I’m a CEO – I give my team £1,000 for a break-up and two-week pet bereavement leave

Alex Myers, 46, from Kent, is the founder and CEO of marketing agency Manifest. He introduced a pet bereavement and “pawternity” leave in 2009, which gives two weeks off after the death of a pet, from dogs and cats to hamsters and two weeks off when a new one is brought home. Here he shares the impact it has had on his company’s productivity. As told to MaryLou Costa I’ve got two cats. They often flash themselves in front of the camera when I’m working from home and on calls. It’s a fairly normal state of affairs at Manifest, actually, because we take pets seriously – seriously enough that we’ve built a leave policy around them. If you’re a person who’s mad about pets – that’s your true passion and what you’re really into – then you should have the freedom to do that properly and feel like you’ve got an employer that’s going to support you in that. Shorts It’s seen as normal to take time off for other life events like weddings or when a close family member dies. So if an animal is part of your family, why do we treat what happens to them any differently? As a pet owner – and seeing that everyone in our New York office has a dog – it’s not up to me to decide to what extent someone should be affected by their pet dying. It is up to me as an employer, though, to make sure they’re not sitting at a desk when they’re not emotionally capable of being there. That’s detrimental not just to their personal wellbeing, but to my business too. Plus, it’s more impactful to support your team in the minutiae of life, I feel, than in the big, obvious moments. This isn’t some kind of Dickensian Fezziwig scenario. This is just the way that good business is run. In our UK offices, we’ve had at least five or six people take pet bereavement leave over the years, of up to two weeks – and that is totally fine, and normalised in our company culture. We’d never laugh at or judge someone who does that. Signing off for ‘pawternity leave’ The lighter side of that is “pawternity leave” – time off when you bring a new pet home. That’s actually been more common than the bereavement leave, which probably says more about the age of our agency than anything else. Pretty much everyone who gets a new pet in any of our studios will take some time off and they usually take around two weeks, although we allow more if needed. When you take on a new puppy, you need time to train it. People usually feel that they can’t take the time because they would have to take that leave as holiday. But that’s not the way we do things. The only thing we insist on is a decent number of pictures on Instagram, and that they bring the puppy (or whatever it may be) into the office once it’s trained. As a creative business, we always wanted to be creative about the policies we offer as an employer. Also, we had an issue with people just not taking their full holiday allowance every year. So in 2015, I called it: everyone could take unlimited paid leave each year, and use it for holiday or for personal life stuff – whatever they need. Now, people take around 25 days of holiday each year and still feel like there is space for when life demands more. Thinking bigger picture But sometimes people need more than just permission to take time away. Sometimes something has happened in their life that means they need support, without necessarily wanting to explain themselves to everyone around them. That’s where our Life Change bursary comes in. It’s a grant, not a loan, so nothing gets paid back. It covers paid time away for things like bereavement, miscarriage, relationship breakdown or comparable situations, and typically ranges from £500 to £1,000. That same thinking extends to some of the biggest changes people go through in their lives, particularly starting a family. When we opened in Sweden, I learned that the gender pay gap there is one of the lowest in Europe. I asked Anna, who runs our Sweden business, why, and she said it was because of equal parental leave. In Sweden, both parents receive 240 days of fully paid parental leave each on full pay. So now, any parent within Manifest can take 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave, then a further 10 weeks at 50 per cent salary for those with five years’ service or more. It’s the very civilised view that if you want to get more women into the boardroom, you have to get more men into the home. I believe you need to support mums as much as you can, but in reality, the support that mums aren’t getting is the ability to pass childcare responsibilities to a father because he has no systemic support. We believe every parent should have equal opportunity to work and raise a family, whatever their gender, and whether they’re a biological, adoptive, or surrogate parent. I would hope there’s no unconscious bias at Manifest against hiring someone senior because they might go off and have a child in the next 12 months. But if that bias exists anywhere, at least now it’s equally applied to both male and female candidates for that role. And parental leave is a superpower. Parents come back like a different person. They suddenly understand where work needs to fit into their life. They understand what real pressure looks like. But the philosophy isn’t only about supporting people through difficult or major life events. We also think about what makes people feel secure and valued in the day-to-day experience of working here. Paying people to leave That’s partly where our F**k Off Grant came from. I read an article saying that a lot of people stay in jobs they hate because they’re financially scared to leave. So we offer new starters £1,000 to quit during their first three months. No one’s ever taken it. But if you don’t leave, you have to choose the person who made you feel most welcome and give that £1,000 to them. It tends to be the kind of person who is an unsung part of the culture – the one who notices when someone’s having a bad day, brings them a treat, suggests they take some time off, or simply makes people feel welcome. That’s not something salary usually rewards. People sometimes question why we’re essentially bribing people to be nice. But we’re rewarding people for the thing they bring to work that they’re not rewarded for in their salary. Supporting the side hustlers And that idea – that people bring a whole life, and a whole set of ambitions, into work – applies beyond what happens inside Manifest too. We support people who want to start a side hustle alongside their job. We’ll invest £10,000 and provide marketing support for the idea, although you do need to apply with an actual business proposal. We’ve never had anyone actually apply, which surprises me, but the offer stands. Then there’s the sabbatical. After five years, employees can take a month off, fully paid. After 10 years, that becomes three months – one paid and two unpaid – plus up to £1,000 towards a flight anywhere in the world. At least eight people have taken us up on that one. There are lots of things that we’ve normalised at Manifest. It’s very normal for people to block in their therapy session. It’s very normal for someone to say they’re finishing early because they have to do something that they might previously have been embarrassed to say. Our sick leave is very low compared with an agency like ours. I think part of that is because people aren’t taking fake sick leave. You don’t have to take it off if you need some mandatory leave and you’re out of holiday. But I also think people are healthier because they’re taking time out for themselves, and they’re not afraid to tell people. I think not enough employers see that as part of their legacy. If all it takes is being able to say: “Your life is important to us as a whole, not just when you’re inside our building, and we understand how being inside our building can affect your life outside of it,” then that’s just common sense as an employer.