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View full libraryOur Guide to Managing Shared Parental Leave offers practical insights for employers to navigate this process, promoting transparency and supporting employees.
If you are managing parental and family leave, the toolkit brings together practical HR templates covering notifications, eligibility, planning, leave and return to work.
Introduction
Shared parental leave is a relatively new concept that provides eligible parents with greater flexibility in how they take time off work to care for their child. As a manager, it's important to understand your responsibilities in supporting employees who are taking shared parental leave, while ensuring compliance with relevant legislation and company policies.
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for shared parental leave, employees must meet certain criteria, including:
Entitlements
Eligible employees can take up to 50 weeks of shared parental leave and up to 37 weeks of statutory shared parental pay. The leave can be taken in blocks, with periods of work in between, and can be shared between partners in any way that suits them. Both parents can take leave at the same time, but not for the same period.
Communication
As a manager, it's important to maintain open communication with employees who are taking shared parental leave. This includes discussing their intentions regarding taking leave, and ensuring that they are aware of their entitlements and the process for requesting and taking leave. You should also consider how their absence will affect team dynamics and workload management, and plan accordingly.
Performance Management
Employees who take shared parental leave are protected against discrimination and unfair treatment, and have the right to return to the same or a similar role after their leave. As a manager, you should ensure that you are supportive of your employees taking leave, and that their performance is not negatively impacted by their absence.
Workload Management
It's important to manage the workload of your team during periods of shared parental leave to ensure that employees taking leave can return to a manageable workload. This may involve redistributing tasks, hiring temporary staff, or reorganizing team structures. Effective workload management will help to ensure that the employee's transition back to work is as smooth as possible.
Conclusion
By understanding your responsibilities as a manager and supporting employees who take shared parental leave, you can help to create a positive and inclusive workplace culture that values work-life balance and family-friendly policies.
This Managers guide to shared parental leave aims to offer you a versatile and customisable tool, serving as a solid foundation for your needs. Utilise it to ensure consistency, enhance accuracy, and save valuable time.
Adapt it to suit your unique requirements, ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in your HR processes.
Yes. This template has been designed for organisations of all sizes, including small businesses, charities and growing employers. It follows UK employment law best practice and can be adapted to suit your organisation.
Our templates are developed with UK employment legislation, Acas guidance and HR best practice in mind and are reviewed and updated as relevant requirements change. However, every employment situation is different, so the template should be adapted to the circumstances and checked against the employee's contract and your organisation's procedures before use.
Yes, we highlight the areas of the document that you need to update with your own details, and where you need to make decisions to suit your situation. This saves you time and ensures that you meet best practice.
Yes. Once purchased, you'll be able to download it instantly. Templates are provided in editable format (such as .doc or .xls) so you can customise them easily, and in PDF format for easy sharing.
If you're looking for broader support, we also offer toolkits and library bundles that include the Managers guide to shared parental leave, along with other HR templates and policies for fully managing your situation. These may be more cost-effective if you need deeper advice.
AI can produce a document quickly, but effective HR documentation needs to be more than well-written words. It needs to reflect relevant UK employment law, HR best practice, practical considerations and the circumstances in which it will be used. These resources have been professionally developed around that wider HR context, drawing on extensive practical experience, rather than simply generating a generic document from a prompt.
How this content is developed and reviewed
The Managers guide to shared parental leave is developed using a practical HR methodology that considers current UK employment legislation, ACAS guidance, CIPD good practice and the real-world HR process it supports. Templates and supporting information are regularly reviewed and updated, with additional reviews triggered by significant changes to legislation, guidance or established HR practice, helping ensure each document remains practical, relevant and suitable for UK employers.
Darryl Horn, Chartered HR Director
Darryl is a Chartered HR professional with over 25 years' experience in senior HR and employee relations roles.
He has extensive practical experience of managing parental and family HR processes and founded hrdocbox to provide businesses with practical, professionally developed HR resources grounded in UK employment law and best practice.
HRDocBox has been creating practical UK HR documents since 2009.
"Darryl provides support and advice with excellent judgement, and has a strong understanding of people, policies and UK employment legislation."
"He is someone I trust; consistent, dependable, and committed to doing things properly."
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