RJMetrics now has an official maternity leave policy

RJMetrics announced its official maternity and paternity leave policy last month: new mothers and fathers get one month paid leave and up to three months unpaid leave, said spokesman Tristan Handy. Previously, the Center City analytics company took an ad-hoc approach.

Along with that policy, the company created an employee guidebook, formalizing many of the processes that had already been written down in “the form of blog posts, all-hands meetings and the old [employee] handbook,” CEO Robert Moore wrote in his column in the New York Times.

It’s a sign that the 70-person company is maturing, tackling issues that all growing startups face. (Some Silicon Valley startups have suffered from their handling, or lack thereof, of HR policies.) When RJMetrics was just starting out, Moore wrote, “anything that sounded like the trappings of a big company was met with skepticism.”

But now, as Moore said he realized, a company guidebook “represented an opportunity to improve communication, motivate new hires and inspire our team.”

In the case of the maternity leave policy, one year ago, a potential hire asked if RJMetrics had one. The company didn’t, but they created (an informal) one and she accepted the job, Moore wrote.

As the topic came up more and more, RJMetrics decided to formalize the policy, Handy told us in an email last month. The company did research on comparable companies and settled on what seemed like “a pretty aggressive plan.” (“And we got significantly more generous over the course of the ensuing year,” Handy said.)

RJMetrics doesn’t have any official HR employees, Handy said. Right now, the company outsources benefits management. Two administrative staffers handle employee onboarding.

“We’re particularly proud of the onboarding program we rolled out back in April,” Handy wrote in an email. “Every new employee hired in a given month gets two days of training with our executive team on the market, the product, and how we do what we do. We call it RJDay.”