Six months ago, two of our team members came to me, separately, to share the same news: they were going to be dads.
It was a happy moment, but it was also the moment I realised VXT didn't have a parental leave policy. Until then, we'd didn’t need one.
So we asked ourselves what we should do.
The easy path would have been to look up the statutory minimums in each country we operate in, paste them into a document, and move on.
Instead, we asked a different question:
What would genuinely support our people through one of the biggest transitions of their lives?
We did the research. We looked at the parental leave policies in the countries we operate in. We looked at the real hardships parents face: pension gaps that compound over decades, physical recovery timelines that don't match short leave allowances, the childcare cost that hits when leave runs out. We looked at what was considered "best practice" and then we built something better and made it radically simple.
Here's what we landed on.
VXT’s parental leave policy
Every parent at VXT gets 26 weeks of fully paid leave.
We give our employees flexible options to take the leave all at once, spread it over a year, or take a mix of both. Primary carers can take a further 26 weeks unpaid if they want.
And when our employees come back, we don't expect them to flick a switch from full-time parent to full-time employee overnight. For the first month back, they work 20 hours a week and get paid for 40, so they can ease into the rhythm of work, manage daycare drop-offs and pickups, and still be present at home while they figure out the new normal.
Why every parent gets the same entitlements
Caregiving isn't gendered. The first months of a child's life shape that child, and they shape the parent too. When only one parent gets meaningful leave, the parent who took leave becomes the default carer. The parent who didn't becomes the default earner. Careers diverge and resentment can build.
I didn't want VXT to be a company that reinforces that pattern.
The policy applies the same way across all countries we operate in. Regardless of gender and regardless of how they become a parent — whether through birth, adoption, surrogacy, or foster care — everyone is entitled to the same leave.
“It’s been life changing being given the time and space to be fully present for our new baby and my partner. Not having to worry about money during this time has changed everything for us.“
— Ashton Moore, Senior Software Engineer
Removing the small penalties
The 26-week headline is the easy part to talk about. The harder part, and the part I think matters more, is everything around it.
A lot of companies have a parental leave policy that looks generous on paper. The experience of actually taking it is something else. Your pay rise quietly skips you. The wellbeing allowance you used to have access to suddenly isn't yours anymore. If you're on commission, your income drops to base while everyone else keeps earning their full target.
You come back six months later to find your salary has fallen behind your peers and your projects have been redistributed. You haven't been fired for taking leave, but you can feel you've been quietly penalised for it.
We tried to engineer those penalties out. Pay rises continue. Our wellbeing allowance and professional development fund stay available throughout so a new parent can use them for things like postpartum physio, sleep support, counselling, or career coaching, when they need them.
People on commission-based pay receive their on-target earnings, not just base salary. And time off for medical or parenting-related appointments doesn't count against any leave entitlement.
When people come back, our flexible work policy means they can arrange their day around their family. Cat, our People and Culture Manager, blocks out time every day for daycare pickup, dinner, and bedtime, then takes calls later in the evening.
The honest economics
I want to be upfront about what this costs, because I think transparency matters.
At our current size, this policy will cost us roughly $300,000 NZD a year. As we grow, that number grows with us.
If a few team members have babies in the same year, it could temporarily slow our growth. We've decided we're okay with that. We'd rather build a company people want to stay at for decades than optimise for short-term efficiency.
And retention is cheaper than replacement. The cost of losing a great engineer or salesperson because they couldn't make work and family fit is enormous. Our best people building families here is far better than losing them to other companies that support parents well.
"We want to make VXT the best place you’ve ever worked. We believe that if you take care of your employees, especially during the hard parts of their lives, they’ll take care of you."
— Cat Strydom, People and Culture Manager
Part of a bigger picture
This policy isn't a one-off. It sits alongside how we think about our people more broadly: 5% automatic raises every six months, salaries well above market average (median compensation is $180,000 NZD), employee share options for every team member, six mandatory wellbeing days and a $3,600 annual wellbeing **allowance, unlimited professional development funding, and fully transparent compensation and financials across the company.
I think we got here for one main reason: no one ever told us we couldn't.
When you're a young company building from the ground up, you don't inherit assumptions. You don't have a 50-page HR handbook telling you what's "standard." You can ask the basic question “what's the right thing to do here?” and act on the answer. That's a privilege of being a small team, and one we want to keep using.
If this resonates
We're hiring. If you want to build your career and your family's at the same company, and you want to work somewhere that backs its values with actual policies rather than posters, we'd love to talk to you.
Visit our careers page to view open roles at VXT.