Using Checklists To Have A Baby

Years ago as a young manager, I was confused why my female colleagues were so afraid to share the exciting news about their upcoming delivery. Being both a man and a manager at once made it doubly difficult for me to understand that having your first baby, as an employee, is an anxiety-inducing experience (and can be for fathers too).

Think of the kinds of questions they might be wrangling with:

• How much time-off will I get?
• Will my manager be mad?
• Will I take a pay cut?
• Will my job still be there when I return?

Here I will introduce a simple and powerful way to give your employees greater transparency into the company's benefits and policies, particularly those that matter in your employees' real lives.

A Checklist Is Like A Lamp

Let's illuminate a solution to this problem for our newly expecting mother with this sample checklist:

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Having A Baby‍

What to expect at Banzai Inc. when you're expecting!

1. Share the news with your manager. Let us celebrate with you. Your manager will help you prepare, set expectations, and help make this the best experience it can be.
2. Create a work transition plan. While you're gone, your colleagues will fill in. Help them create a plan like who will take on which responsibilities.
3. Review the parental leave policy. (If you keep a benefits wiki, you can link to the policy here.)
4. File a claim for disability insurance. The company can extend the length of your parental leave by taking advantage of the company's disability insurance policy.
5. ...
6. Add your baby to your health insurance.** After your baby is born (congratulations!) you will have 30 days to add them to your policy as a dependent.

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Seems too easy, right? Notice how the checklist takes the perspective of the employee, answering questions people have, not merely processes.

Checklists can make nearly any complex HR process transparent for your employees. Not only do checklists reduce your employees' anxiety, they signal that the company understands that your employees have personal lives, and that you want them to use the benefits you're already paying for to improve their situations.

Checklists Make Life In HR Easier Too

Let's outline other checklists you might want to implement:

• New Employee Onboarding
• Prepare For Open Enrollment
• Signing Up For The 401(K)
• Joining The Company Cell Phone Plan
• Wellness Week To-Dos

The beauty of automating HR with checklists is that when you upgrade the checklist once, you've upgraded the process for everyone, forever.

Speaking Of Automation...

Checklists can be implemented in any shared document system, whether it's Microsoft Sharepoint, Google Docs, or Atlassian's Confluence.

But at Pendant we've perfected checklists to work seamlessly alongside your benefits.

Not only does Pendant report progress within a checklist, the checklist acts like a launchpad to your benefits and policies themselves.

Pendant makes sharing checklists and reminding employees to complete them easy.

Even Pendant's AI-powered assistant can use your checklists to help answer employees' questions more accurately:

If you're interested in how Pendant can get you up and running with checklists, click here and we'll show it to you, no pressure.