Parental leave is barely over the legal minimum (2 weeks at 75% salary for first child, 2 weeks at 50% salary for second)
I was a happy Epic employee for nearly 10 years, with parental leave being by far my biggest gripe, until COVID-19 came and changed everything. Overall, we moved mountains (as Epic should have) to ensure that the essential operations and tracking within our customers was available as quickly as possible, but the company was slow to respond to the ever-changing crisis with employees. The conservative course of action would have been to require all employees who can to work from home, and to bring people in for extremely limited reasons. However, the response has been that it's "culture" above everything including safety, which apparently means bringing employees back to campus as quickly as possible and skirting public health orders. When describing what this culture is, wishy washy statements about hallway conversations is the best that can be said.
I could live with all of this if it weren't for the fact that communication and feedback about this issue has been sparse, dismissive, obfuscated, and sometimes it isn't happening at all. As a manager myself, I see that there are only a few people making decisions and disseminating information. Senior leadership shares once every few weeks (scheduled less than a week in advance) a Q&A session with management, where it has been specifically said "this is not the place to give feedback." There have been no town halls, Q&As or the like for non-managers, and it's not clear that other roles are receiving the same communication. During this meeting, it was asked who was responsible for giving this information to non-management, and the answer was "you."
Historically, Epic has been very good about listening and talking through feedback. At the start of my career, when there was no parental leave at all, I was encouraged to contact someone in Benefits by my team leader at the time and talk over my concerns. I didn't love all the answers that I got, but I had an understanding of why they were made, and felt like my points had been documented.
Epic's leadership is currently asking employees to trust them in ways that we would never had allowed 6 months ago. The CEO loves to quote Warren Buffet - "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it." For me, I've had a wonderful decade at Epic, but it has taken a few short weeks to completely erode my trust.
