Strafe Creative | Putting Family First: New Family Policies

Strafe Creative’s new family policy – An Open Letter

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From the Strafe Studio
CSR photo of how we look after our staffs family here at strafe

I can honestly say I’m proud of the culture we’ve built at Strafe Creative. Over the years we’ve grown both in size and in the diversity of people, whilst building a workplace our team loves and working with great clients.

We believe in treating others how we would want to be treated ourselves and to ensure this, we’re continually improving and adapting the agency through our processes and policies. We strive to ensure the team can do their best work with us whilst also appreciating that they have their own lives outside of the Strafe working day.

Currently, Strafe Creative team members benefit from our varying start and finish times, we have flexible working locations and new starters are offered a completely customisable tech stack so they can work with the tools they know and love.

Beyond choosing your favourite Mac or monitor, family is a huge part of our personal considerations here at Strafe. On top of a job, starting and raising a family is hard work. From looking after sick kids, having a baby or going through the adoption process, it’s fair to say we all need support.

What you don’t need is the added pressure of booking time off work, a lack of flexibility from your employer and using up your holiday days just to spend hours in dingy waiting rooms. From personal experience, I know how hard these situations can be and my goal is to ensure my staff can experience the same flexibility I did, as the owner of the company, if they need this time to themselves.

With that said, I’m excited to share Strafe Creative’s brand new family policy, which puts the needs of our staff at its core. No matter your gender, race, sexuality, age or parenting preferences, we just want to make it easier for our staff to start and look after their families.

We’re giving our team members (regardless of gender) paid time off for IVF and/or adoption appointments. Plus scan appointments can be more regular if a pregnancy is being closely monitored.

Miscarriage is more common than we ever know. To support our staff if they go through this, they’ll receive a week’s paid leave, whether they’re mum or dad.

A standard Statutory Maternity Policy is 6 weeks at 90% of your usual salary, and then 33 weeks of statutory pay. To support new mums we’ve always offered 100% pay for the first eight weeks followed by Statutory Maternity leave for 31 weeks, hugely beneficial compared to the typical policy. To complement this, every new Dad at Strafe will now receive four weeks of paid paternity, double what is offered as statutory. Parents need each other during those early days, trust me!

It’s not just starting the family that’s the hard part, once you’re blessed with a child or more you’ve got to manage a work / life / family balance. Although flexible working is becoming more and more common, many organisations overlook the other elements required to help working parents. With that in mind we are now offering sick pay for those who need time off to look after their sick children.

We want to build a supportive, positive and flexible organisation. These changes to our family policy and our flexible working programme are our latest steps in doing so. To continue delivering the results we do we need our talented team to give us their best work, and so in return, we’re offering our best support in family matters.

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to Patrick, my business partner. He’s been so open to these ideas and working together to create this policy has been both an exciting and fulfilling development for our business.

 

Ross Davies
Proud Husband, Dad & CEO of Strafe Creative

 

Read more about what it’s like to work at Strafe Creative directly from the team. If you’re interested in working with us, view the careers page to see all our open positions and our application form.

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