ask people that question, I do think, and I feel very strongly that we have to change this narrative, that being a parent is not career limiting, that it introduces new competitive advantages, it makes you more efficient, but that's a fun thing to talk about. It's a totally different thing to have data showing that people actually believe that. 

And I think that you sharing that data and those stories are really important because that is how, especially for people who are not yet parents, but who are thinking about it. I mean, this is a big thing that I know people in that stage of their life are looking at. Where can I work? Where I can move into that and not give up on my career?

It's something that all of my friends and I have gone through. I'm sure you've seen this yourself as well. So I think that that is just huge. So that data is amazing. There's also stories. And that's the part that I, I mean, it makes my job the most fun is like, yes, I see the data about how great this support is, but there are always these stories that just sort of hit you to your core. 

I'm curious if you have...do you know anyone personally that has gone through Parentaly who's gone through this transition? What are the things that you've heard that have really made you think like, wow, I'm so glad that we made this, this overall change, not just Parentaly, but just all of the work that you've done within the parenting space?

Sonia: Yes, thank you, Alison. It's a great question and I'm doing a lot of one-on-one feedback with our people across the country. And we get both very great feedback from the coaching and also the manager training component that you deliver. 

From coaching, we have heard that the training has really helped our people prepare for their leaves and feel confident about returning to work while also being able to share thoughts and feelings on becoming a parent. 

Few example, maybe you will love, is one first time mother was concerned about how parental leave will affect her career, but her Parentaly coach supported her in finding the right language and give her some courage to have the conversation she need with her leaders. These conversations made her feel reassured and she left on leave with confidence about her future. 

For me, this is a big win.

A director and first-time father said the Parentaly coaching program was a game changer for him. The personalized one-on-one sessions with his mentor address all his concerns about maintaining his performance at work, which let him really get excited about becoming a new parent.

He shared that the resources made the preparation process smooth and stress-free. Having a supportive mentor to share his journey with boosts his confidence in taking time away from work to focus on his family. 

Allison: Love that.

Sonia: Isn’t that amazing? I love it too. When I do the one-on-one and I get feedback, I'm very pleased because this is exactly why we're doing that. This is the reason why we're doing all this and with passion.

Lisa: And I have a few stories or a story to share about our manager coaching as well. And what I'd say is that the most common piece of feedback we take from people who go through the manager training is, I wish this had existed when I went on my leave, right? And so for me, that really resonates because it's people saying like, hey, this is amazing. I didn't have this. I'm grateful that you are providing this for the people that I lead now.

And of course, they also share they feel much better prepared to support their members, their staff members. And what they tell us is they really appreciate the clear direction on when to like, when, when do I have a conversation? What exactly should I ask? It really demystifies their role in the process. And, you know, people are always nervous about saying the wrong thing. And so people's instincts around when they don't know what to say is to do nothing.

And so you have this silence where people don't feel supported. And so if there's one thing the manager training does is it empowers people to have those conversations and be less anxious about saying something. It means that people say something and that is a huge deal. Yeah.

Allison: Right. You know, and you're making me realize we've barely even talked about the manager training. And I think this is something that the most common question I get about manager training is, well, do managers even want that? 

Because the idea of manager training, I think sometimes it gets a bad reputation of like, it's a thing that someone is forced to do. And I think what you're highlighting is yes, because I really think most managers really want to do a good job. They want to be supportive. And I have consistently been shocked by how many people show up to manager trainings across all of our clients, the questions that they ask, how thoughtful they are, the feedback they give that finally I know what I should be saying and how to say it in a way that is appropriate.

And so I love that you've brought those examples up because I think sometimes I'm guilty of this where the manager training is sort of a fraction of what we do. And so I don't focus on it, but it is actually really incredibly important because back to our earlier conversation, The Parentaly coach is not the end all, be all. The managers have to show up and be supportive. They want to be. So how do we just give them a little bit of support and language to do that? So thank you for sharing that.

I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you, and then we're going to move on to not just talking about Parentaly for two final questions, but before we do that, if you had to sum up the Parentaly and PwC Canada partnership value prop, in one sentence, how would you describe that value?

Sonia: I can't have a shot at it, Allison. I think that for me, parental coaching extends our care value by offering personalized support that reflects our commitment to new parents.

Allison: Great job. Lisa?

Lisa: Gosh, me? I would echo Sonia, really. But maybe what I would say is that Parentaly extends our wellbeing strategy directly to parents. It fits in very, very well with our broader strategy of wellbeing for everyone at PwC.

