Supporting Pregnant Women and Mothers: Increasing Retention Rates among New Mothers Requires More Than Just Meeting Minimal Leave Requirements and Establishing Onsite Breastfeeding Facilities, as the Experience of an Australian Banking Firm Makes Clear

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The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) is a major international banking and financial services organization--the largest bank in New Zealand, among the five largest companies in Australia, and one of the top 50 banks in the world. ANZ has more than five million customers worldwide and employs more than 30,000 people globally.

ANZ prides itself on creating a high-achieving culture with consistently increasing levels of employee engagement. We encourage our workers to bring their "whole selves" to work and for more than half of our employees, that means their role as a mother or father.

This creates a challenge for ANZ to find practical ways to help our people balance the twin demands of home and family One way we've responded is by developing a range of employee benefits to support the 60 percent of our employees who are female, many of whom are also mothers. These benefits, which exceed minimum standards defined by Australian law, support our goals to be an employer of choice and a highly competitive force in the war for talent.

While we still have more to do to meet these goals, we have already seen pleasing results from this approach. Over the past two years, our employees' rate of return from maternity leave has increased from 80 percent to 87.4 percent and the incidence of women in management-level positions has risen from 24 percent in 2000 to 33 percent in 2005. Organizations that monitor workforce trends have taken notice: ANZ has been named an …