My Time on Paternity Leave

My name is David Lindley and I have been at Vodafone for nearly 5 years working as an Engineering Manager in Vodafone UK Digital. As part of my role, I look after the line management of 6-8 front end engineers, ensuring that they have a great experience working at Vodafone. I am also a technical product owner for our globally shared react component library – which is built to enable engineers from around the world build great web experience quickly with reusability at its heart. 

Throughout my working career I have always tried to balance my work and home life, ensuring that my work life didn’t creep its way into my home life. This was even more critical when back in November 2021, my wife and I found out we were expecting a baby – we were over the moon with excitement and nerves. The prospect of bringing a new baby into the world whilst trying to juggle work commitments made me quite anxious. Thankfully, Vodafone is a fantastic employer when it comes to family life. 

Their policy enabled me to take 16 fully paid weeks of paternity leave in two 8-week chunks. I took the first 8 weeks as soon as my baby was born, and to be honest those 8 weeks were a blur of sleepless nights, endless use of the washing machine (it has seen some things) and trying to understand how to operate a brand-new baby without a user manual (you can tell I am an engineer). In those 8 weeks, I barely functioned as a new dad, let alone a line manager, so having the time off to bond with my new baby was invaluable to me and my wife. It really helped make the journey of having a baby feel more shared between us. 

Coming back to work, I found my team and peers to be very respectful of my new life change. There was acceptance that if I needed to rush off to help the baby I could, or that finishing later wasn’t really an option when help with bath time was needed. This again comes down to the culture that Vodafone has.