Pet-focused retail organisation Pets at Home is to launch a new suite of leave benefits for its 8,200 employees, including a day’s paid leave for when an employee or an employee’s child moves home or when introducing a new pet into the family.
The new leave arrangements, which will be available from April 2017, form part of a new package of benefits designed to help employees improve their work-life balance. The scheme, For all the times we share, provides paid leave around key milestones, enabling staff members to engage more fully in family activities.
The new leave arrangements include New roost leave, Flying the nest leave, and Pet-ernity leave. Respectively, these initiatives provide employees with an additional day of paid leave when they move house, when their child leaves home for the first time, for example to go to university or to move into their own home, and when they get a new dog, cat or horse.
These new benefits will run alongside the organisation’s current leave arrangements, which include giving employees their birthday off work, an additional week of leave when getting married, and a day for charity work each year.
Staff based at the organisation’s headquarters are also encouraged to bring their pets to work with them, with more than 50 dogs joining their owners at Pets at Home’s Handforth head office on a daily basis. Approximately 95% of the organisation’s employees are pet owners.
Ian Kellett, chief executive officer at The Pets at Home Group, said: “We want to help and support key events in [an employee’s] life. We are also launching a ‘flying the nest’ day when a child leaves home, a ‘new roost day’ when [an employee] moves home and a day’s holiday on [an employee’s] birthday.
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“We know that if [employees] have a new dog, cat or horse it can be quite stressful and to help with the settling in process that comes with welcoming a new pet into any family, we want to grant one day’s paid holiday to help support them. It fits into our ethos; we recognise the importance of pets.”