Auror

Auror is a NZ-based global start-up that reduces crime, loss, and harm in retail stores. Auror was founded in 2013 and now has 120 employees across New Zealand, Australia, North America and the United Kingdom.

 At the 2022 NZ Hi-Tech Awards, Auror was awarded Duncan Cotterill Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution and was highly commended for the Pacific Edge Hi-Tech Emerging Company of the Year. Auror founders James Corbett, Tom Batterbury and Phil Thomson were named the New Zealand winners of EY Entrepreneur of The Year for 2022.

 This interview was conducted with Lauren Spagnuolo, People Experience Partner, who spearheaded Auror’s updated parental leave policy in 2022.

What prompted Auror to review its policy?
Auror has grown rapidly, and as the business scales, we continue to review our benefits and incentives. With 51% of Aurors supporting dependents and a lot of our team in their family-forming years, we decided we could improve on what we had and provide even more support to parents.

More broadly, we’re constantly thinking about how to make Auror the best place to do great work, and a big part of that is designing high-impact well-being programs that support Aurors in their home life, work life, and everything in between.

What process did you go through internally to formulate your policy? How did you get employee feedback?

It started with a discovery. We interviewed team members who had recently taken parental leave to understand what we were doing really well and what areas might need more attention. We benchmarked our current parental benefits against similar size/stage companies to understand where we were starting from.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are at the centre of Auror. We wanted to give all parents access to family-forming benefits regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or family composition. As such, our parental benefits are designed to be inclusive, flexible, and supportive of Aurors at every step of their parental journey - and best of all, they start on day one at Auror.

Auror is a start-up, and even though it’s had a great growth trajectory, I can imagine you still need to make financial trade-offs. What convinced the management and/or the board that this was an area worth investing in?

We strive to demonstrate genuine care for and commitment to the physical and mental well-being of our team. Family always comes first at Auror, and having supportive parental benefits is an outward expression of this.

What did you include in making the business case for employer-paid parental leave?

We are grateful to have CEO/Founders who have been very supportive of this initiative from early on, but being a global company supported our business case even further. We care deeply about creating a fair and consistent Auror experience globally, and we want every Auror to have the same parental leave experience regardless of where they reside. For example, we exclude any local government benefits to even the playing field for everyone. 

Auror has a number of benefits outside of paid parental leave, such as meal plans and financial contributions towards baby expert sessions (e.g., lactation consultants). How did you work out what to include outside of paid parental leave?

We learned a lot about what we needed to add outside of paid parental leave in our discovery interviews - it also helped tremendously that the People Experience Team, our co-CEOs and over half of Aurors are parents so it’s something many of us could relate to. We were able to reflect on our own experiences and ask - how could Auror elevate the parental journey?

What did you need to consider when rolling out a new policy? 

Putting a new policy into operation takes time, but it’s so worth it to see it in action!

• Collaboration: we collaborated with our Finance Team early to understand how we execute these benefits via payroll.

• Communication: the People Experience team communicated in our company-wide quarterly Objectives and Key Results that revamping the parental benefits was on the horizon, so there were no surprises. And once we had it down on paper, we asked for feedback from our People Leaders, which always brings new, valuable perspectives.

• Technology: once the policy was finalised, we used various tools to manage the rollout, including:

• HiBob: We used workflows to organise the tasks and built custom parental time-off policies to make it all seamless.

• Notion: This is our company intranet, and when we were ready to announce the new policy to the team, we included a detailed Parental Leave section in Notion.

• Loom: We recorded a video to walk folks through our new benefits and posted this on Notion.

• Blog: we wanted to shout about our new policy from the rooftops, so we wrote a blog post for our At Auror blog that was then shared on LinkedIn. A number of candidates have shared with us that this post encouraged them to apply for roles at Auror. 

What has the feedback been like?

The feedback has been outstanding - I think all the work we did in the early stages allowed us to understand what our team needs, what’s working and how we could improve. It was a recipe for success!

What advice do you have for employees within an organisation who want to champion parental leave?

Do it! If you conduct an annual engagement survey, take that opportunity to ask your team the right questions. Use insights from your surveys, team feedback and resources like Crayon to spark ideas on designing your paid-parental leave benefits.

Thank you very much, Lauren! And to view Auror’s profile, visit the register.