Lotte Department Store Introduces First Steps Leave for Children... 1 Million Won Childbirth Congratulatory Bonus

Support for Childbirth and Parenting... Welfare System Overhaul
Significant Improvements with 'Family-Friendly Policies' Tailored to Marriage, Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Life Cycle

Lotte Department Store is significantly upgrading its employee welfare system to overcome low birth rates and childcare issues.

Lotte Department Store Main Branch [Photo by Lotte Department Store].

On the 5th, Lotte Department Store announced that as part of the valuable companionship 'Gatgiga (家) Project,' it will greatly improve its employee welfare system with a 'family-friendly system' tailored to the employee life cycle, from marriage and pregnancy to childbirth and parenting.

A new "Our Child's First Step Leave" has been established to help employees adapt during the admission period to daycare centers and kindergartens, which was highly preferred during employee interviews. The existing "Child Elementary School Admission Care Leave" has also been improved to allow flexible use on a daily basis. Starting January 2024, support for infertility treatment expenses for married employees will be expanded from 5 years after marriage to 3 years, and infertility leave will be newly introduced.

To provide emotional support for pregnant wives, Lotte Department Store is the first in the industry to immediately implement "Expectant Father Fetal Checkup Leave" for male employees, and from January next year, it will also support prenatal education trips (1 night, 2 days) through affiliated Lotte Department Store resorts. The childbirth congratulatory money, which was previously 100,000 KRW for the first child’s birth, will be increased to 1,000,000 KRW from January next year to encourage a happy start to parenting.

The improvement of these family-friendly systems at Lotte Department Store reflects the opinions of actual working mom employees. Gwak Somi, a manager of the Corporate Culture Team at Lotte Department Store who is currently raising a 5-year-old child, said, "We actively reflected employee opinions to create an environment where employees can feel psychological stability during pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting periods and focus on their work, thereby upgrading the existing welfare system further."

According to Statistics Korea, last year, South Korea’s total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman aged 15-49 is expected to have) was 0.78, marking it as a representative low birth rate country. The government is also increasing interest across society by introducing various support policies for low birth rates and childcare.

Lotte Department Store introduced an automatic maternity leave system for women in 2012, creating an environment where employees can take childcare leave following maternity leave. Since 2017, it has been implementing a mandatory paternity leave system, strengthening support for childbirth and childcare. In fact, the number of male employees who have taken childcare leave at Lotte Department Store reached a total of 404 from 2017 to last year.

Meanwhile, Lotte Department Store has maintained its certification as a "Family-Friendly Company," the first in the group, for 14 consecutive years since 2009. It also operates various welfare systems tailored to employees’ life cycles related to marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare, including childcare leave (up to 2 years), mandatory paternity leave, child care leave, shortened and flexible working hours for pregnant employees, daycare centers, and child education expense support.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.