Building a family-friendly workplace is not just good for business, it reflects our commitment to supporting our people. As team members balance the demands of work and family life, having flexibility and understanding from their employer can make a real difference. By fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment, we help our people thrive both personally and professionally, while also contributing positively to the broader community.
At Leidos, we work hard to create an environment where everyone feels welcome, valued, respected and supported. By creating a culture that enables everyone to do their best work, we seek to harness and support the very best talent, which means that we’re both a great place to work and we deliver for our customers.
Becoming an accredited Family Friendly Workplace is another way we are living and breathing our value of ‘Inclusion’. We recognise the often many and varied roles our team members need to play within their own unique family setting, and we seek to support them to manage those family responsibilities while realising their potential with a rewarding career at Leidos.
Over the years, we have continued to evolve and improve our parental leave experience using a human-centred design approach to ensure we were unearthing the real opportunities, not just implementing what we ‘thought’ might help.
One key finding was that Team Members taking Parental Leave found that the feelings of competence, connection and confidence that they had when they went on leave, were difficult to maintain through their leave period, and this made their return to work more stressful than it needed to be.
So, we went about designing improvements to the parental leave experience to ensure that parents have a smooth transition to and from parental leave and feel supported and included during their time off.
We:
One of our senior leaders, Louisa Pontonio, has taken two periods of parental leave after the births of her son and daughter. She had been with Leidos for 6.5 years before the birth of her son and worked across a number of business lines in project delivery. During her parental leave, she made the most of the coaching sessions with an executive coach to support her through her various transitions. Louisa was also included in the Talent review that occurred during her parental leave period and was duly promoted into a newly created role while on leave. Louisa maintained her confidence and connection throughout her leave and her People Leader was connected into her career goals and family needs.
She shared the following reflections:
“There were a number of exercises that I completed to get me to think about motivation, my professional vision, what is important to me as a mum, setting professional and personal goals, and thinking around my values and what sort of parent I want to be, including the sort of important role model I would like to be. The coaching sessions were a great mix of getting me back in the mindset of work and my professional self, but also reflecting on this new and exciting journey of motherhood ahead of me”.
After her second period of parental leave after the birth of her daughter, Louisa returned to work, and into a more substantive role as the 2IC to one of Leidos’ lines of business, with a focus on driving strategy across capability and people within the Defence and National Intelligence space. Louisa took on the acting Account Executive role at the beginning of 2025, and at the beginning of 2026 was made permanent.
She enjoys the flexibility of hybrid working where required, with some days in the office and others from home and has been also inspired other women by having spent time as lead of our Women and Allies Network Group and now supporting the group as Executive Sponsor. In addition, Louisa has supported the establishment of a Women in STEM+ (WiS+) community, which is run by four Early Career women who started at Leidos as Graduates/Interns. Louisa has championed gender parity within the Graduate and Intern recruitment program and as Account Executive, has seen the increase of women hired into the Business Line and increase in the representation of women in leadership.
The research is clear around the many and varied ways diverse and inclusive organisations outperform less diverse and inclusive organisations. From increasing potential talent pools for our business to higher engagement of team members and ultimately delivering better bottom line results for shareholders – everybody wins.
There are many and varied lenses through which we can (and should) look at inclusion -ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and so on, but the unique feature of the family friendly lens is that everyone is a part of a family in some way – whether that is as a parent, grand-parent, carer, son, daughter, Auntie, Uncle…the list goes on. So achieving Family Friendly status should deliver benefits for every single team member at Leidos – that’s exciting.
Building a family-friendly workplace is not just good for business, it reflects our commitment to supporting our people. As team members balance the demands of work and family life, having flexibility and understanding from their employer can make a real difference. By fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment, we help our people thrive both personally and professionally, while also contributing positively to the broader community.
