Why we did it Our parental project started with a question we'd been sitting with: are we a good place to work for women and working parents?
We'd audited our gender diversity across seniority, pay and decision-making. The pattern is one most small consultancies will recognise: junior team members are on client-facing, billable work; senior people have more flexibility in how they structure their time. At Loomery, as at most consultancies, those two groups don't map equally across gender. Not because of deliberate intention, but because of industry demographics and a skew towards men in leadership. Unfortunately that means a day of unexpected childcare lands very differently depending on where you sit.
Underneath the structural picture is a more immediate one, in that being pregnant at work is harder than it looks from the outside. You're often exhausted, sometimes anxious, frequently managing something significant before you're ready to talk about it. Later on, returning to a job you care about after months away is a bigger transition than most policies acknowledge.
How we approached it The first thing we discovered was that we didn't really know what our parental policy said. It lived in an old staff handbook, and was written in dense legalese. You can't have a real conversation about what a policy should be until you've read what it is.
We didn't want to design in a vacuum, so we began by talking to eight agencies or consultancies at a similar size to Loomery. What we were looking for was less ‘what do you offer?’ and more ‘how did you make the call, and what surprised you?’. There was no single right answer, and a lot of companies are figuring this out as they go, but the choices, rationale and feedback we heard were all useful.
We also ran an anonymous internal survey. The top-requested benefit was improvements to the pension. We took that seriously, but ultimately decided to prioritise the parental policy. The reasoning was that parental leave has more structural impact on inequality within the company. A better pension would benefit everyone equally, which is valuable, but wouldn't specifically address the patterns we'd identified. (Pension improvements are still on the list 🙏.)
What we changed We looked at several options for enhancing leave and landed on a 50% increase to both maternity and paternity pay.
Loomery's enhanced maternity pay is now 18 weeks at full salary, plus up to 10 keeping-in-touch (KIT) days . On the paternity side, we increased enhanced pay to 6 weeks at full salary .
We didn't make them equal, which was a real trade-off. The gold standard (the Scandinavian model, where leave is largely shared and non-transferable) requires a different level of financial commitment, and we're not quite there yet. What we could do was improve the benefits meaningfully for everyone, pair that with a set of supporting changes and be honest about the direction of travel.
The reasoning for improving paternity leave alongside maternity leave wasn't just a symmetry exercise. It was about the underlying dynamic that makes parental leave an inequality issue: the career penalty partly comes from leave being predictable for one group and not the other. When men take meaningful time off as new parents, it normalises the interruption for hiring decisions, team expectations and the women who would otherwise carry that predictability alone. The evidence backs this up . Paternity leave that men actually take is the most meaningful lever a small employer has (whether people use it is something we intend to track).
Alongside the core leave changes, we introduced a set of improvements that either cost nothing or very little, but that we think matter a great deal in practice:
Unlimited antenatal appointments for both parents , with manager sign-off. We'd had a cap in the old policy for partners attending. There was no good reason for it.Two weeks pregnancy loss leave for everyone : mothers, fathers, partners, regardless of how long they've been at Loomery. The statutory provision is inadequate; ours reflects what a loss actually involves, for everyone it affects.A guaranteed pay review before you go on maternity or adoption leave , if you haven't had one in the last six months. Going on leave without financial clarity adds unnecessary anxiety to an already uncertain time.A career coaching session with your manager , either on a KIT day or when you first return to work, to talk through your career goals and development. Returning from extended leave is a significant moment, and we wanted to make sure someone was actually having that conversation.A softer stance on the “clawback clause” : the provision that could require you to repay enhanced parental pay if you don't return to work, making clear that we'll aim to be flexible and accommodating where there are genuine difficulties returning.We also rewrote the whole policy in plain English. Legal-sounding language accumulates in these documents because nobody goes back to check whether it still needs to be there. We removed requirements that didn't apply to us, cut the jargon and added plain-language introductions to each section so that someone reading it in a stressful moment can orient themselves quickly. We also made the policy properly inclusive throughout: covering adoption alongside birth, using primary and secondary adopter terminology and making sure the language didn't default to assumed heterosexual birth parents.
Four things we learned A few things we'd pass on to any similar company thinking about doing this work:
Understand the policy you actually have before you try to improve it. It sounds obvious, but it's easy to skip. The real document will show you things that are out of date, requirements that don't apply and language written to protect the business rather than the person taking leave. You also need that baseline to communicate what's changed. Separate the investment decisions from the low-cost changes. Some of what we did required real financial commitment; others, like unlimited antenatal appointments, pregnancy loss leave and the pay review commitment, cost very little. The low-cost changes don't need to wait, and getting them in place quickly builds goodwill and shows the project is moving.Run an anonymous survey, and take what it says seriously. People will tell you different things when they're not worried about being identified. Taking it seriously means engaging with results you didn't expect, including ones where what team members want doesn't map neatly onto what you'd planned to offer.Communicate the changes properly, and then keep doing it. A few months after our new policy was live, someone at Loomery didn't know where to find it. That's a rollout problem, not a policy problem, but it's still a problem. Announce it clearly, make it discoverable and make sure it reaches new joiners over time, not just the team at launch.This is a start, not a finish The most important thing we learned is what this work doesn't fix. Better leave makes the experience of navigating structural inequality more manageable, but resolving it requires a longer-term effort around hiring, retention and progression.
That work is underway. We've set up a DEI hiring taskforce focused on the next phase: advertising roles more widely, training the team on interviewing and unconscious bias, auditing our website and publishing career stories that show what working here actually looks like.
So are we a good place to work for women and working parents? Better than we were, but we’re not done yet.
If that sounds like the kind of company you'd want to join, our Join Us page is the place to start.