Allison: Amazing. Okay, I'm gonna ask two more questions that are not specifically about Parentaly, but I'm curious because I know a lot of other HR listeners will wanna hear the answer to these questions.

The first is, how do you keep a pulse on what your staff members and employees need?

Sonia: We have probably different answers to that, Me and Lisa. Lisa, I will start and you can answer more. 

But I will say as Chief People Officer, as I said, I have a number of sessions across all of our Canadian offices and I'm doing what I call listening tours. That gives me the opportunity to hear from our people, what is working for them, what we can do better, and also host one-on-one sessions and keep always an open door policy so our people know they can come to me at any time.

The other aspect is we are having a lot of surveys. Some people will say maybe too much, but I will say we survey a lot. We survey at least once a year, all our people, but also on a monthly basis as well, just to make sure of the benefit of that.

Then I will say through those listening tours, one-on-one as well as the survey, we get really great insight if the initiative that we are looking at or making an action is working or not. And people love it and we need to continue to do it or stop doing it.

Lisa: Yeah, and I think what I would answer is just if you zoom out a little bit further for me, like this is really where I feel in my role, I can make the biggest difference and impact on our people and on our firm. So in addition to everything Sonia mentioned, I really like to focus on relationships and engaging with thought leaders in the space.

So outside of the organization, both in the benefit space, the well-being space, I read a lot of thought leadership. I read a lot of industry publications, research studies, white papers…because my goal as a wellbeing leader is to always be like a few years ahead of the curve and identify.

Sonia: And she's doing that really well, by the way. yeah, yeah. She's doing a magnificent job with that.

Allison: I was going to say, I've picked up on that.

Lisa: So one of the things that helps me is that the UK and Australia tend to be ahead of North America. So keeping a pulse on what's happening there is a really good barometer. And something I would encourage North American wellbeing leaders to consider is to look at what's happening in Europe and in Australia to set sort some of the trends.

Allison: That is fantastic advice. And I love the sort of internal focus on what people are saying they want and need, and then also keeping a pulse on what others are doing, because then you can come together and match those two really well. Last question to close us out is, what would your advice be to other HR leaders that maybe now are starting to sense that they have this need to better support the parental leave experience?

Lisa: Yeah, I'll answer that question. And I hope it's not going to be too repetitive to what I shared about our own process. But it really is a formula that you can repeat over and over again that works super well. 

First, identify the problem you're trying to solve and how it fits into your broader strategy. So for parental leave, is it about talent attraction? Is it about being a top employer and employer of choice? Are you trying to address attrition? Maybe it's all three. So set what is your problem that you're trying to solve.

Then to guide you, you need to collect data about your people, right? What are you measuring? Set what do you need to measure. So there's lots of available data then about the cost of labor, the cost of replacing people, the cost of women leaving the organization. You want to take that broader information and then you want to match it with your own workforce.

What's your gender split in your organization at senior levels of your organization? Do you know where your broken rung is? So broken rung is a concept where you may have at your more junior levels, like a 50-50 male-female split. But your senior leadership may not be. So where does that shift? And that helps you focus. And you may find that it's correlated to your family building years. And if it is, that signals an issue.

So then you take that qualitative, quantitative feedback, and then you look at your qualitative feedback, which is what Sonia's been talking about in terms of the conversations, the surveys. And then once you understand that landscape, you want to define how you're going to measure success.

Once you do that, you'll be better positioned to articulate the issue to your senior leaders. You'll be able to demonstrate your return on investment for a parental leave coaching program. And that will set the stage for getting the buy-in from senior leaders.

Allison: I think that was the perfect way to close this out because it was a very concise and direct summary of the process that you used that I really do think is applicable to any company of any size to be able to do that. 

Thank you both so much for being with me here today. I have had just the best time and I know I speak for my whole team working with you all. It is so fun to work with humans that care so deeply about this and also have a really high bar on what the end results are. Like we want to get the process right, but at the end of the day, we need to make sure that every piece to this machine is working in a way that, like you showed, Sonia, your employees are saying, this is a great place to work for parents.

And at the end of the day, there's many different ways to get there. This is the way that you get there. I think it works very well. Of course, I'm very biased. think this is the great way to do it. But at the end of the day, it's all about the end result that you have been able to achieve. So thank you so much for bringing us along, explaining that journey and giving us more insight into how you've built this at PwC Canada.

Sonia: Thank you, Allison. It was a pleasure.

Lisa: Thanks, Allison. It's been so great working with you and with Parentaly. So thank you for all you do to support our people as well.

Allison: Thank you.