Most large employers are keen to promote their family friendly credentials. Enhanced parental leave, flexible working, wellbeing initiatives and glossy recruitment hooks all help attract talent. But a recent £1.45 million tribunal award against Goldman Sachs is a timely reminder that a policy only tells half the story.
In Reeves v Goldman Sachs International, Jonathan Reeves succeeded in claims of unfair dismissal and direct sex discrimination after being selected for redundancy following six months’ contractual parental leave. Last week, following a remedy hearing, the tribunal awarded him around £1.45 million, including substantial compensation for the long-term damage to his career. The tribunal accepted that bringing proceedings against such a high-profile employer had itself made it significantly harder for him to secure comparable work, resulting in an unusually large award for so-called ‘stigma’ losses.
The size of the award will inevitably grab the headlines. The more interesting lesson for HR, however, lies elsewhere: in the gap between policy and culture.
When culture undermines policy
Goldman Sachs publicly promoted an enhanced parental leave policy available to all parents. Yet the tribunal concluded that Mr Reeves had nevertheless been disadvantaged because he, as a male employee, actually used it. He was found to have been treated less favourably than a hypothetical female employee choosing to take the same period of leave for the same reason. The judgment contains several examples which, taken together, paint a picture of how attitudes can quietly undermine even the most progressive family-friendly policies.
One was a comment attributed to senior managers when Mr Reeves raised the challenge of balancing work and childcare responsibilities during the pandemic. The tribunal accepted evidence that the response was, in effect, ‘you’re a grown man, you can sort this out’, and regarded this as evidence of a dismissive attitude towards a man having childcare responsibilities.
Another concerned an incident during a family holiday. While driving to Cornwall over the August Bank Holiday with his young family, Mr Reeves missed an email asking whether he was available to discuss an issue. The tribunal noted that nobody telephoned him to explain the urgency, that he was driving rather than constantly monitoring emails, and that once contact was made he spent part of his holiday helping resolve the issue. Despite that, the incident later resurfaced repeatedly as an example of poor performance. Mr Reeves’s manager, some 18 months after the weekend in question, referenced his failure to respond immediately at the weekend as “a really negative sound bite”.
The policy isn’t the problem
Most organisations no longer question whether fathers should be able to take extended parental leave. The more difficult question is whether managers genuinely regard employees who use those rights as being just as committed, ambitious and promotable as those who do not.
Culture is rarely revealed by the wording of a policy. It is revealed by the off-hand comments managers make, the assumptions they bring into performance discussions, the examples they remember at appraisal meetings and the criteria used during redundancy exercises.
What HR should do now
HR professionals must look beyond the policy itself. Ask whether managers have been trained to recognise unconscious assumptions about caring responsibilities. Review whether redundancy scoring disadvantages those who have recently been absent on family leave. Consider whether performance concerns are genuinely about performance, or whether they are influenced by reduced visibility or availability following leave.
A family-friendly policy can be an excellent recruitment and retention tool. But if employees believe using it will quietly damage their careers, its value is largely illusionary. The Reeves case is a reminder that tribunals will look beyond what an employer says about supporting working parents and examine what actually happens when an employee decides to take them up on that offer.